Preschool Quality and Child Development
EGC Research Summary, August 2024
Which strategies work to improve the quality of public preschools? In new research published in the Journal of Political Economy, Yale Economist Orazio Attanasio and coauthors partnered with the Colombian government to evaluate a nationwide expansion of its preschool program. In collaboration with a private foundation, they also evaluated the impact of slightly modifying the government intervention. Prior to this research, few studies have addressed which aspects of preschool programs are most important for child development or whether specific improvements to existing programs are effective.
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Their paper directly addresses key education policy issues: Does providing schools with additional resources necessarily improve education quality? Do teacher professional development programs work? They find, strikingly, that a costly national government program that provided resources to hire teaching assistants (TAs) had no impact on child development. However, also including—at little extra cost—a professional development training program for existing preschool teachers resulted in significant positive overall impacts on children’s cognitive development. They show that, even within the same institutional setting, different approaches to improving the quality of early-years education can have very different effects on child development.
The article and interview with Professor Attanasio below dive into the research process, the key results, and the implications for local and international education policy.
Results at a Glance
- The TA program alone had no positive impacts on child development, despite high compliance and the fact that it represented a large increase in government investment in preschools.
- The authors found that teachers responded to the program by reducing their overall involvement in classroom activities, delegating much to (often untrained) TAs, thus inhibiting child development.
- However, moderate extra training of the existing teachers did have significant positive impacts on child development.
- This training program prompted teachers to delegate only specific activities to TAs, and to focus more on improving teaching quality and spending more time on learning activities.
- Overall, additional school resources can be effective when accompanied by guidance on how to utilize them. Without guidance, such provision might generate unintended consequences.