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Interest in scaling up prekindergarten programs for children from low income families is dramatically increasing, especially with the announcement by President Obama of support for "universal preschool." Research in early education supports the idea of developmentally appropriate practice as reflected in instructional groupings and covered content; however, it is not yet clear if such appropriate practice and consistency in that practice can be upheld in a statewide program. This paper focuses on evidence from one portion of the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten Program (TN-VPK) evaluation from which classroom observations yield information on classroom quality state-wide. One table is appended.

In 2009, Vanderbilt University's Peabody Research Institute, with the assistance of the Tennessee Department of Education's Division of Curriculum and Instruction, initiated a rigorous, independent evaluation of the state's Voluntary Prekindergarten program (TN- VPK). TN-VPK is a full-day prekindergarten program for four-year-old children expected to enter kindergarten the following school year. The program in each participating school district must meet standards set by the State Board of Education that require each classroom to have a teacher with a license in early childhood development and education, an adult-student ratio of no less than 1:10, a maximum class size of 20, and an approved age-appropriate curriculum. TN-VPK is an optional program focused on the neediest children in the state. It uses a tiered admission process with children from low-income families who apply to the program admitted first. Any remaining seats in a given location are then allocated to otherwise at-risk children including those with disabilities and limited English proficiency. The current report is the second in a series that presents findings from this evaluation. The prior report described outcomes at the end of the pre-k year for the children in the Intensive Substudy sample who participated in TN-VPK in comparison to those who did not participate. The present report summarizes the longitudinal effects of TN-VPK on kindergarten outcomes and those first grade outcomes that are currently available. At the end of prekindergarten, TN-VPK effects could be examined only on early achievement measures and teacher ratings of academic skills and behavior obtained at the very beginning of the kindergarten year. A notable addition in this current report is that results are now available on several other "non-cognitive" academic outcomes, including grade retention, attendance, recorded disciplinary actions, and special education services.

This study includes a randomized control experiment, but that component could only be implemented in a limited number of schools with more applicants than seats in the pre-k program. Informative as that component is about the effects of Tennessee Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten (TN-VPK), the participating schools do not provide a representative sample of the TN-VPK classrooms in Tennessee. To provide a more representative statewide picture, a stratified random sample of schools with TNVPK classrooms was drawn and enrolled in an age cutoff regression-discontinuity designs. This design was made possible because TN-VPK has explicit age requirements that are implemented as a strict age cutoffs for TN-VPK eligibility in all schools. Using the two designs concurrently, this study seeks to determine the statewide effect of TN-VPK on both the kindergarten readiness of the participating children and their long-term cognitive and behavioral skills, including performance on the state-administered achievement tests in the third grade. A secondary purpose is to investigate the relationships between those outcomes and the characteristics of the TN-VPK classrooms, e.g., the curriculum used, teacher credentials, and classroom quality, and structural support and monitoring at the district and school levels, detecting impact heterogeneity by these characteristics.

Relatively few rigorous studies of the effectiveness of contemporary public prekindergarten programs have been conducted despite the growing number of programs and large monetary investments they require. The study on which this presentation is based was launched in partnership with the Tennessee State Department of Education's Division of School Readiness and Early Learning to provide an assessment of the effects of the statewide Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten (TN-VPK) program on the readiness for kindergarten of the economically disadvantaged population it serves. Research studies have reported the rapid neurological, cognitive, and social-emotional growth that takes place during the first five years of life and the positive effects of high-quality early childhood educational programs. In recent years, however, TN-VPK has become a controversial program in Tennessee, with some legislators expressing doubts about its value in the context of severe budget shortfalls and still others referring to it even more skeptically as expensive babysitting. This study interleaves a longitudinal randomized control trial (RCT) and an age-cutoff regression discontinuity (RD) design to evaluate the effectiveness of the TN-VPK program. Though the project is still underway, this presentation will summarize results for two cohorts of RCT participants.

