Abstract
To date, there have been few causally interpretable evaluations of the impacts of preschool curricula on the skills of children at-risk for academic difficulties, and even fewer studies have demonstrated statistically significant or educationally meaningful effects. In this cluster-randomized study, we evaluated the impacts of a literacy-focused preschool curriculum and two types of professional development on the emergent literacy skills of preschool children at-risk for educational difficulties. Forty-eight preschools were randomly assigned to a business-as-usual control, a literacy-focused curriculum with workshop-only professional development, or a literacy-focused curriculum with workshop plus in-class mentoring professional development conditions. An ethnically diverse group of 739 preschool children was assessed on language and literacy outcomes. Results revealed significant and moderate effects for the curriculum and small, mostly nonsignificant, effects of professional development across child outcomes and classroom measures.
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Notes
Although the Perry Preschool Project (e.g., Schweinhart, Barnes, & Weikart, 1993) is often cited as evidence for the efficacy of the High/Scope Curriculum, the design of that study limits internally valid conclusions about differences between children exposed to the High/Scope Curriculum and children who had no preschool. Although often described as a randomized study, post-randomization manipulation of the sample reintroduced potential selection biases into the results. Moreover, because children in the control group received no preschool experience and because children in the High/Scope group also received weekly home visits as a part of the experimental conditions, any observed differences between children in the High/Scope condition and children in the control condition cannot be unambiguously attributed to the curriculum even if internally valid conclusions were possible.
English-language assessments were used in this study to provide a common outcome metric by which to measure the impacts of the intervention. Because almost all instructional activities were conducted in English, regardless of children’s language background, these measures also provide the most direct measure of child outcomes. Moreover, in California and elsewhere, educational outcomes of interest are English-language outcomes.
Although the curriculum did not target phonological short-term memory or lexical access, and we, therefore, did not anticipate any measured impacts on these measures, we included all of the subtests of the P-CTOPPP to provide descriptive information on the full spectrum of phonological processing skills.
Despite the large number of children who were Spanish-speaking English language learners in the Los Angeles sites, most of the preschool personnel were monolingual English speakers, and virtually all of the instructional activities in the preschool centers were conducted in English.
Use of multi-level modeling analysis is required because children within the same preschool site are likely to be similar to each other in measured outcomes, particularly by the end of a school year after being exposed to the same teacher, classroom activities, and classroom context. This can create a “clustering” effect in which variability between children within a preschool site is reduced (generally indexed by the intra-class correlation coefficient [ICC]), resulting in a reduction in the size of the error term in an analysis, which inflates the significance level of an inferential test of the differences between means. Multi-level analyses adjust the inferential tests by accounting for the “cluster variable” in the model (in the reported analyses for this study, by treating preschool site as a random factor in the model). Analyses using classrooms as a random factor, either alone or with preschool center, did not alter the results. Children were not “clustered” within small-groups because small-group membership in LEPC classrooms was not assigned and is intended to vary across the school year as children’s skills change.
Any pre-existing group differences are controlled in the analyses through the use of the nonverbal cognitive ability covariate, which was unlikely to be affected by exposure to the curriculum.
Additional analyses were conducted to examine what, if any, influences the curriculum in use before the study had on outcomes. As with the site variable, there were no statistically significant experimental group by original curriculum interactions. Additionally, there were no statistically significant differences for scores of children in control classrooms using High/Scope versus Creative Curriculum.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by an Interagency Education Research Initiative grant (REC-0128970) to JoAnn M. Farver and Christopher J. Lonigan through the National Science Foundation. The views expressed herein have neither been reviewed nor endorsed by the granting agency. We wish to acknowledge the significant contributions to this project by Stephanie Eppe, Kimberly McDowell, and Patricia Byler, and we thank the teachers, schools, children, and research assistants involved in the project.
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Lonigan, C.J., Farver, J.M., Phillips, B.M. et al. Promoting the development of preschool children’s emergent literacy skills: a randomized evaluation of a literacy-focused curriculum and two professional development models. Read Writ 24, 305–337 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-009-9214-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-009-9214-6