Effectiveness

Findings

The WWC review of interventions for early childhood education addresses children's outcomes in six domains: oral language, print knowledge, phonological processing, early reading/writing, cognition, and math. Clements and Sarama (2006, 2007) addressed outcomes in the math domain. The findings below present the authors' and the WWC-calculated estimates of the size and statistical significance of the effects of Building Blocks for Math on children's performance. ⁷

Math. Clements and Sarama (2006) analyzed group differences between the Building Blocks for Math intervention group and the business-as-usual comparison group on one math outcome measure (Early Mathematics Assessment). The difference between groups was statistically significant and favored children in the Building Blocks for Math group.

Clements and Sarama (2007) found a statistically significant difference favoring children in the Building Blocks for Math group on one of the two outcome measures assessed in this domain (Building Blocks Assessment of Early Mathematics, PreK-K: Geometry section) and this effect was confirmed to be statistically significant by the WWC. The authors also reported statistically significant differences between the intervention and business-as-usual comparison groups on the other math measure (Building Blocks Assessment of Early Mathematics, PreK-K: Number section); however, the WWC was unable to confirm the statistical significance of this effect.

Rating of effectiveness

The WWC rates the effects of an intervention in a given outcome domain as positive, potentially positive, mixed, no discernible effects, potentially negative, or negative. The rating of effectiveness takes into account four factors: the quality of the research design, the statistical significance of the findings,⁷ the size of the difference between participants in the intervention and the comparison conditions, and the consistency in findings across studies (see the WWC Intervention Rating Scheme).