Early Childhood Policy Research

Reports

• "Head Start Children, Families, and Programs: Present and Past Data from FACES." Lara Kristin Hulsey, Nikki Aikens, Ashley Kopack, Jerry West, Emily Moiduddin, and Louisa Tarullo, December 2011. Using data from the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), this report for the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provides a portrait of children entering Head Start for the first time in fall 2009, as well as of their family backgrounds, and the classrooms and programs that serve them. The report also offers comparisons across the past decade of the Head Start program to delineate trends and changes in the population served and the services provided. Data tables.
• "Building Partnerships Between Early Head Start Grantees and Family Child Care Providers: Lessons from the Early Head Start for Family Child Care Project." Patricia Del Grosso, Lauren Akers, and Luke Heinkel, December 2011. This report evaluates the Early Head Start Family Child Care Project, designed to develop and pilot strategies for building Early Head Start and family child care partnerships. It documents characteristics of grantees, child care partners, child care partnership coordinators, and communities. The report describes how the work was implemented at local and state levels, including progress toward reaching targeted outcomes and types of partnerships formed to support collaboration. It also addresses sustainability of the partnerships and highlights lessons learned about collaborations designed to create more seamless service delivery for families. An additional report profiles the 22 partnership teams.
• "Resources for Measuring Services and Outcomes in Head Start Programs Serving Infants and Toddlers." Ellen Eliason Kisker, Kimberly Boller, Charles Nagatoshi, Christine Sciarrino, Vinita Jethwani, Teresa Zavitsky, Melissa Ford, and John M. Love, September 2011. As part of the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation-funded Early Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey project, Mathematica updated a 2003 report containing resources to help Head Start programs for infants and toddlers develop a performance measurement plan and carry out data collection to support continuous program improvement. The report discusses the importance and development of a comprehensive plan and presents profiles of potentially useful instruments. This version updates 16 of the original profiles with new information about norms and test characteristics and adds 13 new profiles of more widely used measures.
• "Building Infrastructure to Support Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment: Two-Year Findings from the Cross-Site Evaluation of the Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting Initiative." Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment. Patricia Del Grosso, Margaret Hargreaves, Diane Paulsell, Cheri Vogel, Debra A. Strong, Heather Zaveri, Megan Hague Angus, Brandon Coffee-Borden, Russell Cole, Kirsten Barrett, Kimberly Boller, and Deborah Daro, August 2011. This report describes planning and early implementation of home visiting programs in 15 states. The programs and report were funded by the Children's Bureau at the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The report describes the grantees, the home visiting program models they selected, and their progress and challenges. It should be of special interest to states and home visiting providers participating in the new Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting grant programs authorized by the Affordable Care Act and now being implemented in states.
• "The Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) Evaluation Toolkit." The Child Care Quality Rating System (QRS) Assessment. Julieta Lugo-Gil, Samina Sattar, Christine Ross, Kimberly Boller, Gretchen Kirby, and Kathryn Tout, August 2011. This toolkit is an informational resource for state administrators, child care and early education practitioners, and other stakeholders on how QRISs work, how to plan and design QRIS evaluations, and why such evaluations are important.
• "Defining and Measuring Quality: An In-Depth Study of Five Child Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems." The Child Care Quality Rating System (QRS) Assessment. Pia Caronongan, Gretchen Kirby, Lizabeth Malone, and Kimberly Boller, August 2011. This in-depth study describes what is conceptualized as quality and how it is measured in five QRISs.
• "Child Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems: Approaches to Integrating Programs for Young Children in Two States." The Child Care Quality Rating System (QRS) Assessment. Gretchen Kirby, Kimberly Boller, and Heather Zaveri, August 2011. This report focuses on approaches used by QRISs in Indiana and Pennsylvania to connect with and build on the programs and resources that exist within the early childhood care and education system.
• "Measuring Quality Across Three Child Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems: Findings from Secondary Analyses." The Child Care Quality Rating System (QRS) Assessment. Lizabeth Malone, Gretchen Kirby, Pia Caronongan, Kimberly Boller, and Kathryn Tout, August 2011. This report presents findings from an exploratory analysis of administrative data from three QRISs. The analyses examine the prevalence of quality components across centers and how they combine to result in an overall rating level and to predict observed quality.
• "Effective Evaluation of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems for Early Care and Education and School-Age Care." Gail Zellman, Richard Brandon, Kimberly Boller, and J. Lee Kreader, June 2011. This brief presents basic evaluation concepts for child care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRISs), useful tools for determining the appropriate design and timing of an evaluation, and evaluation references and resources for those who wish to learn more.

Journal Articles

• "Measuring Quality and Using It to Improve Practice and Policy in Early Childhood Development." Pia Rebello Britto, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Kimberly Boller. Early Childhood Matters, November 2011.This article in the Bernard van Leer Foundation's international journal proposes a framework for conceptualizing and measuring the quality of early childhood programs in global contexts and makes recommendations for how policymakers, practitioners, and researchers can work together to improve quality. This article is a précis of a Society for Research in Child Development social policy report and issue brief on these topics.
• "Trajectories of the Home Learning Environment Across the First 5 Years: Associations with Children's Vocabulary and Literacy Skills at Prekindergarten." Eileen T. Rodriguez and Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, Child Development, June 2011 (published online ahead of print). This article examined home learning environments in a sample of 1,852 low-income families and their children at ages 1, 2, 3, and 5 years. The study found enriched learning experiences as early as 15 months are important to children's vocabulary growth and provide a foundation for children's later school success.

