Year 3 Follow-up of the ‘Quality Preschool for Ghana’ Interventions on Child Development

Governments around the world are increasing investments in early childhood education as a way to promote children’s learning and development. As research grows on the longer-term effects of early educational programs, some have hypothesized that sustained impacts may depend on the quality of children’s subsequent classroom environments and may be more likely to occur in certain nonacademic domains. This study is the first to examine these questions in sub-Saharan Africa, using longitudinal data from a school-randomized trial in Ghana. A 1-year teacher-training and coaching program, delivered with (TTPA) and without (TT) parental-awareness meetings, was implemented when children were enrolled in 1 of 2 grades of preprimary school. Previous studies showed that in Year 1, the implementation year, the TT treatment had positive impacts on children’s literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional development, while the TTPA treatment yielded no positive impacts for children in both grades. In this study, I examine impacts in Year 3, at the end of children’s 1st or 2nd year of primary school. I find persistent positive impacts of TT on literacy, and new negative impacts of TTPA on numeracy, but these depend on levels of classroom emotional support and teacher burnout in primary school. In addition, there were small persistent impacts of both treatments on children’s executive function, and these were not conditional on subsequent classroom environments

Conformity and Innovation

A report by Sharon Wolf to the Faculty Research Committee on August 15, 1981 on quantitative comparisons between majority influence (conformity) and minority influence (innovation)

Impacts of Pre-Service Training and Coaching on Kindergarten Quality and Student Learning Outcomes in Ghana

Using a randomized-control trial, this study evaluates a program designed to support Ghanaian kindergarten student-teachers during pre-service training through mentorship and in-classroom training. Several potential barriers to improved teaching quality and learning outcomes are examined. Findings show that the program improved knowledge and implementation of the national curriculum for individuals both when they were student-teachers and, the following year, when they became newly qualified teachers (NQTs). There were mixed impacts on professional well-being, increasing personal accomplishment and motivation but decreasing job satisfaction for NQTs. There were mixed impacts on teaching quality, with increases in child-led learning but decreases in some other aspects of quality. There were no impacts on NQTs’ student learning outcomes. The findings highlight system level challenges with both the posting of NQTs and the absence of support in their first teaching year. Implications for global early childhood education policy and teacher education are discussed

Attachment to land: The case of the land of Israel for American and Israeli Jews and the role of contagion

This is a first study on attachment to national and sacred land and land as a protected value. A measure of attachment to the land of Israel is developed and administered to two groups, Jewish college students in Israel and the United States. Levels of land attachment are high and not significantly different in the two groups, with a great deal of variation. Land may become more important through being inhabited by a group over centuries. This is a positive contagion effect, and is opposed in some cases by negative contagion produced when the enemies live on the land for some period of time. We demonstrate a significant correlation of positive contagion sensitivity with attachment to the land of Israel. Unlike many other cases of the interaction of positive and negative contagion, negative contagion does not overwhelm positive contagion in the domain of land attachment. We also present evidence for linkages between political positions, religiosity, importance of Israel, Arab aversion, and vulnerability of Israel with attachment to land, but these do not fully account for the contagion effects. A number of significant differences between Israelis and Americans are described

Economic Instability, Food Insecurity, and Child Health in the Wake of the Great Recession

Although there is a wealth of research on the relationship between income level and employment status and child well-being, the relationship between economic instability and health during early childhood is understudied. We examine the associations between the incidence, accumulation, and timing of intrayear employment and income instability with household and child food insecurity and child health using a nationally representative sample of households. The sample includes children age 3–5 from households in the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation (N = 5,056). We find that young children’s households experience high levels of both income and employment instability. Both the incidence and the accumulation of instability predict poorer child outcomes, more recent instability is more strongly associated with child outcomes, and these relations are stronger for children with less educated parents. Employment and income changes have separate, unique associations with each outcome and operate in somewhat different ways

A ‘smart buy' for all? Unequal and unintended consequences of a messaging program for child education

