Synthesizing, Interpreting, and Extrapolating Interventions to Foster Human Development

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OTHER PROJECT INFORMATION – Project Summary/Abstract “Synthesizing, Interpreting, and Extrapolating Interventions to Foster Human Development” will support diverse scholars of early childhood development using different empirical strategies to investigate the sources of treatment effects of successful early childhood programs and to compare the growth of skills by age across them. It draws on a wealth of data collected on three influential programs (the Perry Preschool Program, the Abecedarian Project, and Jamaica Reach Up and Learn) and subsequent implementations and adaptations. Members of our team have actively designed, collected, and analyzed different subsets of these programs evaluated by random assignment. Some programs have long-term follow-ups. This research has five main aims: (1) Using common (across studies) dynamic analytical frameworks developed and applied in different disciplines, we analyze longitudinal data on the growth of comparable measures of skills and outcomes from major early childhood interventions targeted to disadvantaged children, controlling for family and environmental conditions. We conduct mediation and moderation analyses to control for endogeneity of intervention-induced changes in mediators and moderators. We examine the intra- and inter-generational impacts of the interventions with long term follow up, taking participants well into their middle age (ABC) and late middle age (Perry). These analyses adjust for attrition and non-response. We use both large sample inferential methods and design-based small-sample randomization inference. We harmonize measures and outcomes and require those we use to satisfy metric invariance criteria; (2) Building on our previous research, we use empirically validated dynamic models to forecast experimental outcomes out-of-sample. We build theoretically- and empirically-grounded tools to estimate the long-run impacts of short-run interventions that will be available to other practitioners; (3) Update and extend cost-benefit analyses of early childhood programs. For the first time, we incorporate impacts on adult children and siblings as well as impacts on middle age and late middle age health and earnings of the original participants. We investigate the impact of early childhood programs on social mobility; (4) Examine the effectiveness of home visiting programs. We analyze the influential Jamaica Reach Up and Learn home visiting program and many programs inspired by it. We compare child growth trajectories from these programs with those from more comprehensive omnibus (and expensive) early childhood programs, many of which have a home visiting component. This will facilitate isolation of the role of home visiting in promoting child development; and (5) We investigate in detail the roles of parent (caregiver)-child, home visitor-child, and home visitor-caregiver interactions in promoting skill development in a uniquely well-documented adaptation of Jamaica Reach Up: China REACH (10 sites). We quantitatively assess the impact of “scaffolding” measured on a weekly basis on the growth of child skills.