Issue Briefs

• "Supporting Home Visitors in Evidence-Based Programs: Experience of EBHV Grantees." Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment, Brief #4. Brandon Coffee-Borden and Diane Paulsell, December 2010. This brief summarizes lessons about supervising and supporting home visitors in evidence-based home visiting programs. Topics include steps to cultivate organizational support for evidence-based home visiting programs, methods to address internal staff concerns about these programs, benefits of evidence-based models’ approaches to home visitor supervision, and the need to provide home visitors with resources and knowledge through community partnerships.
• "Replicating Evidence-Based Home Visiting Models: A Framework for Assessing Fidelity." Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment, Brief #3. Deborah Daro (Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago), December 2010. This brief presents a system to monitor fidelity in evidence-based infant and early childhood home visiting programs. Topics addressed include defining fidelity and its impact on program outcomes; assessing fidelity during initial and ongoing program implementation; and selecting program level, provider level, service delivery, and participant level indicators to obtain a comprehensive view of fidelity.
• "Recruiting and Training Home Visitors for Evidence-Based Home Visiting (EBHV): Experience of EBHV Grantees." Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment, Brief #2. Brandon Coffee-Borden and Diane Paulsell, October 2010. This brief summarizes lessons about recruiting and training home visitors for evidence-based programs from grantees participating in the Children’s Bureau’s Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment grantee cluster. Key challenges include locating candidates that understand the demands and responsibilities of home visitation, hiring home visitors that can serve families that are culturally and linguistically diverse, and understanding that training about the community and target population complements training provided by the evidence-based model.

• Two briefs on the Seeds to Success Modified Field Test, a voluntary child care quality rating and improvement system to improve the quality of child care in Washington State, are available.
  
  "The Seeds to Success Modified Field Test: Implementation Lessons." Patricia Del Grosso, Kristin Hallgren, Diane Paulsell, and Kimberly Boller, July 2010. This brief highlights key findings on whether the coaching model and financial incentives implemented affect quality of services participating child care businesses provide.
  
  "The Seeds to Success Modified Field Test: Impact Evaluation Findings." Kimberly Boller, Randall Blair, Patricia Del Grosso, and Diane Paulsell, July 2010. This brief highlights key findings on whether the coaching model and financial incentives implemented affect quality of services provided by participating child care businesses.

• "Assessing the Need for Evidence-Based Home Visiting (EBHV): Experience of EBHV Grantees." Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment, Brief #1. Diane Paulsell and Brandon Coffee-Borden, July 2010. This issue brief provides information about how grantees participating in the Children’s Bureau’s Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting (EBHV) to Prevent Child Maltreatment grantee cluster prepared and planned needs assessments and collected data. It also describes facilitators and barriers to carrying out the assessments and provides lessons learned by grantees. This information may be useful to states as they plan needs assessments required by the new Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program.

• In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Early Learning Initiative to improve the school readiness of Washington State’s children. Two communities, East Yakima and White Center, have implemented strategies to meet the initiative’s goals. Mathematica conducted a formative evaluation of one component of the initiative, home-based early learning services, to learn how home-visiting programs have been implemented within the two communities as well as the quality and content of the home visits. A new series of briefs describe the study’s findings and provide recommendations for developing and evaluating home-visiting programs.

  "Better Beginnings: Developing Home-Based Early Learning Systems in East Yakima and White Center." Kristin Hallgren, Diane Paulsell, and Patricia Del Grosso, May 2010. This brief summarizes the experiences of two communities in developing home-based early learning services.

  "Better Beginnings: Partnering with Families for Early Learning Home Visit Observations." Kristin Hallgren, Kimberly Boller, and Diane Paulsell, May 2010. This brief provides an overview of the observation instruments and describes the content and quality of the observed home visits.

Other

• "Quality of Early Childhood Development Programs in Global Contexts: Rationale for Investment, Conceptual Framework and Implications for Equity." Pia Rebello Britto, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Kimberly Boller, April 2011. Early childhood development programs—which often involve the health, education, child welfare, and other sectors—are of great interest to policymakers, service providers, and families around the globe. This paper proposes that equity in access and quality are critical to effect sustainable and meaningful change in these programs in developing countries. The paper conceptualizes quality across settings and systems and identifies implications for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers on how they can work together to measure, improve, and sustain quality. Issue Brief: "Early Childhood Development Programs In Global Contexts: Improving Quality."
• Mathematica authors contributed to two chapters in a new book, Quality Measurement in Early Childhood Settings, edited by Martha Zaslow, Ivelisse Martinez-Beck, Kathryn Tout, and Tamara Halle, 2011:

• "Measuring the Quality of Early Childhood Math and Science Curricula and Teaching." Kimberly Brenneman, Kimberly Boller, Sally Atkins-Burnett, Deborah Stipek, Nicole D. Forry, Barbrina B. Ertle, Lucia French, Herbert P. Ginsburg, Ellen Frede, and Thomas Schultz. This chapter reviews instructional and child care quality measures in mathematics, science, and general cognition and finds few measures that focus on these areas. More investment is needed in developing content-specific and global quality measures to assess supports for early math and science learning, to help guide the field and improve curricula and instruction.

• "Family-Sensitive Caregiving: A Key Component of Quality in Early Care and Education Arrangements." Juliet Bromer, Diane Paulsell, Toni Porter, Julia R. Henly, Dawn Ramsburg, Roberta B. Weber, and Families and Quality Workgroup Members.  Drawing on research about working families and literature from Head Start, family support, and home visitation programs, this chapter presents a model for conceptualizing and measuring quality in early care and education settings, focusing on the sensitivity of providers toward families of children in care.