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Four studies reviewed by the WWC investigated the effects of Tools of the Mind on preschool children’s cognitive and language competencies and their school readiness. One study (Barnett et al., 2008) was a randomized controlled trial that meets WWC evidence standards. The remaining three studies did not meet WWC evidence standards.
Seven other studies did not meet WWC eligibility screens. Five did not investigate the effects of Tools of the Mind on children’s outcomes, one did not focus on preschool-age children, and one did not provide enough information to assess its study design.
Barnett et al. (2008) conducted a randomized controlled trial of teachers and students to investigate the effects of the program. In an urban school teachers and their assistants were randomly assigned to classrooms using a stratified random assignment procedure. Three- to four-year-old children attending preschools then were randomly assigned to either Tools of the Mind or comparison group classrooms. In all, 85 children in 7 classrooms used Tools of the Mind, and 117 children in the 11 comparison group classrooms used their regular district curriculum. According to the study authors, the district curriculum covered much of the same academic content and topics as Tools of the Mind, but there was greater emphasis on teacher-imposed control and less on children’s self-regulation. The study reported students’ outcomes after the first year of program implementation.
Extent of evidence
The WWC categorizes the extent of evidence in each domain as small or moderate to large (see the What Works Clearinghouse Extent of Evidence Categorization Scheme). The extent of evidence takes into account the number of studies and the total sample size across the studies that meet WWC evidence standards with or without reservations.4
The WWC considers the extent of evidence for Tools of the Mind to be small for oral language, print knowledge, cognition, and math. No studies that meet the WWC evidence standards, with or without reservations, addressed phonological processing or early reading/writing.
4 The Extent of Evidence Categorization was developed to tell readers how much evidence was used to determine the intervention rating, focusing on the number and size of studies. Additional factors associated with a related concept, external validity, such as the students’ demographics and the types of settings in which studies took place, are not taken into account for the categorization. Information about how the extent of evidence rating was determined for Tools of the Mind is in Appendix A6.
|Institute of Education Sciences
