Learning “What Works” in Early Childhood Classrooms

In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama cited Nobel Laureate James Heckman’s research that has shown that every dollar invested in high-quality early childhood programs has returns of 7 to 10 percent per child, per year due to increased productivity, healthy behaviors, and reduced social costs. President Obama called on Americans to “…do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let’s give our kids that chance.”

“Do what works.” After all, not all preschools produce positive benefits. President and Professor Heckman are talking about high-quality preschool programs. The question then becomes, what defines a “high-quality” preschool? Recent research addresses one aspect, showing that targeted investments in the professional development of teachers can improve classroom environments and children’s preschool experiences in the short-term.

MDRC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan social policy research organization, seeks to thoughtfully evaluate the characteristics of a high-quality preschool. In a recent report, MDRC summarizes findings from the Foundations of Learning (FOL) demonstration, an evaluation that tested a promising approach toward increasing preschool quality by improving teacher’s classroom management skills and the “social-emotional” development of children.

Seventy-one preschool centers containing 91 participating classrooms in Newark, New Jersey and Chicago, Illinois were randomly assigned to implement FOL (the program group) or conduct “preschool as usual” (the control group). Teachers participating in FOL received intensive professional development comprised of five monthly training sessions and yearlong in-classroom consultation to reinforce training concepts. Teachers also attended a 90 minute stress management workshop and received additional classroom support from consultants who worked one-on-one with particular children. Implementation findings suggest that teachers did participate in these offered activities and rated them as high quality.

At the end of the school year, researchers found that FOL improved teachers’ classroom management skills. Relative to the control group, teachers in the program group had warmer, more positive interactions with students, fewer sarcastic and angry interactions, and were better able to prevent misbehavior. Notably, this finding was sustained one year later.

Classrooms participating in FOL experienced more orderly transitions and fewer disruptions, thereby allowing more time for instruction and other learning activities. Observers conducted two-hour observations and reported an average of ten more minutes of instructional time in FOL classrooms, totaling more than a week of instruction over a school year.

According to independent observers, children in FOL classrooms had fewer negative interactions with peers, were more engaged in classroom activities, and performed better on a battery of tests designed to measure attention, self-control, and memory skills. However, with limited resources for follow-up data collection, there was no evidence that suggested the children sustained any of these benefits in Kindergarten or first grade or that FOL improved early academic skills like letter identification or early numeracy skills.

The researchers suggest that targeting children’s social and emotional abilities through classroom management techniques may need to be one part of a larger overall strategy to strengthen preschool classroom quality. For example, if teachers do garner additional instructional time from learning classroom management techniques, they might take better advantage of that additional instructional time by deploying research-based math or literacy curricula.

FOL cost approximately $1,750 per child in the classroom, an increase in normal classroom costs for both Newark and Chicago classrooms. Taken together, at this time, the researchers report that there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that the benefits of FOL outweigh its cost.

Important evaluations like this one shed light on “what works” in improving early childhood programs and evaluate the benefits and costs of such initiatives. Continuing their research on “what works” in preschool, MDRC plans to release implementation and impact findings from the Head Start CARES evaluation, a large-scale evaluation that built on findings from FOL and tested three approaches designed to enhance children’s social-emotional development.

Photo credit: cc/Just Joe