Last week, I moderated a fascinating panel discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of research on pre-K. (You can see a video of the event here.) A great panel — including Tim Bartik, Dale Farran, Bill Gormley, and Russ Whitehurst — disagreed on much: the quality of pre-K research, the strength of the current evidence base on pre-K, and whether that evidence base supports large-scale expansion of public pre-K as an effective strategy for advancing the well-being of America’s most vulnerable children.
Yet despite some sharp differences, a significant area of agreement emerged. While we know that quality is the key to pre-K effectiveness, we know too little about what quality actually is and what drives it. That is, we know that pre-K can work, but not enough about what makes it work and how.
Twenty20.
In fact, our thinking about pre-K quality is often a kind of circular reasoning. We describe pre-K as “high quality” when it produces results — and “producing results” is how high quality pre-K is defined in the first place. But what causes quality, how to measure it, and how to ensure it have largely remained a “black box.” Panelists agreed that a crucial task for research is to get inside that black box: to build knowledge on what specific program inputs and practices are linked to children’s outcomes and, equally important, how to implement those inputs and practices effectively at scale.
At the same time, while high quality pre-K is defined as pre-K that produces results, panelists agreed, too, that we have inadequate knowledge about what results are most important and how to measure those. Children’s early acquisition of two kinds of skills is understood to be important to their long term success in school and life: cognitive skills (like the capacity to learn, remember, reason, solve problems) and noncognitive skills (like motivation, persistence, self-control, the ability to pay attention, and social competence). A growing body of research suggests that that noncognitive, or “character” skills may actually be the strongest determinant of later success. But researchers don’t know which early skills have the strongest links to long term success, or how to measure those.
In fact, most child outcomes reported in contemporary pre-K studies are neither cognitive nor noncognitive skills, but rather children’s scores on tests of basic academic knowledge like identifying letters of the alphabet, recognizing vocabulary words, and counting small numbers. Those test scores are considered to be a proxy for other, more important skills like being able to solve problems and being motivated to learn — skills which are harder for researchers to measure. But the panelists agreed that a much better understanding of what skills are fundamental to children’s success, how to teach those skills, and how to measure whether children have acquired them is also a crucial area of future research.
So “does pre-K work”? Some researchers say yes and some say no. (We’re releasing an in-depth report on the topic on March 22.) But our panel identified some important common ground: an essential aspect of the early childhood research agenda going forward is to figure out what “work” really means and how to make it happen.
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