In intervention research, it is critical to determine not just if an intervention is effective, but for whom it is effective and "under what circumstances" those effects occur. Moderators can be the key to answering those questions. A moderator is a variable that affects either the direction or the strength of the relationship between the predictor (curriculum condition, in this case) and the dependent variable (here, child outcomes) (Baron & Kenny, 1986). Identifying those variables that help specify the conditions under which interventions are most effective is central to social science research (Cohen et al. 2003). Moderators of curricular effects may be particularly important to scale-up studies. There may be no more challenging educational and theoretical issue than scaling up educational programs across a large number of diverse populations and contexts in the early childhood system in the U.S. The paucity of high-quality instruments, or the use of any measure of the fidelity of implementation, is one of the most important deficits in the field of scaling up educational innovations (Borman et al., 2003). This paper examines possible moderators, using fidelity as the primary variable of interest, of the effects of an early mathematics curriculum used in a scale-up study across three states. Participants in this study included primarily at-risk preschoolers between the ages of 4 and 6 from low-income households. Data from this study demonstrated teacher adoption of many aspects of the curriculum, and the degree of adoption was related modestly to the amount children gained in math knowledge over the preschool year. While teachers enacted more math instructional activities, changing the quality of their instruction was much more difficult. Moreover, the overall instructional classroom environment in treatment and control classrooms remained very similar, as did children's learning behaviors. The results from this scale up investigation demonstrate how difficult immediate and sustained change is to effect. (Contains 2 figures.)

Studies show that the mathematics test-score gap is evident at every level of schooling and can be linked to students' earlier performance. For example, a mathematics performance gap was found in children as young as three years of age (Case & Griffin, 1990; Jordan, Huttenlocher, & Levine, 1992). Addressing the mathematics performance gap early on, before children start school, has therefore become a priority for preschool programs serving children from low-income backgrounds (Clements, 2004). The authors created a research-based model to meet this challenge in the area of mathematics, with the intent that the model generalize to other subject matter areas and other age groups. The specific goal of their implementation of the TRIAD (Technology-enhanced, Research-based, Instruction, Assessment, and professional Development) model was to increase math achievement in young children, especially those at risk, by means of a high-quality field-centered implementation of the Building Blocks math curriculum, with all aspects of the curriculum--mathematical content, pedagogy, teacher's guide, technology, and assessments--based on a common core of learning trajectories. The primary research question of interest is as follows: Do children who are exposed to the Building Blocks mathematics curriculum in preschool perform better on measures of mathematics skills through the end of first grade than do children who were not exposed to that curriculum? This scale-up intervention took place in preschool classrooms in three urban school districts: the Buffalo Public School system in Buffalo, New York, the Boston Public School system in Boston, Massachusetts, and a combination of the Metropolitan Nashville Public School system and the Metropolitan Action Council Head Start system in Nashville, Tennessee. Research has suggested that early curricular effects may fade over time, resulting in very little, if any, discernable difference in elementary school between students who had been exposed to a given curriculum prior to formal schooling and students who were not exposed to such a program, as those without early curriculum exposure "catch up" to their peers (Barnett et al., 1995). In the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER) project, across all 14 curricula, kindergarten effects were nonexistent, prompting a decision not to collect any further longitudinal data. Similarly, with the scale-up project, the authors saw evidence of curricular effects across outcomes at the end of prekindergarten, but very few differences at the end of kindergarten, and virtually none at the end of first grade. Longitudinal research, including follow through interventions in these grades, is needed to determine if these early gains truly "fade," or if, as the authors posit, the problem is that primary grade curricula and teachers do not build upon them.

This research investigated the effects of two contrasting pre-k curricula, relative to practice as usual, on subsequent academic achievement. One curriculum had a strong literacy focus, the other was a less didactic "developmentally appropriate" curriculum that allowed children to have more influence on classroom activities. The purpose of the research was to determine if either of these curricula provided advantages for improving the academic performance of economically disadvantaged children in rural Tennessee. (Contains 3 tables.)