Acknowledgments

This study represents a collaborative effort of ERF grantees, unfunded ERF applicants, preschools, teachers and other preschool staff, parents, researchers, data collection experts, and IES staff. We appreciate the time and effort of the many preschool staff in making their classrooms and students available and in responding to requests for data from the evaluation team.

The National Institute for Literacy provided crucial financial support for the data collection phase of this study.

A technical working group provided invaluable and critical guidance to us in designing the evaluation and analyzing the data. We thank Margaret Burchinal, Janet Currie, John Guthrie, and Mark Lipsey for their insights. Their participation immeasurably enhanced the quality of this effort. Important substantive expertise was also provided to our team by Chris Lonigan.

We also acknowledge and thank Audrey Pendleton, Ricky Takai, Tracy Rimdzius, and Phoebe Cottingham of IES for their interest, support, and thoughtful feedback throughout the project. In addition, Patricia McKee and her Early Reading First program staff in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education assisted in ensuring that we obtained maximum cooperation from grantees throughout the evaluation.

The listed authors of this report represent only a small part of the team involved in this project across three organizations. At DIR, we thank Nancy Dawson, Pam Wells, Pia White, Irvin Williams, Sherri Provost, Cynthia Melgoza, Brenda Johnson, Nancy McArthur, Cynthia Lewis, Scott Peecksen, Carla Prince, Antwanette Hill, Kenneth Jackson, and other staff who supported the site recruitment, data collection, and analyses activities. Over 40 observers and assessors were critical to the success of the data collection and we thank them for their tireless efforts. We also thank Jamie Diamandopoulos for her skillful editing of the final report and Frenetta Tate for her production assistance.

At MPR, we thank Jennifer Baskwell (production support), Mark Dynarski (technical review), William Garret (production support), Jamila Henderson (programming support), and Steve Williams (technical review of sampling). At Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education (CIRCLE) at the University of Texas-Houston Health Sciences Center, we thank Mike Assel, Lauren Jenkins, April Crawford, Susan Landry, Wei Wu, Pornchai Direkwut, and Yimei Han for the significant contribution that they made to the success of this evaluation.

We thank Ronna Cook at Westat for providing unpublished tabulations of Cronbach's alpha for the pre-CTOPPP Elision subtest using the Head Start Impact Study data, and Tracy Rimdzius and Caroline Ebanks of IES for sharing similar unpublished tabulations using data from the Even Start Classroom Literacy Interventions and Outcomes (CLIO) Study and Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER) Study, respectively.