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Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research

To help strengthen and improve the quality of the nation's preschool programs, the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER) program funded research to determine whether selected curricula could produce educationally meaningful improvements in children's school readiness. Each grantee implemented its curriculum, and randomized field trials tested the effectiveness of the interventions relative to prevailing curricula in the schools.

Mathematica was the national coordinator for the PCER 2003 group of grantees, overseeing all data collection and conducting cross-site analyses of projects implemented by Florida State University, the Success For All Foundation, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Missouri, and the University of Virginia. Assessments and parent interviews took place in fall and spring of the children's preschool year (2003-2004) with approximately 1,225 children and parents, and continued in spring of their kindergarten year (2005), and at the end of first grade (2006). In the fall and spring of the preschool year, staff conducted detailed observations of classroom environments and literacy and numeracy activities. The study's main research questions, to guide impact analyses of curriculum intervention across the entire sample as well as within important subgroups, and trends over time, included:

• What were the impacts of each intervention on important dimensions of children's development, including cognitive and social-emotional domains?
• How did the curricula change the prevailing classroom environments?
• How did the impacts vary for subgroups of children, classrooms, teachers, or communities? What worked for whom?
• What were the patterns of impacts over time, as children progressed through preschool and kindergarten?

The four-year evaluation was funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which established PCER in 2002 to enhance the school success of children in low-income families.

Publications

"Learning About Preschool Curricula: PCER and Beyond" Presentation at Annual Conference of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (November 2008) 
Effects of Preschool Curriculum Programs on School Readiness (NCER 2008-2009) Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Consortium (July 2008)