Experimental Evaluation of the Tools of the Mind Pre-K Curriculum. Technical Report. Working Paper

The experimental evaluation of the "Tools of the Mind Pre-K Curriculum" described in this report was designed to examine the effectiveness of the "Tools of the Mind" ("Tools") curriculum for enhancing children's self-regulation skills and their academic preparation for kindergarten when compared to the usual prekindergarten curricula in use in the school system. In order to assess the long-term impacts of "Tools" on student academic achievement and self-regulation outcomes, students were followed into kindergarten and first grade. Participating classrooms were also observed three times during the prekindergarten year using multiple measures designed to capture implementation fidelity as well as child and teacher behaviors in the classroom. The project was fortunate to have participants from Franklin Special School District, Lebanon Special School District, Wilson County School District, and Cannon County School District in Tennessee as well as Guilford County Schools and Alamance-Burlington School System in North Carolina. The evaluation involved two cohorts of children. Cohort 1 (2010-2011) included the four Tennessee school systems and Guilford County Schools in North Carolina and involved children from 60 classrooms ("Tools" = 32) in 45 schools ("Tools" = 25). Cohort 2 (2011-2012) included Alamance-Burlington School System in North Carolina with children from 20 classrooms ("Tools" = 10) in 12 schools ("Tools" = 5). The research design investigated the effectiveness of "Tools," by conducting a longitudinal cluster-randomized experiment to address the questions: (1) Do children in "Tools of the Mind" classrooms improve more in literacy, math, social skills, and exhibit reduced behavior problems during the preschool year than children in "business as usual" comparison classrooms? (2) Do children in "Tools of the Mind" classrooms show greater gains in learning-related self-regulation than children in the comparison classrooms? (3) Are there differential effects of "Tools of the Mind" associated with characteristics of the children? And, (4) Do the effects of participating in a "Tools of the Mind" classroom sustain into kindergarten and first grade? In addition, an extensive battery of observational measures was employed to examine implementation fidelity and other classroom processes that might have mediated the curriculum effects. Overall, the authors found no significant effects of the "Tools of the Mind" curriculum on literacy, language or mathematics achievement when compared to business as usual classrooms whose teachers used a variety of curricular approaches. Similarly, they found no effects on Self-Regulation. Gains in achievement and self-regulation were correlated, r = 0.35. Additional outcomes and future directions are recommended. (Contains 53 tables.) [For "Experimental Evaluation of the Tools of the Mind Pre-K Curriculum. Fidelity of Implementation Technical Report," see ED574843.]