Early Childhood Education
Westat performs a number of studies to examine children's early life and school experiences and
to measure the effectiveness of national programs on early childhood.
- Westat designed and implemented three rounds of a nationwide longitudinal study of the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey—FACES. FACES assists the Office of Head Start in evaluating and implementing a system of program performance measures to assess the effectiveness of Head Start in increasing the school readiness and social competence of children from low-income families. Westat has performed a number of tasks:
- Developed performance measurement instruments;
- Carried out cognitive laboratory testing and field testing to validate the instruments;
- Used the instruments to collect information about children, families, teachers,
and classes in a stratified national probability sample of 40 to 63 Head Start programs; and
- Examined average program quality and relationships between quality and children's outcomes.
- Westat is studying the impact of Head Start on participating children and whether impact varies as a function of child,
family, or program characteristics. The National Head Start Impact Study is a longitudinal study involving
approximately 5,000 preschool-aged children who were eligible and applied for Head Start in fall 2002 to
383 centers across 84 nationally representative grantee/delegate agencies. The multifaceted data collection plan includes
the following:
- Combination of twice-yearly in-person and telephone interviews with parents,
- In-person child assessments conducted twice during the first year of the study and annually
afterward,
- Annual surveys with care providers and teachers,
- Direct observations of program quality, and
- Teacher ratings of individual study children.
- For the Head Start National Reporting System (NRS) Training & Data Management project, Westat gathers child assessment and descriptive data for 436,000 4- and 5-year-olds twice a year. Westat also trains local Head Start program staff, who train their program staff to implement the NRS. Westat analyzes assessment data for technical assistance and program improvement. Starting in fall 2006, Westat gathers data on social-emotional development of all NRS-eligible Head Start children. Under an earlier contract, Westat took part in a project to design and field test the NRS.
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Even Start Classroom Literacy Interventions and Outcomes Study (CLIO) is testing 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 are being followed. Measurement of impacts on Even Start children and their parents
are being performed at the end of the preschool year and at the end of kindergarten and first grade.
- The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study is a two-part program funded by NCES.
The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) is a multisource, multimethod study that focuses on children's early school experiences beginning with kindergarten. A total of 21,260 children throughout the country participated. Over the period 1999-2004, Westat collected four waves of data from first grade to fifth grade. During the 2006-07 school year, Westat is collecting another round of data when most of the children are in eighth grade.
The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) examines children's early life
experiences, such as
- What they learn in the early preschool years,
- What their parents teach them,
- How their early health conditions affect their preparation for school, and
- What challenges children and their families face that may affect early development and
preparation for school.
Westat selected a national sample of 15,000 children of different races, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds
born throughout 2001 to participate in this study. We also conducted the first two rounds of data collection over the
period 2001-03 when the children were 9 months old and 2 years old, including child assessments and in-home interviews
with the parents.
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