Dana C. McCoy, Ph.D. - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Research has consistently shown positive impacts of early childhood education and parent support programs on young children's cognitive, academic, and behavioral development. At the same time, comparatively little research has evaluated the ways that these programs may be more or less effective for particular groups of children. As the population of preschool-aged children in the United States becomes increasingly racially and ethnically diverse and urban, understanding potential differences in early childhood program effectiveness is more critical than ever for ensuring equitable access to high quality services for all children. The first aim of the proposed study is to test whether the effectiveness of early childhood education (ECE), family support (FS), and combined ECE/FS programs differ based on programs' racial/ethnic composition or urbanicity. In particular, this study will test whether these programs' impacts on children's cognitive, academic, and behavioral outcomes are larger or smaller for programs serving predominantly Hispanic, black, or white children, or for programs located in urban, suburban, or rural contexts. In addition to understand basic differences in impact variation, the second and third aims of the present study will further test whether these differences may relate to the quality of programming offered to children in these different contexts. In particular, Aim 2 will evaluate the relationships between programs' racial/ethnic composition and urbanicity, and the quality, comprehensiveness, and intensity of programming offered to children in each type of programming. Finally, Aim 3 will test whether observed differences in program impacts based on racial/ethnic composition or urbanicity may be attributed to related differences in program quality. To accomplish these aims, this study will make use of two complementary data sources: 1) the National Forum on Early Childhood Policy and Programs' meta-analytic database, which spans more than four decades of early childhood research, and 2) the nationally representative, experimental Head Start Impact Study. The use of these datasets will confer several important advantages over past work in this area, including the ability to simultaneously explore multiple program types (including ECE, FS, and combined ECE/FS in the meta- analysis, and Head Start in the HSIS), features of quality (including objective indices of quality, comprehensiveness and intensity in the meta-analysis, as well as observed quality interactions in the HSIS), and child outcomes (including cognitive, academic, and behavioral outcomes in both datasets). In addition, these studies will use complementary analytic techniques to explicitly account for related, potentially confounding characteristics such as child- and neighborhood-level socioeconomic disadvantage.