Skip Navigation

What Works Clearinghouse

Search
Intervention: Doors to Discovery™

Overview1

Doors to Discovery™ is an early childhood curriculum that uses thematic units to engage young children and support them as they build an understanding of their world. Doors to Discovery™ literacy activities are used to encourage children’s development in a number of areas identified by research as the foundation for early literacy success: oral language, phonological awareness, concepts of print, alphabet knowledge, writing, and comprehension.

Research

One study of Doors to Discovery™ met the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. 2 This study included 76 classrooms in universal pre-kindergarten, Head Start, or Title I programs in the Houston, Texas, metropolitan area and examined intervention effects on children’s oral language, print knowledge, and phonological processing. This report focuses on immediate posttest findings to determine the effectiveness of the intervention. 3 The WWC considers the extent of evidence for Doors to Discovery™ to be small for oral language, print knowledge, and phonological processing. No studies that met WWC evidence standards with or without reservations addressed early reading/writing, cognition, or math.

Effectiveness

Doors to Discovery™ was found to have no discernible effects on oral language, print knowledge, and phonological processing.

  Oral language Print knowledge Phonological processing Early reading/ writing Cognition Math
Rating of effectiveness No discernible effects No discernible effects No discernible effects na na na
Improvement index4 Average: –8 percentile points
Range: –11 to –6 percentile points		 Average: +3 percentile points Average: +5 percentile points
Range: +4 to +5 percentile points		 na na na
na = not applicable
1 The descriptive information for this program was obtained from publicly available sources: the program’s website (http://www.wrightgroup.com/index.php/programsummary?isbn=0076036243, downloaded March 16, 2007) and the research literature (Assel, Landry, Swank, & Gunnewig, 2006). 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 To be eligible for the WWC’s review, the Early Childhood Education (ECE) intervention had to be implemented in English in center-based settings with children ages 3 to 5 or in preschool.
3 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available. Doors to Discovery™ is being studied under the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER) Grants administered through the U. S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. The final PCER reports were not released in time to be reviewed for this report.
4 These numbers show the average and range of student-level improvement indices for all findings across the study.