Primary Outcomes (end points)
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.