A Research Partnership to Improve the Quality of Pre-K Classroom Practices

Co-Principal Investigators: Baker, Scott K.; Little, Derek, G.

Partner Institutions: The Early Learning Department of the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD); Center on Research and Evaluation (CORE), located in the School of Education and Human Development at Southern Methodist University.

Partnership Activities.The partnership engaged in three types of activities to improve the quality of pre-K classroom practices:

• PD for instructional specialists and pre-K teachers
• Data collection to support ongoing PD planning and implementation
• Data analysis to answer research questions related to PD implementation, the quality of pre-K classroom practices, and child outcomes

• The partners completed the major project activities, including all planned project meetings as necessary, refining data collection protocols in an iterative ongoing manner each year, data collection and classroom observations, and ongoing data analysis. Planned analyses will continue with the data accrued from this project for the foreseeable future. Some activities were delayed through years 2 and 3 due to disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. These delays did not cause any changes to the overall planned activities, but rather the activities were extended into longer timelines to allow for completion.
• The overall findings published to date point to meaningful associations between pre-K classroom quality and student outcomes in the early grades. In other words, evidence is suggesting that efforts to improve classroom quality, if successful as they have shown to be, can have some positive effects on student outcomes in the early grades. Further analyses will explore how these associations vary by factors related to teachers, classrooms, and students. (Kara, et al., 2024)
• One substantial result of this project is a more formalized research collaboration system between SMU and Dallas ISD modeled after the collaboration between CORE and DISD early learning (i.e., this funded work). In 2022, SMU, under the leadership of this project team, and Dallas ISD formalized a broader research/practice collaborative titled CERI (the Consortium on Educational Research and Improvement). This collaborative is formalized through a Memorandum of Understanding and Data Sharing Agreement that specifies that SMU and Dallas ISD will decrease barriers for productive research/practice partnerships and will create a formal system and process to develop and established collaborative research agendas that are practice-informed by Dallas ISD leadership and staff. The data sharing agreement provides SMU with a regular stream of student-level deidentified data from Dallas ISD to be used for research and evaluation as agreed upon by the two institutions without administrative delays.

• Do systematic changes to differentiate PD for pre-K teachers lead to with improvements in pre-K classroom quality?
• Do systematic changes to differentiate PD for pre-K teachers and instructional specialists (coaches) lead to improvements in child outcomes?
• Are improvements in pre-K classroom quality and child outcomes stronger in some classrooms than others? What factors related to the district, instructional specialist, school, classroom/teacher, and student are associated with variability in pre-K quality and student outcomes?