ERF Impacts on Children's Language and Literacy Skills and Social-Emotional Outcomes

Ultimately, through its effects on classroom practices, the ERF Program is intended to provide young children with the necessary language, cognitive and early-reading skills to prevent reading difficulties and ensure school success as they enter kindergarten. We obtained the outcome measures for the child analyses from assessments that were given to children in spring of the school year on their literacy and language skills and behavior. The assessments measured print and letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and oral language. We also estimated ERF's impacts on children's social-emotional development.

Impact findings. Overall, we find that ERF had a statistically significant positive effect on children's print and letter knowledge but no statistically discernable impact on phonological awareness or oral language. We find no evidence of negative impacts on children's socialemotional skills. Specifically:

• ERF increased children's standard scores on Pre-CTOPPP print awareness by 5.78 points relative to what we would have expected in the absence of the program. This increase indicates that ERF improved children's ability to recognize letters of the alphabet and associate letters with their sounds. The impact estimate translates into an effect size of 0.34 standard deviations. Comparison of the regression-adjusted standard scores for children in the unfunded sites to the national norms for this subtest indicates that in the absence of ERF, children in the ERF sites would have scored about 3 percentage points below the national average of 100; with exposure to ERF, their average score of 102.69 was slightly above the national average for this subtest.

• We find no evidence that ERF improved children's phonological awareness.

• We find no evidence that ERF improved children's oral language skills.

• ERF did not affect children's social-emotional skills, as measured by the SCBE-30 anger-aggression, social-competence, and anxiety-withdrawal scales. The lack of program effects in this domain is noteworthy in light of concerns that ERF might adversely impact these skills by compelling teachers to focus on improving language and literacy at the expense of developing other skills.