This report describes the history, program, sample population, assessment methods, participant reactions, and final evaluation of a 7-year study which investigated the long-term effects of a 2-year traditional nursery school intervention program. A total of 30 disadvantaged children with below-normal initial IQs began the full-day program at age 3…

The material reported here was developed as part of a systematic effort to develop techniques to evaluate the effectiveness of a nationally implemented early childhood program. The Classroom Attitude Observation Schedule technique has been implemented in a number of school districts as a means of assessing program implementation of the Tucson…

This report presents a description and a brief evaluation of the Child Center Project, a bilingual-bicultural early childhood development program designed to prepare preschool Latino children to succeed in school without losing their bilingual-bicultural identity. Funded by the Office of Child Development, the three-year project was initiated in…

As a follow-up to a 1970 study, interviews were conducted in 1971 in four ghetto communities (Bedford Stuyvesant, East Harlem, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.) to determine the extent to which Sesame Street was reaching preschool age children as compared to the previous year. The program's success was demonstrated by continued growth in audience,…

This document is a transcript of the proceedings of a one-day meeting held in Austin, Texas on March 29, 1967. Participants included representatives of the national Head Start Planning Committee, the Head Start Research and Evaluation Division in Washington, D. C., and the staff and study directors of the regional Child Development Evaluation and…

The Responsive Model program assumes that the school environment should be designed to respond to the learner, and that school activities should be autotelic, or self-rewarding, not dependent upon rewards or punishment unrelated to the activity. Developmental theory, certain ideas of operant conditioning, and flexible learning sequences are used…

The purposes of this study were (1) to identify the social-emotional and information-achievement characteristics of 133 children enrolled in Head Start and (2) to explore the interrelationships found to exist between social-emotional behavior, as assessed by the teacher at the outset of the program, and the gains exhibited over the year in…

During the 1972-73 school year, Community School District 24 in New York City supplemented its regular school program with special educational services, funded under Title I of the 1965 Elementary Secondary Education Act. A primary objective of the Pre-Kindergarten Program was to develop children's understanding of basic concepts through a…

The first two years of "Sesame Street" were evaluated as to their effectiveness as compensatory education. The evaluation assessed progress along some 36 primary goals of the show, as well as transfer effects, home background variables, parental attitudes, and socioeconomic status factors. Over 1,300 preschool children were tested, and…

This is the final report on evaluation and research of the Flexible Learning System (FLS). The Flexible Learning System (FLS) began as an outgrowth of the Far West Laboratory's several years of investment in research and development of a Responsive Model of Early Childhood Education for young children. The model emphasizes the development of…

This final report is a general description of the activities of the Demonstration and Research Center for Early Education (DARCEE), an Appalachian preschool program for disadvantaged children. Included in the document are: a general overview of the program, histories of the three Early Training Centers, and objectives and publications of the…

This report describes and anlayzes the second year operations of an ongoing successful parent initiated and directed nursery school. Included are: (1) a brief review of relevant issues in early childhood education, such as parent participation and community control in education; (2) a short history of the program's inception and early development;…

One of the most popular and enduring legacies of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs, Project Head Start continues to support young children of low-income families--close to one million annually--by providing a range of developmental and educational services. Yet as Head Start reaches its fortieth anniversary, debates over the…

This monograph describes the development, implementation, and outcomes of the full-day, literacy-focused Bright Beginnings program for disadvantaged preschoolers in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) in North Carolina. Key components of Bright Beginnings are a child-centered curriculum with strong language development and literacy emphasis,…

Although an extensive body of literature exists on the impact of Head Start, very few studies have used an experimental design with random assignment, a key methodological component needed to increase the weight of evaluation findings. This study used a randomized design with a wide range of outcomes related to school readiness to assess the…