About MDRC
Mattera’s research focuses on early childhood education and intervention and children’s development. She currently works on impact and implementation evaluation for both preschool interventions and projects focused on children from birth to age 3. In studies related to preschool, she helped lead the Head Start CARES project (which studies the impact of social-emotional interventions on preschool children’s outcomes) and Making Pre-K Count (which examines the effects of a preschool mathematics curriculum). In studies related to children from birth to 3, she focuses on services offered through pediatric settings and aligning services across providers in the early years. Mattera received her PhD in applied developmental psychology from the University of Miami.
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MDRC Publications
BriefBuilding Better Evidence on Pre-K Programs by Assessing the Full Range of Children’s Skills
February, 2022Recent research has highlighted a pattern of “fadeout” of positive academic effects of pre-K as children progress into elementary school. This brief looks at examples of less frequently measured types of skills that pre-K programs may help boost in the short term and sustain over the longer term.
ToolkitDecember, 2021This interactive guide and the accompanying, full toolkit are designed for school-based and community-based programs interested in implementing evidence-based early childhood curricula. The guide provides practical guidelines and tools for four stages of implementation.
ReportThe Impacts of Making Pre-K Count and High 5s on Third-Grade Outcomes
December, 2021Children who received two years of early math enrichment in New York City had improved math test scores in third grade. The size of the effect is equivalent to closing about 40 percent of the achievement gap between children from families with low incomes and their peers from families with higher incomes.
CommentarySeptember, 2021In this commentary, originally published in District Administration, MDRC’s Michelle Maier and Shira Mattera offer evidenced-backed advice for policymakers and practitioners about how to invest new federal funds to enhance the quality of preschool programs.
CommentaryJune, 2021In this commentary, which originally appeared in Early Learning Nation, MDRC’s Shira Mattera and Ximena Portilla suggest three important investments that states, districts, and programs can make to support high-quality teaching in early education settings.
CommentaryJune, 2021In this commentary originally published by New America, Meghan McCormick and Shira Mattera describe how investing greater resources in community-based programs will be critical for building an equitable universal pre-K system that provides high-quality experiences to all children.
BriefOctober, 2020More children spend time in preschool now than a decade ago, but not all of them get educational programs of the same quality. This brief explores how to put new classroom curricula in place across multiple schools to bolster classroom quality, instructional practices, and children’s skills.
ReportOctober, 2019This research report evaluates tools for assessing skills that are important predictors of the reading gap that may emerge in later years. It reviews the measures on a set of logistical and psychometric criteria relevant for three purposes: identifying delays; measuring individual differences and change; and informing teaching and learning.
BriefWhat Do We Know and What Are We Learning?
July, 2019There is growing evidence that alignment between preschool and elementary school can help sustain the learning gains that children make in preschool. A new policy brief examines two large-scale, multiyear projects seeking to build rigorous evidence about the promise of aligning instruction from preschool through third grade.
MethodologyMay, 2018A two-stage study design can test a complex set of interventions, individually and in combination. Reflections on Methodology shows how this approach was used for a pair of programs, the first administered in preschools and the second implemented as a kindergarten follow-up for individual students.
ReportThe Impacts of Making Pre-K Count and High 5s on Kindergarten Outcomes
March, 2018This project tested whether high-quality, aligned math instruction, via an evidence-based curriculum in pre-K and innovative math clubs in kindergarten, could improve children’s outcomes. The effect of two years of enriched math translates into closing more than a quarter of the achievement gap between low-income children and their higher-income peers.
ReportThe Implementation of High 5s in New York City
March, 2018Small-group math clubs in kindergarten are an innovative way to align children’s elementary and pre-K math experiences. In a demonstration of the High 5s kindergarten supplement aligned with the principles of an evidence-based, developmentally appropriate pre-K curriculum, attendance and engagement were high, and children participated in hands-on, individualized activities.
Issue FocusMarch, 2018The Implementation Research Incubator discusses an innovative approach to pre-K math, in which the researchers used qualitative methods to put the critical elements of a program’s theory of change under a microscope. Their insights may help future adopters of the model better understand these key components.
BriefPreliminary Kindergarten Impacts of the Making Pre-K Count and High 5s Programs
February, 2017Can children’s math skills be strengthened in pre-K and kindergarten, and can such improvements have longer-term effects? This preliminary analysis examines the cumulative effects of two early math programs and demonstrates that this enhanced experience can have modest, positive impacts on children’s math and executive function skills in kindergarten.
