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Until the past few years, our nation's approach to designing federal programs for preschool-age children lacked coherence and paid little attention to what had worked (and not worked) in the past. In this article, the authors propose that credible information useful for designing effective programs will require the ongoing, systematic development and evaluation of alternative approaches for the improvement of large-scale early childhood programs. The research should place greater reliance on experiments in which existing groups of individuals, such as intact classes or preschool agencies, are randomly assigned to implement competing early education programs or program components. Randomizing groups, rather than individual children, changes the research question from "What works?" to "What works better?" yielding more useful information than is currently available about which preschool approaches ought to be strongly embedded in our nation's social policy. (Contains 2 tables.)

A randomized experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of Even Start, a federally supported family literacy program providing early childhood education, adult education, parenting education, and joint parent-child literacy activities to children and parents from low-literate families. The evaluation of 18 Even Start projects followed 463 families for 2 years and found no statistically significant or educationally important impacts on Even Start families when they were compared with control families on child literacy outcomes, parent literacy outcomes, or parent-child interactions. The study concludes that Even Start projects were able to properly implement family literacy programs, and the observed lack of effectiveness is attributed to a combination of 2 factors: (a) a lack of full participation on the part of families and (b) instructional services that may be ineffective because of the curriculum content or the instructional approach.

Describes some of the ways in which the federal government has decentralized responsibility for national evaluations of federally-funded early childhood programs. Details the methods used in local evaluation studies, and the strengths and weaknesses of centralized and decentralized national evaluations. (Author/KB)

Responds to Gilliam et al.'s critique of evaluation of the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP). Restates the policy implications of the study and comments on the design of the intervention and the evaluation. Concludes with remarks on how evaluation and research should be used to help low-income families. (Author/KB)

Conducted a randomized experiment over 5 years to test effects of the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP), a 2-generation program that employed case management and home visiting to ensure education, health, and social services for multi-risk, low-income children and families. Found no statistically significant impact on CCDP families when compared with control families in child or parent outcomes. (Author/KB)

Conducted a large-scale evaluation of the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) to provide information about this widely used approach. This six-year impact evaluation, which considered more than 4,410 families, shows that CCDP's case-management approach, which is costly, does not lead to improved outcomes for parents or children. (SLD)

This article focuses on the management of federally funded evaluation research by (1) discussing aspects of building an in-house evaluation team; (2) defining possible contractor/client relationships, and (3) considering contractor/practitioner team rapport. (Author/GK)

Methods and findings are summarized from a classical randomized experiment used to evaluate the Nutrition Education and Training (NET) Program developed and implemented in Nebraska. Generally positive effects of the program were found. Two issues needing further consideration are described. (Author/GK)

Presents the organizing framework used in evaluating the National Nutrition Education and Training Program (NET) and summarizes the descriptive, evaluative, and meta-evaluative findings. Concludes that positive effects on children's nutrition-related knowledge have resulted from different nutrition education programs. (DC)

The degree of control that project directors exert over the technical direction of evaluations and the selection of evaluation staff is examined, and the way in which control has grown and shrunk over the past decade is considered. (Author)

Discusses fairness in evaluation of nutrition education programs in terms of (1) proximity of outcomes or the degree to which outcomes are temporally and conceptually near to or distant from the program instruction and (2) conflicting program expectations of policy makers and program developers. (Author/DC)

The Education Voucher Demonstration began in the Alum Rock Union Elementary School District during the 1972-1973 school year. Under the voucher concept, parents freely select a school for their child and receive a credit or voucher equal to the cost of the child's education that is paid directly to the school upon enrollment. It was presumed that this form of school finance would foster competition among the schools and improve the quality of education by making schools more responsive to students' needs. An initial external evaluation at the conclusion of the first year found, however, a relative loss in reading achievement for students in the six public schools that participated in the voucher demonstration. The present report reexamines some of these data using a quasi-experi mental design involving multiple pretests and individual students' test scores (rather than school means) as the unit of analysis. The results appear to indicate that the deleterious reading effect of the voucher demonstration was confined to a few within-school programs featuring nontraditional, innovative curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The possible biasing effects of attrition of subjects in experiments is a problem to which social science researchers and evaluators rarely attend. A study of the relationships between attrition rate and background variables for children participating in the Nation al Follow Through Evaluation revealed that in general there were few differences between students who dropped out of treatment and comparison groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]