Christina Weiland

Impacts of a prekindergarten program on children's mathematics, language, literacy, executive function, and emotional skills.

Publicly funded prekindergarten programs have achieved small-to-large impacts on childrens cognitive outcomes. The current study examined the impact of a prekindergarten program that implemented a coaching system and consistent literacy, language, and mathematics curricula on these and other nontargeted, essential components of school readiness, such as executive functioning. Participants included 2,018 four and five-year-old children. Findings indicated that the program had moderate-to-large impacts on childrens language, literacy, numeracy and mathematics skills, and small impacts on childrens executive functioning and a measure of emotion recognition. Some impacts were considerably larger for some subgroups. For urban public school districts, results inform important programmatic decisions. For policy makers, results confirm that prekindergarten programs can improve educationally vital outcomes for children in meaningful, important ways.

Teacher-Child Interactions in Chile and Their Associations With Prekindergarten Outcomes

Quality of teacher-child interactions is central to prekindergarten childrens learning. In the United States, the quality of teacher-child interactions is commonly assessed using the teaching through interactions conceptual framework and an associ/ated observational tool, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). This study examined: (a) whether there was evidence supporting three distinctive domains of teacher-child interactions in Chile (construct validity) and (b) whether these domains predicted end-of-prekindergarten language, academic, and executive function skills in Chile (predictive validity). The sample consisted of 91 Chilean prekindergarten classrooms (1,868 four-year-old children). The findings support both construct and predictive validity of the teaching through interactions conceptual framework as assessed by the CLASS in Chile. Implications for cross-country comparison of quality of teacher-child interactions in prekindergarten classrooms are discussed.

The Prekindergarten Age-Cutoff Regression-Discontinuity Design: Methodological Issues and Implications for Application

Much of the currently available evidence on the causal effects of public prekindergarten programs on school readiness outcomes comes from studies that use a regression-discontinuity design (RDD) with the age cutoff to enter a program in a given year as the basis for assignment to treatment and control conditions. Because the RDD has high internal validity when its key assumptions are met, these studies appear to provide strong evidence for the effectiveness of these programs. However, there are overlooked methodological problems in the way this design has typically been applied that have the potential to produce biased effect estimates. We describe these problems, argue that they deserve more attention from researchers using this design than they have received, and offer suggestions for improving future studies.

Early mathematics assessment: validation of the short form of a prekindergarten and kindergarten mathematics measure

In recent years, there has been increased interest in improving early mathematics curricula and instruction. Subsequently, there has also been a rise in demand for better early mathematics assessments, as most current measures are limited in their content and/or their sensitivity to detect differences in early mathematics development among young children. In this article, using data from two large samples of diverse populations of prekindergarten and kindergarten children, we provide evidence regarding the psychometric validity of a new theory-based early mathematics assessment. The new measure is the short form of a longer, validated measure. Our results suggest the short form assessment is valid for assessing prekindergarten and kindergarten children’s numeracy and geometry skills and is sensitive to differences in early mathematics development among young children.

When Does Preschool Matter

Summary:We have many reasons to invest in preschool programs, including persistent gaps in school readiness between children from poorer and wealthier families, large increases in maternal employment over the past several decades, and the rapid brain development that preschoolage children experience. But what do we know about preschool education’s effectiveness?In this article, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Christina Weiland, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn report strong evidence that preschool boosts children’s language, literacy, and math skills in the short term; it may also reduce problem behaviors such as aggression. Over the elementary school years, however, test scores of children who were exposed to preschool tend to converge with the scores of children who were not. Many factors may explain this convergence. For example, kindergarten or first-grade teachers may focus on helping children with lower levels of skills get up to speed, or children may lose ground when they transition from high-quality preschools into poor-quality elementary programs. Taking a longer view, some studies have found that attending preschool boosts children’s high school graduation rates and makes them less likely to engage in criminal behavior. Overall, higherquality preschool programs are associated with larger effects.How might preschools produce larger effects that last longer? Developmentally focused curricula, combined with intensive in-service training or coaching for teachers, have been shown to improve the quality of preschool instruction. Focusing on fundamental skills that both predict long-term outcomes and are less likely to be gained in the first years of school might also produce longer-lasting effects. And improving instructional quality in early elementary school and better aligning the preschool and elementary curricula may be another way to sustain the boost that quality preschool education can provide. Above all, the authors write, if we want to see sustained improvements in children’s development and learning, we need to increase the quality of—not just access to—preschool education.

