Purpose: Children in poverty are at risk for school failure, which leads to negative long-term consequences both for them and for society. There is a strong need for evidence-based educational programs to ameliorate socioeconomic status disparities in academic achievement. Researchers have developed an intervention, Parents and Children Making Connections-Attention (PCMC-A), based on research on the development and neuroplasticity of attention as well as parenting and family dynamics. Research has shown that PCMC-A improves family dynamics, child cognition, and brain function and that these gains last at least 18 months. In this project, researchers propose a longitudinal follow-up of effects of participating in the intervention during preschool over the next 3 years to determine whether gains persist from preschool to early elementary school.

Project Activities: Researchers will conduct a comprehensive longitudinal assessment of children in the PCMC-A intervention study, gathering follow-up data with a full set of behavioral and electrophysiological measures in the laboratory as well as school records covering a wide spectrum of academic outcomes. Researchers will compare and contrast child and family outcomes in the PCMC-A group and the control comparison (Head Start as usual) group to test the hypotheses. Researchers will also examine the mechanisms of the intervention using the measures of attention and family stress to test whether changes in these factors are predictive of other school relevant outcomes. Researchers will use videotaped parent-child interactions for assessment and measures of parent stress and parenting attitude. Participating families will return to the laboratory for assessment on a yearly basis starting one year post-intervention, and local school districts will be contacted yearly for school records. Researchers will examine a broad set of outcome measures. This includes cognition, attention, and stress assessments as well as predictors and outcomes more directly relevant to academic achievement, in order to directly examine the practical relevance of the intervention for education.

Products: Products from this project will include evidence of the long-term efficacy of the PCMC-A intervention to determine if gains persist from preschool to early elementary school. Peer-reviewed publications will also be produced.

Structured Abstract

Setting: This study will take place in elementary schools in Lane County, Oregon and the Brain Development Lab (BDL) at the University of Oregon.

Population: Participants will include approximately180 children and their parents.

Intervention: In the intervention, PCMC-A, researchers employ two strategies to train attention. In the first strategy, researchers target family stress regulation. A reduction in family stress is achieved by helping parents create predictable home environments with contingency-based discipline routines and positive patterns of adult-child interactions. Parent supervision and monitoring is emphasized to improve adult awareness of shared attention, social interactions, and the characteristics associated with optimized learning. The parent-directed component includes a scaffolded set of 25 strategies delivered in small group format. In addition, parents receive information on the attention activities in which their children participate, with suggestions for home-based modifications to provide further practice. Small-group instruction is supplemented with support calls from the interventionist between meetings.

The second strategy is to train children's attention by employing several different exercises/games that children enjoy. Together, the exercises train alertness, sustained selective attention, executive function/self-regulation, and meta-cognitive awareness of attention. In addition, many of the exercises train selection of specific stimuli for further processing using mechanisms of signal enhancement and distractor suppression; processes that are essential for learning and the establishment of flexible, adaptive behavior. The child component includes a set of 20 small group activities designed to address the overarching goals of increasing metacognitive awareness to support self-regulation of attention and emotion states. In line with cognitive models of attention, the activities target aspects of attention including vigilance, selective attention, working memory, and attention/task switching. All activities were tested and developed with input from Head Start teachers at schools not participating in our study.

Research Design and Methods: In the initial efficacy trial, researchers used an experimental design featuring random assignment to PCMC-A or control. The research team will gather a battery of behavioral and electrophysiology data from the children on an annual basis for 3 years. The research team will also gather school records data to gather information about academic performance. In addition, parent-child interactions will be videotaped on return visits to the laboratory in order to gather information about family interaction. Researchers will compare and contrast performance in families who participated in PCMC-A during preschool and families who participated in typical Head Start programming. The purpose of this evaluation is to test the hypotheses that children who received the PCMC-A intervention will maintain or accelerate the gains previously made after the original eight-week intervention relative to children in control groups. In addition to directly testing the effectiveness of PCMC-A, researchers will also examine the mechanisms of the intervention using the measures of attention and family stress to test whether changes in these factors are predictive of other school relevant outcomes.

Control Group: Preschoolers in the control group received Head Start as usual.

Key Measures: Key measures include behavioral tests of language, cognition and attention, and electrophysiological (event-related potential) measures of attention for children. Parents and teachers will complete questionnaires documenting child behavior and family stress. Interactions between parents and children will be videotaped and quantified to document parent language, turn-taking and conflict resolution. School records of grades, grade retention and special education will be acquired from children's schools.

Data Analytic Strategy: A series of planned comparisons in analyses of covariance will be performed to test the longer term effect of the PCMC-A intervention on children's outcomes at the end of kindergarten, first, and second grades. The researchers will conduct growth curve analyses to test the slopes of growth for children in the PCMC-A and control conditions. Structural equation modeling will be used to examine the relationships between the different components of PCMC-A and the intervention outcomes of reduction in family stress and improvement in children's attention skills.

Related IES Projects: Training Attention in Preschool: Effects on Neurocognitive Functions and School Performance (R305B070018) and Training Attention in At-risk Preschoolers: Expansion of our Successful Program to a Wider Population within Head Start (R305A110398)

Products and Publications

Book chapter

Stevens, C., and Neville, H. (2014). Specificity of Experiential Effects in Neurocognitive Development. In M.S. Gazzaniga and G.R. Magnum, Eds., The Cognitive Neurosciences (pp. 129–142). Cambridge: The MIT Press.