Multi-State Pre-Kindergarten Study - Development Phase

Co-directors: Donna Bryant, Richard M. Clifford

Principal investigators: Oscar Barbarin, Peg Burchinal, Carollee Howes, Bob Pianta

Investigators: Diane Early, Sharon Ritchie

Project staff: Gisele M. Crawford, Marcia Kraft-Sayre, Gitanjali Saluja

Research questions/goals: We estimate that roughly one in seven 4-year-olds attends a public school prior to kindergarten (See Public Schools and Pre-K Services). These programs are of unknown quality and intensity. Most pre-kindergarten services provided by public schools have been motivated by a desire to provide earlier-than-kindergarten help to children considered at-risk for later school failure or children with disabilities. As local, state, and federal agencies try to increase the number and quality of opportunities for 3- and 4-year-olds in Head Start, child care, and school connected settings, they do so without even this basic knowledge about the breadth and type of services that schools are now providing.

The NCEDL Multi-State Pre-Kindergarten Study has two primary purposes:

• to describe the variations of experiences for children in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten programs in school-related settings, and
• to examine the relations between variations in pre-kindergarten/kindergarten experiences and children's outcomes in early elementary school.

Primary research questions

1. What is the nature and distribution of education and experience of teachers and teacher assistants in public school pre-kindergarten programs?
2. What is the nature and distribution of global quality and specific practices in key areas such as literacy, math, and teacher-child relationships in a diverse sample of public school pre-kindergarten programs for 4-year-olds as well as in a similarly diverse sample of kindergarten classes?
3. How do quality and practices vary as a function of child and teacher characteristics (e.g., child gender, race, home language, family income, teachers' years of education) and classroom, program, community, and state structural variables (e.g., teacher-child ratio, funding base of the program, teacher salary, degree of state regulation) for children with different demographic characteristics (e.g., race, gender, home language and family income)?
4. Do quality and practice vary in relation to combinations of these variables? For example, are quality and practice a function of family poverty and teacher pay or education?
5. Can children's outcomes be predicted by children's experiences in pre-kindergarten programs? Are the various dimensions of quality and/or practice differentially related to different outcomes? Are these relationships constant across children with different characteristics (e.g., race, gender, home language and family income)?
6. Do pre-kindergarten quality and practices predict children's transition to kindergarten and is the transition to kindergarten different (easier/harder) when there is continuity or discontinuity between practices in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten? Is this transition mediated in any way by child characteristics? For example, do African American boys benefit more from continuity of practice than do white girls?

The development phase of this study was undertaken in 2000-2001, to prepare for conducting the study in years 2001-2004. The development phase included the following activities:

Pre-kindergarten in the Schools Survey: The survey focused on the role schools are playing in pre-kindergarten education. NCEDL conducted a survey of state-level personnel in every state and Washington DC to learn about current state-funded and other school-related pre-kindergarten services, class size, ratios, teacher education, and other structural features of quality in school-based pre-kindergarten classrooms. At the request of NIECDE, the National Center for Educational Statistics agreed to conduct a fast response survey of LEAs on this topic. NCEDL investigators helped design this survey.

We worked collaboratively with the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education (NAECS/SDE), SERVE, the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement and NIECDE to host our second annual reception at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) conference.

An essential accomplishment of the development phase was selecting six states for the study, based on maximum variance and the ability of states to provide the necessary assistance and information about their programs.

Policy, practice or professional development implications of this research: In recent years, schools have become increasingly involved in providing services for children and families prior to entry into formal school at kindergarten. In fact, over the last decade, the public investment in formal, school-related programs for the education of young children has soared.

This increase is expected to continue for the foreseeable future, yet little is known about the nature and quality of the programs offered by or through schools much less the impact of these growing programs on the children and families being served.

Key challenges for national and state policy-makers and local practitioners include decisions about:

1. whether to provide pre-kindergarten programs
2. to whom such programs should be available
3. how the services should be financed
4. what the goals of these programs are
5. what models and practices should be used