ReportImproving Math Instruction in New York City
October, 2016An evidence-based preschool math curriculum called Building Blocks, combined with ongoing professional development, was compared with “business as usual” pre-K programs across 69 public schools and community-based organizations. This report contains interim findings on the implementation of the model, the amount and quality of its math instruction, and children’s learning outcomes.
ReportExploratory Findings from the Head Start CARES Demonstration
December, 2014This report suggests that evidence-based approaches can improve 3-year-olds’ social-emotional competence in mixed-age preschool classrooms. While the findings are promising, further research is needed to confirm the results and to better understand how these benefits are generated.
ReportNational Evaluation of Three Approaches to Improving Preschoolers’ Social and Emotional Competence
June, 2014This demonstration tested the effectiveness of three program enhancements implemented at scale that were designed to improve preschool children’s social-emotional competence. All three had positive impacts on teacher practice and on children’s social-emotional outcomes during the preschool year, although to varying degrees and not necessarily in the expected ways.
ReportLarge-Scale Implementation of Programs to Improve Children’s Social-Emotional Competence
December, 2013This report describes the extent to which three different classroom-based social-emotional strategies and related professional development supports were implemented as intended in Head Start centers, as well as the degree to which teachers’ practices changed as a result.
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Other Publications
Mattera’s research focuses on early childhood education and intervention and children’s development. She currently works on impact and implementation evaluation for both preschool interventions and projects focused on children from birth to age 3. In studies related to preschool, she helped lead the Head Start CARES project (which studies the impact of social-emotional interventions on preschool children’s outcomes) and Making Pre-K Count (which examines the effects of a preschool mathematics curriculum). In studies related to children from birth to 3, she focuses on services offered through pediatric settings and aligning services across providers in the early years. Mattera received her PhD in applied developmental psychology from the University of Miami.
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Projects
Jean Grossman, Shira Kolnik Mattera, Barbara Condliffe, Dina A. R. Israel, Jedediah J. Teres, Hannah Dalporto, Sonia Drohojowska, Lauren Scarola, Frieda Molina, Rebecca Schwartz, Mei Huang, Rebecca Davis, Julia WalshThe pandemic has led to unfinished learning for a broad swath of students. This unfinished learning has also exacerbated existing disparities in student outcomes by race and ethnicity, income, and geography. Research has shown that high-dosage tutoring is the most effective way for improving learning for many students. But high-dosage tutoring is cost- and resource-...
Virginia Knox, Carolyn Hill, Shira Kolnik Mattera, Helen Lee, Desiree Principe Alderson, Rebecca DavisAcross the United States, children’s life prospects are substantially shaped by their circumstances between birth and age 3. The earliest years of life, then, may present this country’s best opportunity to disrupt cycles of poverty. In the American South, children of low-income families acutely experience the disadvantages of poverty, and they disproportionately remain...
Shira Kolnik Mattera, Sharon Huang, Seth Muzzy, Samantha Wulfsohn, Marissa Strassberger, Amena Sengal, Mirjana PralicaThe High 5s project is part of the Robin Hood Early Childhood Research Initiative, a partnership between MDRC and the Robin Hood Foundation focused on improving the life trajectories of low-income children in New York City. The Initiative’s first project, Making Pre-K Count ( MPC ), was designed to improve pre-k math instruction using the Building Blocks ...
Barbara S. Goldman, Sharon Huang, Shira Kolnik Mattera, Michelle Maier, Seth Muzzy, Electra Small, Samantha Wulfsohn, Marissa Strassberger, Amena Sengal, Mirjana Pralica, Samantha Xia, Cullen MacDowellMaking Pre-K Count is the result of a partnership between MDRC and the Robin Hood Foundation whose goal is to build evidence about ways to improve the life trajectories of children living in poverty in New York City. The partnership’s first project focuses on improving preschool children’s math skills.
Why math? Recent research suggests that early...
Shira Kolnik Mattera, Electra Small, Nina Castells, Barbara S. Goldman, JoAnn Hsueh, Ximena Portilla, Frieda Molina, Howard Bloom, Patrizia Mancini, Sharon RowserHead Start, which serves nearly 1 million low-income children, is the nation’s largest federally sponsored early childhood education program. 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...