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Policy Framework
Head Start has been referred to as the nation’s “premier” federally sponsored early childhood education program, and today it serves nearly one million low-income children. Designed to “narrow the gap” between disadvantaged children and their more affluent peers, Head Start provides comprehensive programming during the preschool period to improve children’s social competence and academic readiness for school.
A wealth of developmental research highlights the deleterious consequences of poverty for young children. More specifically, because they are exposed to a wide range of psychosocial stressors, low-income children have been found to be at greater risk for developing emotional and behavioral difficulties than their middle-income peers. Empirical studies have documented prevalence rates of emotional and behavior problems among preschool children as high as 20 to 40 percent, such that four to seven children in any given Head Start classroom may require additional assistance in managing their emotions and behavior. Accordingly, Head Start programs and other preschools in low-income communities report a pressing need for effective tools for building children’s social-emotional skills. Indeed, the payoff of such prevention efforts may be high, as supporting low-income children’s healthy emotional and behavioral development during the preschool years is likely to influence their chances for success in school and beyond, both for the highest-risk children in the classroom as well as for their lower-risk peers.
This study comes at an important juncture for the field of early childhood education. New advances in neuroscience have increased the public’s understanding of the importance of early years of development, and policymakers have become increasingly focused on the role of early education in increasing preschool children’s readiness for school. At the same time, there is a surprisingly thin base of rigorous research investigating on how preschool programs can most effectively support children’s social-emotional development as part of that effort. Without such knowledge, programs like Head Start will have difficulty improving children’s school readiness.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
Building on theories of how children’s development unfolds, researchers and practitioners have created a new generation of classroom-based strategies that are specifically designed to improve children’s social-emotional competencies. Two basic approaches have been emphasized. In one approach, children are provided with very specific hands-on activities and lessons to build their knowledge of emotions and their ability to consider alternative solutions when faced with a conflict with a peer. In the second approach, teachers are trained in specific behavior strategies that support the social-emotional development of preschool children — for instance, praising children for socially-competent behaviors and setting clear limits for children’s behavior. However, the majority of these programs have been tested only in single cities, with programs highly motivated to take up the intervention, and with training and technical assistance provided under the direction of senior academic researchers. Never have multiple social-emotional programs been tested on a national level in the context of a federal initiative.
The Head Start CARES (Classroom-based Approaches and Resources for Emotion and Social skill promotion) Project will use a group-based randomized design to test the effects of a set of evidence-based strategies designed to improve the social and emotional development of children in Head Start classrooms. The evaluation will randomly assign 100 centers to four interventions and a control group, with 20 centers in each of the five groups. A well-designed project with a nationally representative sample of Head Start programs and a rigorous analytic design, this study holds the promise of identifying the impacts of these new approaches compared to current practices within Head Start settings and providing lessons about how they can best be integrated into Head Start classrooms around the country.
This study has the potential to dramatically improve our understanding of: (1) promising approaches to building children’s social and emotional development, (2) the processes by which the largest and most sustained effects on children’s social and emotional development are likely to occur, and (3) the features of Head Start settings and families that contribute to successful implementation of these program models. The Head Start CARES Project will provide the information federal policymakers and Head Start can use to increase Head Start’s capacity to improve the social-emotional skills and school readiness of preschool-age children.
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The project is in the design phase, which includes the following steps:
- Identify promising programs to enhance the social-emotional development of Head Start children. With a carefully selected set of contrasting program approaches, this study can make a pivotal contribution to both the scientific base of evidence and to Head Start policy and practice.
- Develop partnerships with program developers, Head Start programs, and consultants to facilitate a successful implementation of the study.
- Finalize the study design to leverage the information that may be gained from the selection of programs and measures. The research team will plan the data collection effort and develop the sampling and evaluation design to provide the strongest possible information about the impact of these programs.
What's Next
This project extends until mid-2013. Centers will be recruited in the 2008-2009 academic year. Training of teachers in the new programs will begin in the summer and fall of 2009, and the data collection will begin in fall 2009. Follow-up of children in the participating centers will be conducted at the end of their preschool year and into a subsequent school year. Reports are planned for 2011 and 2013.
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