Chile: Promoting the Well-Being of Young Children

Recent international research from the field of early childhood development reveals that the period from birth to age eight has a major impact on children’s later health, growth, and development. Consequently, countries around the globe are increasingly developing policies to support and promote young children’s well-being through comprehensive health and educational programs.

In 2006, the Ministry of Education of Chile led the creation of a partnership between various Chilean institutions that deliver early childhood development services and Harvard University to enhance the quality of preschool education. The goal was to build a model of quality, comprehensive early childhood education that could be implemented effectively on a national scale. This project, Un Buen Comienzo (UBC), aims to strengthen language, literacy, and health practices in preschool education in Chile. The intervention consists of a six-month professional development program with monthly cycles of workshop training, in-classroom coaching, and group reflection and feedback. The health component consists of partnerships with local health clinics to monitor respiratory health and nutrition of the participating children and their families.

In 2008, Mathematica, with support from the Education Program Development Fund managed by the World Bank, consulted with the UBC team on the following project components:

• Study design: Provided consultation to develop a cluster, randomized design of schools and calculated minimum detectable effect sizes to determine the number of schools required for the study to be able to detect child-level and classroom-level impacts for key outcomes.
• Random assignment: Made presentations to key stakeholders to communicate the benefits of conducting randomized control experiments.
• Site selection: Participated in site visits to schools to better understand the context in which the intervention will be implemented and advised on how to randomly select schools following the study’s evaluation design.
• Data collection: Oversaw data collection decisions related to the selection of child outcome and classroom quality instruments, training of data collectors, quality assurance procedures, and development of classroom observational coding schemes.

In 2009, Mathematica continues its collaboration with UBC with funding from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Fundación Educacional Oportunidad in Chile. This collaboration aims at ensuring that the impact evaluation design is implemented with fidelity. We also continue to monitor data collection and analysis activities and have provided guidance about the potential scaling of the project. 

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