Why It Matters

High-quality care and early childhood education services help ensure that even the most at-risk children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn.

Children living in poverty who have access to high-quality care, beginning in infancy and continuing until they reach kindergarten age, perform better on measures of cognitive, social, emotional, and language development than peers who did not receive services.

Hart and Risley

University of Kansas child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley found that the way parents and caregivers talk to kids has a significant effect on the child's I.Q., literacy and academic success later in life.

Hart and Risley observed 42 one- and two-year olds and their families for more than two years. Their study found that the frequency and quality of words a child hears during her first three years of life are critically important in shaping language development. Based on hourly differences, Hart and Risley estimate that children in professional families hear approximately 11 million words per year; children in working class families hear approximately 6 million words; and children in welfare families hear approximately 3 million words annually.

For more information about the Hart and Risley study, go to:

http://www.strategiesforchildren.org/eea/6research_summaries/05_MeaningfulDifferences.pdf

High-quality care and early childhood education services lead to better academic performance and longer stays in school.

The Abecedarian Project

The Abecedarian Project demonstrated that young children who receive high-quality early education from infancy to age five do better in school academically, and are more likely to stay in school longer and graduate. Children who participated in the early intervention program had higher cognitive test scores from the toddler years to age 21. What's more, children who receive high-quality early education were, on average, older when their first child was born.

Conducted by Dr. Craig Ramey, one of the nation's leading early childhood researchers, this was the first study to track participants in an early education program from infancy to age 21. This study tracked 111 low-income African-American families in North Carolina. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to receive full-time educational intervention services in day care in infancy; the other half did not receive educational services.

To read the executive summary online, go to: http://www.fpg.unc.edu/~abc/

High-quality care and early childhood education services improve cognitive, social, emotional, and language skills.

The Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project

Major findings from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project include: Children and families who participated in both Early Head Start (from birth to age three) and formal programs (from age three to age five) had the most positive outcomes. Overall, EHS children performed better on measures of cognition, social and emotional, and language functioning than did their peers who did not receive EHS.

This evaluation project examines the implementation and impact of the Federal Early Head Start program on 17 diverse sites across the country. More than 3,000 children and families in these sites were randomly assigned to receive Early Head Start services or to be in a control group in 1996. Researchers assessed child care and family arrangements and collected evaluations on each child's language, cognitive, and social and emotional skills three times.

For more information about this study, go to: www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/ehs/ehs_resrch/ index.html