Preschool Language & Social Curriculum Evaluation

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The primary aim of the proposed R21 project is to plan a multisite effectiveness trial of a comprehensive multimodal curriculum designed to promote the literacy, communication, and socioemotional skills of preschool children. Our goals include enhancing these skills to ensure that preschoolers are successful in their transition to and experiences in kindergarten. The proposed curriculum will expand the Preschool Behavior Project (PBP) that integrates activities promoting language/preliteracy skills with topics related to socioemotional development. We plan to conduct focus groups with teachers who have previously participated in PBP or in a college course on teaching language and preliteracy skills to preschoolers. We will revise the curriculum and practice new activities in preschool classrooms. We will conduct another focus group with teachers about the curriculum and their appraisal of its comprehensiveness, developmental appropriateness and usability. Our prior experience and the broader literature suggest that children with behavior problems are less able to take advantage of traditional early childhood environments. A second aim of the project is to make adaptations to the curriculum so that these children can benefit from its activities. We will conduct focus groups with teachers about ways to best implement the adaptations in classrooms. The adaptations will be practiced with children by project staff and teachers in regular early childhood classrooms and manualized. The third aim of the project is to create professionally designed curriculum materials. We will enlist the help of early childhood curriculum and graphic design consultants for advice about the design, layout and integration of the curriculum. The fourth aim is to develop a research design to examine what education, training and administrative supports are needed to effectively implement the curriculum. This includes finalizing measures, research design, partnership development and planning for a large-scale, multisite, randomized effectiveness trial of the curriculum which will allow us to answer questions associated with the aims described above. To achieve these aims, we plan to continue our successful collaboration with Head Start programs and expand to public and private child care centers to deliver the curriculum in a randomized design.