Long-term effects of early global and domain-specific educational experiences and developments: An interdisciplinary longitudinal study (BiKSplus).

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Accumulating evidence of large-scale longitudinal studies over the past decades has revealed the importance of early childhood education for children's development from early childhood to early adolescence. However, research findings have produced an inconsistent pattern of results. This may be due to the fact that studies vary remarkably in their conceptualisations and operationalizations regarding both the quality indicators of early child care and the outcome measures under investigation. Furthermore, many studies fail to account for concurrent effects and possible interactions between different environments or individual child characteristics and experiences (e.g., school entry at different points in time). Additionally, many studies focus on short-term effects, particularly those studies dealing with effects of domain-specific promotion.The current study therefore investigates the long-term effects of early experiences at home and in preschool on different outcome measures in early adolescence, while considering early child characteristics and their development as well as experiences made in the school system at specific time points of school enrolment (early, late, regular). In particular, long-term effects of early domain-specific (numeracy, literacy, language stimulation) and global (social-emotional climate, structures) promotion at home and in institutional learning environments (preschool) on domain-specific developmental progress and measures (mathematics, reading, and language) and on more global (metacognition, life success, social-emotional aspects) outcome measures are investigated.Correspondingly, those measures will be collected at 2 assessment points when children are about 11 and 12 years old (Grade 6 and 7). A specific feature of the current study is that longitudinally assessed data of 10 measurement points are already available, including repeatedly measured indicators of global and domain-specific aspects of child development, of domain-specific and global quality of the early home learning environment and preschool, as well as information on the children's date of school entry. Through the planned reassessment of study participants, these high-quality data will enable the research team to analyse developmental progress and the effects of the learning environments, individual child characteristics and developments, and different time-points of school enrolment through the ages 3 to 12 - a study which is unprecedented in Germany so far.