The “Contexts Inside and Outside of School Walls as Predictors of Differential Effectiveness in Preschool Professional Development” study is conducted in collaboration with Dr. Dana McCoy (Assistant Professor) and her research team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This study is funded by the Institute for Education Sciences.
In this project, we aim to build the early childhood education evidence base by identifying and understanding the conditions under which professional development programs are more versus less effective in improving early childhood classroom quality and child learning outcomes. We will leverage cutting-edge statistical approaches to quantify the distribution of the effects of a professional development intervention (Bloom & Weiland, 2015; Raudenbush & Bloom, 2015). We will then explore whether variation in treatment effects is predicted by characteristics within school walls, such as the composition of students; teacher qualifications and psychological characteristics; and center structural characteristics (e.g., enrollment size).
In addition, we will explore whether variation in treatment effects is predicted by characteristics outside of school walls. The framework for understanding early childhood intervention effects typically does not account for the quality of the environments that surround and support schools. To address this need, we will adapt an existing Systematic Social Observation (SSO) protocol to assess the characteristics of center neighborhoods and school grounds. The SSO provides a low-cost, reliable measurement tool that allows researchers to take a “virtual” walk through neighborhoods using publicly available neighborhood imaging. We will then examine whether the professional development intervention components are differentially effective in improving classroom quality and child outcomes based on neighborhood contexts.