Leveling the playing field: An intervention to promote school readiness and human potential

The intervention focuses on cultivating four sets of skills that the ECEC literature has identified as particularly important to promote future development: Socio-emotional skills, self regulatory-skills, language and math. We stimulate these skills through a playful learning approach. The daycare teachers play with the 5-year-olds using playful learning activities at least eight hours every week for a full daycare year. Prior to the intervention the daycare teachers participated in a 15 credit point continuing education class.
The curriculum was created in a multi step process. First, a multi disciplinary team of researchers (including researchers with many years of experience working as daycare teachers) studied existing curricula in detail. We selected curricula based on two criteria: 1) Documented gain in socio-emotional, self-regulatory, language and math development, and 2) Promise for implementation in the Norwegian culture and daycare context. This narrowed down the list of curricula we used as inspiration for a curriculum to be used in the Norwegian context to: Stop, think act (McClelland & Tominey, 2016), I Can Problem Solve (Shure, 1992), Interactive Book Reading (Mol, Bus, & de Jong, 2009), Building Blocks (Clements & Sarama, 2011), California preschool curriculum framework (California Department of Education, 2016), and Tools of the mind (Bodrova og Leong, 2007).
Second, inspired by the selected curricula, we drafted outlines for more than 130 playful learning activities, stimulating the four key school readiness skills. The main objective was to provide material and inspiration for teachers to craft a more intentional practice.
Third, we collaborated with the 42 daycare teachers in our treatment group to pilot the playful learning activities (see Experimental Design). As part of the education, they tried out the drafted activities with the 5-year-olds in their own daycare, and wrote an assignment on what worked, what did not work, and suggested possible alternative activities. Throughout the year, each daycare teacher had to provide us with oral and written feedback on multiple activities. At the end of the school year, we had critical and constructive feedback from all daycare teachers on each of the activities. This resulted in a substantial revision adapting the playful learning activities to Norwegian culture and context.

2016-08-14

2017-06-17

In order to examine intervention effects on school readiness (daycare) and school adjustment (first grade), we will assess children’s skills using both official mapping tests conducted by schools, and direct assessment organized by the researchers. Direct measures of children’s skills will be conducted both in daycare and in school, and for this we rely on computer tablet instruments, which contain a specially designed APP with a test battery developed for transition between daycare and school.
For daycare children (pre and post intervention), this battery includes the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task (HTKS) and the Hearts and Flowers task (Davidson, Amso, Anderson, & Diamond, 2006) for the assessment of self-regulation (Cameron Ponitz et al., 2008; McClelland & Cameron, 2011; Ponitz, McClelland, Matthews, & Morrison, 2009). Furthermore, vocabulary will be assessed with the Norwegian Vocabulary Test (NVT) (Størksen et al., 2013) and early math skills with the Ani Banani Math Test (ABMT) (Størksen & Mosvold, 2013). Emergent literacy will be assessed with a subtest from screenings for Early Reading developed by The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training. For school children, we will use a similar battery. In the Skoleklar study there was found a relatively high reliability across test, e.g. with Cronbach’s Alpha scores for HTKS of α=.76, for NVT of α =.84, and for ABMT of α =.73. In the present study we will only include highly valid and reliable measures for child development. Furthermore, children’s math and literacy at school will be measured with the aid of standardized mapping tests that schools conduct in first, second and third grade.
The project design – with codes that are connected to the children’s person numbers – gives the potential to follow the children in the field experiment through many years. We will match our data with registry data from Statistics Norway, which allows us to investigate new outcomes as the children grow older. In particular, we will investigate school performance and GPA at ages 10, 13, and 16, and high school attendance and completion. When the children turn 18 years, we plan to collect new consents to continue the investigations on college education and labor market performance.

We investigate effects of the school readiness intervention in an RCT with 71 participating daycare centers. After recruitment, the daycare director and the teacher(s) responsible for the five year olds, signed an agreement detailing responsibilities and expectations. Moreover, they assisted us in collecting informed consent from the parents (700 children). Thereafter, the centers were randomized (block randomization) into treated and control.

The treatment has two stages. First, daycare teachers in the treated group participated in a 15 credit point continuing education class during the school year 2015/2016. The class presents cutting-edge international research on the impact of a more intentional practice with curricular foci on school readiness. Furthermore, as part of the class, daycare teachers practiced and took ownership of what they learnt by collaborating in the development of the playful learning activities in the Agder project. Second, daycare teachers in treated group implemented the school readiness intervention in their daycare center during the school year 2016/2017. The daycare teachers committed to spend at least eight hours every week working with the playful learning activities in the curriculum.

The ECEC centers in the control group continued as before, and were given access to the intervention, material and training, when the implementation was completed.

We assess the children in August 2016 (pre-test), June 2017 (first post-test) and June 2018 (second post-test). In all assessments, the tester is trained and certified in the assessment tools, and blind to treatment status. In addition to the assessment organized by the researchers, we also investigate effects on official mapping tests conducted by schools.

Not available

Prior to randomization, daycare centers were divided into blocks, each consisting of 2 daycare centers. The two daycare centers within each block were as similar as possible with respect to location (municipality) and size (number of 5 year old children).
Randomization was then conducted within each block, done in office by a computer with witness.

The unit of randomization was daycare center.

Yes

71 daycare centers.
Initially 72 daycare centers participated, but one daycare center in the control group withdrew from the project.

701 children

36 daycare centers in treated and 35 in control

There are on average 12 children in each daycare center, and the correlation between children is 0.05. We use a 95% confidence interval in interpreting power. Following this, we have 80 percent power to identify effect sizes of 0.25 standard deviation. When controlling for pre-intervention test scores, in addition to controls for characteristics of daycare centers, children and parents, statistical power is likely to be improved.