Design Options for Studying Head Start Quality Enhancements

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Head Start, the largest federally funded preschool program, provides comprehensive services to economically disadvantaged children and their families so that children can enter kindergarten ready to succeed in school. Performance standards for the program include requirements for the intensity and quality of a broad range of services. Head Start programs must offer education, health, and nutrition services to children, social services to their families, and provide opportunities for parents' involvement in the programs. Programs are also expected to support the parent as the child's economic provider, first teacher, and primary advocate for education and health services.

A focus on program improvement and the development of innovative strategies for meeting the needs of children and families has occurred throughout the Head Start community, on both a large and a small scale. Despite the focus on quality improvement and the wide range of enhancement ideas that have been developed, little is known about the effectiveness of these national, state, regional, and local strategies.

Mathematica developed a set of research designs to help identify the most promising quality enhancement strategies. The designs included possible quality enhancements to be studied, sampling plans, random assignment plans, data to be collected, and the research costs. The final report describes specific quality enhancements that could be evaluated and discusses research designs; implementation approaches; and measures of implementation, children's outcomes, mediators, and moderators.

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