Effects of Preschool Curriculum Programs on School Readiness: Report from the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Initiative

Overview

In 2002, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) began the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER) initiative to conduct rigorous efficacy evaluations of available preschool curricula. Under a competitive process, 12 research teams were awarded grants to implement and conduct research on one or two preschool curricula of their choosing with a predominantly low-income population under an experimental design. IES also contracted with RTI International (RTI) and Mathematica Policy Research (MPR) to collect evaluation data from all research sites in fall and spring of the preschool year and spring of the kindergarten year using a common set of measures. At each site, preschools or classrooms were randomly assigned to the intervention curricula or control curricula and the children were followed from pre-kindergarten through kindergarten. The goal of the PCER initiative was to identify the impact of each preschool curriculum on five student-level outcomes (reading, phonological awareness, language, mathematics, and behavior) and six classroom-level outcomes (classroom quality, teacher-child interaction, and four types of instruction). This final report presents findings for the impact of each curriculum on student-level and classroom-level outcomes.

View, download, and print the full report as a PDF file (3.6 MB)
View, download, and print the Executive Summary as a PDF file (919 KB)
View, download, and print Chapter 1 as a PDF file (875 KB)
View, download, and print Chapters 2-13 as a PDF file (829 KB)
View, download, and print Appendices A-B as a PDF file (1.2 MB)
View, download, and print Appendices C-D as a PDF file (737 KB)