Early Childhood Education
Westat has extensive experience conducting longitudinal studies that examine children's early life
and school experiences and their influence on early childhood development. Many of the early childhood studies that
Westat conducts are complex involving multiple respondents and methods and one-on-one cognitive assessments of young
children.
- Westat is conducting the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011)
for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), U.S. Department of Education. The ECLS-K:2011 is the third in a series
of multisource, multimethod, longitudinal studies funded by NCES.
- During the 2010-11 school year, approximately 20,700 kindergartners in 900 public and private schools across the
nation will be selected to participate in the ECLS-K:2011. These children will be followed each year from kindergarten
through fifth grade. Information about the children, their parents, their teachers, and schools will be collected in
the fall and spring of kindergarten and then in the spring of every year. During the kindergarten year, Westat will
collect the following components:
- Child assessments – Children will be assessed in reading, mathematics, and science in
one-on-one sessions with trained assessors. Through a brief number game and a picture game, children will
also have their working memory and regulation of attention assessed.
- Physical measurements – Children will have their height and weight measured.
- Parent interview – Parents will be asked to participate in telephone interviews to provide
background information about their child, their family, and themselves.
- Teacher and school administrator questionnaires – Children’s teachers will be asked to
complete questionnaires that ask for information about their backgrounds, teaching practices, and the classroom
learning environment. They also will be asked about children’s academic skills. Children’s school administrators
will be asked to complete questionnaires about their backgrounds, the physical and organizational characteristics
of their school, and programs of the school.
- Before- and after-school providers – These individuals also will be interviewed during the
kindergarten year about their care settings and the care of the ECLS-K:2011 children.
Westat also conducted the ECLS-K:2011’s predecessor study, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class
of 1998-99 (ECLS-K), which followed 21,260 children from kindergarten through eighth grade.
- Westat is completing the fifth round of the Fragile Families study for the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing,
Princeton University. Fragile Families follows a cohort of nearly 5,000 children born in the United States between 1998 and 2000 and
their parents. The sample includes children born in 20 major U.S. cities. Approximately three-fourths of the sampled children were
born to unmarried parents.
For the fifth round, fielded when the children were 9 years old, Westat conducted hour-long computer-assisted interviews
with the biological mothers, biological fathers, and primary caregivers (person who lives with the child and knows the most about the child)
of the sample children. Westat also conducted in-home visits that lasted approximately 2 hours.
During the home visits, trained Westat staff:
- Administered one-on-one assessments of the focal children’s language ability and academic achievement,
- Conducted short computer-assisted interviews with children that asked about their behavior and home, family,
and school experiences,
- Collected health measures (measuring the mothers’ weight and children’s height and weight and collecting
saliva samples for genotyping from biological mothers and children),
- Audiotaped the primary caregivers speaking about the focal children, and
- Collected a self-administered questionnaire from the primary caregivers.
In two of the cities, Westat staff used a hand-held spirometer to measure children’s lung function. Home office
staff mailed self-administered questionnaires to the children’s teachers.
Because as many as 4 years had passed since the participants had heard from the study, Westat conducted extensive tracing
and locating activities:
- Developed a locating database to track mothers and fathers separately,
- Trained interviewers how to conduct Internet searches and do in-field locating, and
- Hired private detectives for especially difficult-to-locate cases.
Further information and links to reports:
http://www.fragilefamilies.princeton.edu/ [*]
Westat also examines program performance, provides descriptive information about the children who attend these
programs, and examines the long-term effect of these programs on children’s socio-emotional and cognitive development:
- Westat is conducting the Third Grade Follow-up to the Head Start Impact Study (HSIS). HSIS was designed to
determine whether Head Start has impacts on participating children and their parents and whether any impacts vary among different
types of children, families, and communities.
The Third Grade Follow-up study builds upon the research design, sample, instruments, and data collection plan successfully
implemented for HSIS, which followed children through first grade and also was conducted by Westat. The purpose of the Third Grade
Follow-up study is to determine the longer term impact of the Head Start program on the well-being of children and families. It also
was designed to examine the degree to which the impacts of Head Start on initial school readiness is changed by children’s school
experiences and various school quality, family, and community factors experienced through third grade. The data collection, conducted
in spring 2007 and 2008, included:
- Parent interviews,
- Direct child assessments,
- Teacher surveys,
- Teacher child reports, and
- Principal surveys.
Westat is currently working on the analysis and reporting for this study.
- Westat provides training and technical assistance to the Head Start program to ensure that independent early
childhood researchers understand and can work with Head Start data sets. We are also providing continued analytic support to meet
the Government’s future policy needs.
- As noted above, Westat conducted HSIS. A nationally representative sample of 84 Head Start programs, 383 randomly
selected Head Start centers, and approximately 5,000 newly entering 3- and 4-year old children were selected for the study. The children
were randomly assigned to either a Head Start group that had access to Head Start or to a control group that could enroll in other early
childhood programs or non-Head Start services selected by their parents. Data collection began in fall 2002 (baseline) and continued
through 2006, following children from program application through the spring of their first grade year. Outcomes were measured in the
cognitive, social-emotional, health, and parenting practices domains.
Further information and link to the final report:
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/hs/impact_study/reports/impact_study/hs_impact_study_final.pdf [*]
- Westat designed and implemented three rounds of a nationwide longitudinal study of the Head Start Family and
Child Experiences Survey (FACES). FACES was a system of program performance measures to assess the effectiveness
of Head Start programs in increasing the school readiness and social competence of children from low-income families. FACES included
in a stratified national probability sample of 40 to 63 Head Start programs. Data were collected by:
- Direct child assessment,
- Classroom observation,
- Teacher report of children in the class, and
- Interview with parents, classroom teachers, and program staff.
Further information and links to reports:
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/hs/faces/index.html [*]
- For the Head Start National Reporting System (NRS) Training & Data Management project, Westat gathered direct
child assessment and descriptive data for 436,000 4- and 5-year-old Head Start children at the beginning and end of program year.
Westat also trained lead Head Start program staff, who then trained their local program staff to implement the NRS. Westat
analyzed assessment data for technical assistance and program improvement. In fall 2006, Westat gathered data on social-emotional development
of all NRS-eligible Head Start children.
- Even Start Classroom Literacy Interventions and Outcomes Study (CLIO) tested the relative effectiveness of early childhood
education and parenting education interventions with preschool children and their parents in a sample of Even Start projects. Westat randomly
assigned 120 Even Start projects to one of four enhanced interventions or to an "as is" control group. Westat collected a year of baseline
data on each project before the enhanced interventions were implemented and tested. For each project, two cohorts of preschoolers and
their parents were followed. Measurement of impacts on Even Start children and their parents were performed at the end of the
preschool year and at the end of kindergarten and first grade.
