Project Activities
Researchers will recruit Head Start preschool classrooms to participate in the study. They will randomly assign teachers and their classrooms to treatment or control condition. They will assess the effects of participating in the intervention at the end of the first intervention year and the degree to which effects are sustained when teachers implement LOOK in the following year with a new group of preschool students. Researchers will also carry out cost and cost-effectiveness analyses.
Structured Abstract
Setting
This research will be conducted in Head Start preschool classrooms in Miami-Dade, Florida.
Sample
Participants will include preschool children displaying disruptive behavior (focal), children randomly selected from the classroom (non-focal) to examine spill-over effects, and the teachers who serve these children. The demographic characteristics of children and teachers will be diverse. Children will come from low-income and impoverished backgrounds. Consultants will also participate to provide data on intervention implementation.
LOOK is a fully developed consultation model for early-childhood education teachers that was developed through a prior IES Development grant to this research team. Teachers receive individualized training and consultation/coaching on the use of effective strategies that increase children's classroom engagement and their self-regulation and their behavioral and social skills. Teachers work with a consultant to engage in interactive, online learning modules and guided video review to understand the links between their practice and children's engagement and students' behavior in context, implement new strategies, and analyze their own practice.
Research design and methods
Researchers will use a cluster-randomized control trial design. They will randomly assign teachers and children at the classroom-level to treatment or a business-as-usual (BAU) counterfactual condition. They will assess the effects of the intervention at the end of the intervention year and will examine sustained teacher effects in a second-year follow-up.
Control condition
The control condition is BAU. They will assess BAU teachers and will provide information about their professional development experiences, but no treatment component is provided.
Key measures
Key child outcome measures include children's self-regulation, behavior, and social skills. Teacher outcomes include self-efficacy of classroom management, attributions about children's negative behavior, and use of effective, social-emotional teaching strategies. The researchers will measure child outcomes by direct assessment, teacher report, and independent observations.
Data analytic strategy
Researchers will examine impacts for focal and non-focal children and teachers. They will test for mean outcome differences across conditions after controlling for the random effect of classroom, pretest scores, and covariates. They will use multilevel modeling within an intent-to-treat frame in which we include all children and teachers who were assigned to a condition.
Cost analysis strategy
They will conduct cost and cost-effectiveness analyses to understand the monetary costs of LOOK.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Project contributors
Products and publications
This study will generate information about the efficacy, cost, and cost-effectiveness of LOOK. The researchers will share study findings via conference proceedings and peer-reviewed publications and will prepare a final dataset.
Related projects
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
