Parenting, Preschool, and the Production of School Readiness and Later Academic Outcomes

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

This research project will combine large data sets from Head Start and other publicly provided pre-kindergarten programs, parental involvement and experiments to test the effects of parenting education and length of day care on long-term child educational outcomes. The project will study how extra time in summer school just before kindergarten affect student outcome; the effects of parenting education using video interactions on parenting skills and subsequent effects on child educational outcomes; whether extending Head-Start classes from half day to full day improves child academic outcome, and the use of a different methodology to study the effects of extending the Head-Start program to a full day rather than to a half day. This research project is one of the first to study Head Start in a very comprehensive way. Given the resources spent on Head Start and other pre-school programs as well as the effects these programs could have on human capital development, this research deals with a very important subject. The results of the research project will provide important inputs into the formulation of education and human capital policies in the US. This will help establish the US as the global leader in early childhood education. This research project will combine large administrative data sets on Head Start, parental involvement, and rigorous methodologies, including field experiments and regression discontinuity (RD) to investigate the effects of parenting education on parental skills and subsequent long-term educational outcomes of young children. The research is made up of four projects that includes the study of the effects of extra pre-K summer school on children?s readiness for kindergarten, the effects of parenting education using video interaction with children on parental skills and the last two projects will use multi-site experimental methods and RD to study the effects of expanding Head Start to full day programming using variation in the timing of the roll out of the program across counties as an instrument. This project leverages rigorous methods and innovative programmatic approaches to add additional insights into the literature on early childhood education as well as provide important inputs into policy making. Understanding whether and how early childhood educational interventions work is important for economic science as well as educational and human capital policy. The results of this research project will help to establish the U.S. as the global leader in early childhood education research and policy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.