Experimental Impacts of a Preschool Intervention in Chile on Children's Language Outcomes: Moderation by Student Absenteeism

ABSTRACT Despite consensus that school absenteeism has negative consequences for childrens life outcomes, until recently, little was known about the prevalence of absenteeism or its potential to moderate the impacts of school-based interventions. This study provides evidence from a randomized experiment of a preschool intervention involving 1,876 children in 64 schools in Chile that chronic absenteeism develops in preschool and is predicted by multiple risk factors for poor academic achievement. We find moreover that individual childrens likelihood of absenteeism moderated the interventions impact on childrens language and literacy outcomes such that there were positive impacts of the intervention only for children with the lowest likelihood of absenteeism. Experimental evaluations of school-based interventions that do not take absenteeism into account may thus mask heterogeneous effects. In the context of policy pushes to expand early education and preschool access in the United States and globally, these moderation analyses may prove essential for appropriately interpreting the results of experimental studies of school-based interventions.

Natural Window of Opportunity? Low-Income Parents’ Responses to Their Children’s Impending Kindergarten Entry:

Parental investments in the activities and materials that drive learning are central to young children’s school readiness and life success. Little is known, however, about how parents adjust these investments in response to outside pressures, including their children’s impending entry into kindergarten. In the present study, we employ two analytical strategies (multilevel residualized change and regression discontinuity) within national data from the Head Start Impact Study to examine whether parents of children facing an impending entry to kindergarten invest more time and materials in their children’s language and literacy skill development compared with parents of otherwise similar children who are not yet facing formal school entry. Results suggest that low-income parents react to the impending kindergarten transition by increasing their provision of parent–child language and literacy activities (d = .15) but not related materials. We discuss the implications of our findings for the timing of parenting interventions.

Launching Preschool 2.0: A road map to high-quality public programs at scale

Summary: Head Start and other publicly funded preschool programs are some of the most popular government programs in the United States, and in recent years officials have explored expanding public preschool and making it universal. However, several recent large-scale studies have raised questions about the benefits of these programs for participants and for society, as well as whether high-quality preschool is achievable on a large scale. This article reviews the available evidence on these questions and also what is known about the quality of various types of existing programs. The evidence indicates that the curriculum and professional development choices of most programs are out of step with the science of early childhood education and that this has made preschool programs less effective than they could be. The Boston Public Schools prekindergarten program can be used as a case study in better practice preschool implementation. Evaluation of this program shows that high-quality public preschool is achievable on a large scale if localities make the right investment and implementation decisions.

New Findings on Impact Variation From the Head Start Impact Study: Informing the Scale-Up of Early Childhood Programs:

This article synthesizes findings from a reanalysis of data from the Head Start Impact Study with a focus on impact variation. This study addressed whether the size of Head Start’s impacts on children’s access to center-based and high-quality care and their school readiness skills varied by child characteristics, geographic location, and the experiences of children in the control group. Across multiple sets of analyses based on new, innovative statistical methods, findings suggest that the topline Head Start Impact Study results of Head Start’s average impacts mask substantial variation in its effectiveness and that one key source of that variation was in the counterfactual experiences and the context of Head Start sites (as well as the more typically examined child characteristics; e.g., children’s dual language learner status). Implications are discussed for the future of Head Start and further research, as well as the scale-up of other early childhood programs, policies, and practices.

Preschool Curricula and Professional Development Features for Getting to High-Quality Implementation at Scale: A Comparative Review Across Five Trials:

Experts have heralded domain-specific play-based curricula coupled with regular coaching and training as our “strongest hope” for improving instructional quality in large-scale public preschool programs. Yet, details from different evaluations of the strongest hope model are not systematically compiled, making it difficult to identify specific features across studies that distinguish the most successful implementation efforts. We performed a cross-study review across five diverse large-scale evaluations (n = 6,500 children and n = 750 teachers across 19 localities and multiple auspice types) to identify common features that have characterized successful implementations of this model to date. We identified six features in our exploratory review that may help to flesh out the strongest hope model for localities considering it—a significant focus on specific instructional content, inclusion of highly detailed scripts, incorporation of teacher voice, time for planning, use of real-time data, and early childhood training for administrators. These six features provide more specific guidance for practitioners and help meet calls in preschool and K–12 for more synthesis of implementation lessons from large-scale research trials.