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ABSTRACT

Growing out of the recommendations of the 1993 Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion and the 1994 Advisory Committee on services for Families with Infants and Toddlers, and building on the bipartisan mandate embodied in the 1994 Head Start reauthorizing legislation, Early Head Start began with 68 new programs in 1995. Today, with impetus added by the 1998 reauthorization, more than 600 programs serve some 45,000 low-income families with infants and toddlers. This two-generation program provides high-quality child and family development services, a focus on staff development, and a commitment to community partnerships. A rigorous national evaluation, including about 3,000 children and families in 17 sites, also began in 1995. This summary report highlights the first main impact findings emerging from the analysis of child and family outcomes through the first two years of the children's lives.

The national evaluation, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., of Princeton, New Jersey, and Columbia University's Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, in collaboration with the Early Head Start Research Consortium, finds that after a year or more of program services, when compared with a randomly assigned control group, 2-year-old Early Head Start children performed significantly better on a range of measures of cognitive, language, and social-emotional development. Their parents scored significantly higher than control group parents on many of the measures of the home environment, parenting behavior, and knowledge of infant-toddler development. Early Head Start families were more likely to attend school or job training and experienced reductions in parenting stress and family conflict. Although these impacts are generally modest in size, the pattern of positive findings across a wide range of key domains important for children's well-being and future development is promising. For example:

  • Early Head Start children, at 2 years of age, scored higher on a standardized assessment of infant cognitive development than the control children and were reported by their parents to have larger vocabularies and to use more grammatically complex sentences. On the assessment of cognitive development, Early Head Start children were less likely to score in the at-risk range of developmental functioning; Early Head Start is moving some children out of the lowest-functioning group, perhaps reducing their risk of poor cognitive outcomes later on.

  • Early Head Start 2-year-olds lived in home environments that were more likely to support and stimulate cognitive development, language, and literacy, based on researchers' observations using a standard scale. Their parents were more likely to read to children daily and at bedtime.

  • Early Head Start mothers were more supportive, more sensitive, less detached, and were more likely to extend play to stimulate cognitive and language development, based on researchers' observations of semi-structured parent-child interactions.

  • Early Head Start mothers were less likely than control mothers to report spanking their child in the past week and described milder discipline techniques.

The Early Head Start programs provided child development and parenting services to nearly all program families. Programs also provided families with a greater intensity of services than the control group families obtained in their communities. Data from the implementation study show that the child development services provided by the Early Head Start programs were usually of good quality and improved over time.

Earlier attainment of full implementation of key elements of the revised Head Start Program Performance Standards was associated with larger impacts on service use and a larger number of significant positive impacts on children's development and parenting behaviors. While other differences among programs and communities may be contributing to these associations, it appears that full implementation of the standards contributes to better outcomes.

Programs choosing different approaches to providing services, to meet the unique needs of children and families in particular communities, achieved different patterns of success. Center-based programs produced significant improvements in children's cognitive development, as well as some improvements in parenting behaviors, while home-based and mixed-approach programs produced a greater number of positive impacts on parenting behaviors and language development. These differences reflect variations in the services provided under each approach and other differences among programs and communities choosing each approach.

The early impacts reported here are promising because the pattern of positive findings is consistent across multiple domains of child and family functioning known to be associated with later child outcomes, including social abilities, literacy, and school readiness. Future reports from the Early Head Start evaluation will provide considerable additional detail, including impacts for different subgroups of low-income families and children. Future reports will also assess whether these effects are sustained as children grow and have additional exposure to the program.

For more information about the programs or the research, see Appendix A, which lists all the institutions participating in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, along with contact persons.


 

 

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