The Creative Curriculum® for Preschool is a project-based early childhood curriculum designed to foster the development of the whole child through teacher-led small and large group activities. The curriculum provides information on child development, working with families, and organizing the classroom around 11 interest areas. Child assessments are an ongoing part of the curriculum, and an online program provides record-keeping tools to assist teachers with the maintenance and organization of child portfolios, individualized planning, and report production.
One study of The Creative Curriculum® meets What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards, and two studies meet WWC evidence standards with reservations. The three studies included a total of 844 children from 101 classrooms in more than 88 preschools located in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia.3
Based on these three studies, the WWC considers the extent of evidence for The Creative Curriculum® to be medium to large for oral language, print knowledge, phonological processing, and math. No studies that meet WWC evidence standards with or without reservations examined the effectiveness of The Creative Curriculum® in the early reading and writing or cognition domains.
The Creative Curriculum® was found to have no discernible effects on oral language, print knowledge, phonological processing, or math.
| Oral language | Print knowledge | Phonological processing | Early reading and writing |
Cognition | Math | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rating of effectiveness | No discernible effects |
No discernible effects |
No discernible effects |
na | na | No discernible effects |
Improvement index4
|
Average: +3 percentile points Range: –6 to +9 percentile points |
Average: +3 percentile points Range: –7 to +8 percentile points |
Average: –2 percentile points | na |
na | Average: +4 percentile points Range: –5 to +8 percentile points |
1 The descriptive information for this program was obtained from a publicly available source: the program’s website (http://www.teachingstrategies.com/page/CCPS_Overview.cfm, downloaded July 2009). The WWC requests developers to review the program description sections for accuracy from their perspective.
Further verification of the accuracy of the descriptive information for this program is beyond the scope of this review.
2 The studies in this report were reviewed using WWC Evidence Standards, Version 1.0 (see the WWC Standards).
3 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available.
4 These numbers show the average and range of student-level improvement indices for all findings across the studies.
|Institute of Education Sciences