Through a large-scale household-randomized trial, we document divergent and unintended effects of a SMS-nudge parenting intervention in Ghana. For parents with some exposure to formal schooling, the program supported parental education engagement, child school participation and social-emotional skills. Conversely, for parents with no schooling, the program backfired, exacerbating educational inequality. Messages also lowered parental selfefficacy, educational aspirations, and the perceived importance of regular school attendance among parents with no schooling. As light-touch, low-tech strategies integrate into education systems to combat the global learning crisis, these findings caution against potential unintended and distributional consequences, particularly in rural, low-literacy contexts

A dimensional risk approach to assessing early adversity in a national sample

We examine how incidence and accumulation of two domains of risk factors—deprivation and threat of harm—predict early childhood development, testing a framework put forth by McLaughlin and Sheridan (2016). Using the ECLSK: 11 (N = 18,200, M = 5.6 years; 48.7% female), a nationally representative sample of kindergarteners, we consider behavioral and cognitive indicators that represent different learning processes. We find partial support for the hypothesis that deprivation (but not threat) risks predict higher-order learning outcomes, with both incidence and accumulation of risk negatively predicting reading scores but mixed associations for executive function outcomes. We find support that incidence of threat (but not deprivation) risks negatively predict emotional and behavioral outcomes as hypothesized. When modeled cumulatively, however, both deprivation and threat risks predict behavioral outcomes. Finally, in line with hypothesized processes, both deprivation and threat risks negatively predict math scores, which represent pattern-learning processes. Implications for research in childhood adversity are discussed

Changes in Classroom Quality Predict Ghanaian Preschoolers’ Gains in Academic and Social-Emotional Skills

Rates of participation in early childhood education (ECE) programs are on the rise globally, including in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet little evidence exists on the quality of these programs and on the role of classroom quality in predicting learning for young children across diverse contexts. This study uses data from the Greater Accra Region of Ghana (N = 3,407; Mage = 5.8 years; 49.5% female) to examine how changes in four culturally-validated dimensions of ECE classroom quality predict children’s growth in early academic and social-emotional skills from the beginning to the end of one academic year. We find that improvements in domains of classroom instructional quality are related to small, positive gains in children’s early academic and social-emotional outcomes over the school year, and that these improvements are generally larger for children and classrooms with higher baseline proficiency and quality levels. Associations between changes in social-emotional aspects of classroom quality and child outcomes were mixed. These results extend the knowledge base on ECE quality to a new and under-represented context while also providing important information regarding the contexts and children for whom teacher training and other quality-focused improvement efforts may be most needed

Changing trajectories of learning and development: experimental evidence from the Quality Preschool for Ghana interventions

We examined how exposure to two intervention programmes designed to improve the quality of pre-primary education in Ghana—the Quality Preschool for Ghana project—impacted children’s rate of growth in academic (literacy and numeracy) and non-academic skills (social–emotional and executive function) across two school years. This cluster-randomised trial included 240 schools (N = 3,345 children, Mage = 5.2 at baseline) randomly assigned to one of three conditions: teacher training (TT), teacher training plus parental-awareness meetings (TTPA), and control. We found some evidence that the interventions altered children’s rate of growth in academic and non-academic skills for the full sample, and one unexpected finding: TTPA had negative impacts on growth in numeracy skills. When examined by grade level and gender, TT improved trajectories of younger children, and the negative effects of TTPA on numeracy were driven by boys. Implications are discussed in the context of global early childhood education policy, and teacher professional development and parental engagement programmes

The Role of Executive Function and Social-emotional Skills in the Development of Literacy and Numeracy during Preschool: A Cross-Lagged Longitudinal Study

The majority of evidence on the interplay between academic and non-academic skills comes from high-income countries. The aim of this study was to examine the bidirectional associations between Ghanaian children\u27s executive function, social-emotional, literacy, and numeracy skills longitudinally. Children (N = 3,862; M age = 5.2 years at time 1) were assessed using direct assessment at three time points over the course of two school years. Controlling for earlier levels of the same skill, early executive function predicted higher subsequent literacy and numeracy skills, and early literacy and numeracy skills predicted higher subsequent executive function, indicating that the development of executive function and academic skills is inter-related and complementary over time. Early literacy and numeracy predicted subsequent social-emotional skills, but early social-emotional skills did not predict subsequent literacy and numeracy skills. The findings provide longitudinal evidence on children’s learning and development in West Africa and contribute to a global understanding of the relations between various developmental skills over time