Early Childhood Program Evaluations: A Decision-Maker’s Guide

The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University has produced an easy-to-understand guide to help policymakers interpret and assess the quality of early childhood program evaluations. It helps the reader to answer five key questions:

• Is the evaluation design strong enough to produce trustworthy evidence? This section explains the relative merits between experimental designs and other approaches, such as the regression discontinuity design.
• What program services were actually received by participating children and families and comparison groups? In order to be valid, the evaluation should ensure that the program was implemented as intended and served the intended population.
• How much impact did the program have? This section defines terms such as effect sizes, statistical significance, "intent to treat" impacts, and "treatment on the treated" impacts.
• Do the program's benefits exceed its costs? The most powerful intervention may not be the wisest investment, and this section explains why.

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