PROJECT 1: Child Policy Fit in Experimental Early Childhood Interventions

项目总结(见说明)： 我们使用儿童-环境匹配的观点来推导和测试关于儿童、家庭和儿童保育计划特征的组合导致儿童保育治疗对儿童的认知和社会情感准备结果产生更大影响的假设。我们首先检验了一个补偿性假说，在这个假说中，高质量的托儿服务使高危儿童受益。这是一项实验测试，使用了五项评估的数据，这些评估采用了对高质量儿童保育的实验操作-婴儿健康与发展计划(IHDP)、早期启蒙(EHS)、国家启蒙影响研究(NHSIS)和随机学前课程评估研究研究(PCER)。测试也是使用俄克拉荷马大学普适性学前教育计划的回归-不连续设计进行的。第二组实验测试使用IHDP、NHSIS、俄克拉荷马州学前教育和PCER研究的数据，对补偿性(技能最低的儿童受益最大)和技能产生技能(技能最高的儿童受益最大)假说进行了相互竞争的预测。第三，我们使用EHS、NHSIS和PCER的数据来检验保护性假设，即某些个人和家庭因素保护高危儿童免受低质量护理的负面影响。我们使用这些相同的数据来检验累积劣势假设，即低质量的节目对具有高风险因素的儿童最有害。最后，我们检验了不同的易感性假设，即脾气不好的孩子在低质量的护理下受到的伤害最大，但在高质量的护理下帮助最大。此外，我们将对两个随机数据库--NHSIS和PCER--进行分析，这两个数据库提供了关于方案特征变化的非常详细的信息，以确定哪些特征解释了人口亚组所经历的不同影响。我们将使用工具变量策略，利用由于实验治疗而导致的程序特征的变化来对这些特征对儿童结果的影响提供公正的估计。我们希望为新一代学龄前儿童保育计划提出建议，旨在确定全球和特定内容质量的影响以及质量的其他详细方面，使计划功能更好地与特定儿童的需求和背景相一致。在所有使用NHSIS的数据来检验这些假设的情况下，我们将使我们的结果与Project Ill在NHSIS上使用的分布方法的结果相一致。

PROJECT SUMMARY (See instructions): We employ the child-environment fit perspective to derive and test hypotheses about which combinations of child, family, and child care program characteristics lead to larger child care treatment effects on cognitive and socio-emotional school readiness outcomes for children. We first test a compensatory hypothesis in which high-quality child care benefits at-risk children. This is an experimental test using data from five evaluations that employ an experimental manipulation of high-quality child care - t he Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), Early Head Start (EHS), the National Head Start impact Study (NHSIS), and the randomized Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Study (PCER). Tests are also performed using the regression-discontinuity design of the Oklahoma Universal Pre-K program. A second set of experimental tests are of competing predictions from compensatory (least skilled children profit the most) and skill begets skill (the most skilled children profit the most) hypotheses using data from the IHDP, NHSIS, Oklahoma Pre-K, and PCER studies. Third, we use data from EHS, NHSIS, and PCER to test the protective hypothesis that certain personal and family factors protect at-risk children from the negative effects of low-quality care. We use these same data to test the cumulative disadvantage hypothesis that poor-quality programs are most detrimental for children with a high number of risk factors. Finally, we test the differential susceptibility hypothesis that children with difficult temperaments are at once hurt the most by low-quality care but helped the most by high-quality care. In addition, we will undertake analyses of two randomized databases ¿ the NHSIS and PCER -that provide very detailed information on variation in program characteristics, in order to determine which characteristics account for differential effects experienced by population subgroups. We will use an instrumental variables strategy that employs the variation in program characteristics due to the experimental treatment to provide unbiased estimates of the effects of these characteristics on child outcomes. We expect to produce recommendations for a new generation of preschool child care programs aimed at identifying effects of global and content-specific quality as well as other detailed aspects of quality, enabling program features to be better aligned to particular children's needs and background. In all cases in which data from the NHSIS are used to test these hypotheses, we will reconcile our results with those from Project Ill's use of distributional methods on the NHSIS.