The Impact of Curriculum Adherence on Creating a Linguistically Rich Environment in Head Start Classrooms

• In Event: Vocabulary Instruction in Early Education Settings: Investigating Curriculum Support, Pedagogical Techniques, and Child Language Outcomes

Abstract

Objective
The purpose of this study is to examine variability in teachers’ adherence to a language focused curriculum used as part of an intervention and to examine the impact of the curriculum on teacher efforts to create learning environments that deepen knowledge and build language.

Theoretical Framework
Even before children enter formal schooling, there exists a sizeable difference in vocabulary and content knowledge among children from various socio-economic status backgrounds (Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003; Neuman, 2006). Content instruction in preschool is one way to address the problem as it creates opportunities for teachers to engage in linguistically rich conversations with children (Neuman, 2006). The quality of the conversations between teachers and children is significant for children’s intellectual development but intellectually engaging interactions tend to be rare (Dickinson, Darrow, Ngo, & D'Souza, 2009). One approach to improving the quality of instruction is to help teachers’ begin to use curriculum that includes activities that call for higher level instruction. That is the approach taken in this study. In this paper we examine individual variability in curriculum implementation and investigate the extent to which teachers who followed the curriculum engaged children in conversations that were relatively rich in vocabulary.

Sample and Method
The data come from a larger randomized control study designed to investigate whether Head Start preschool teachers’ implementation of a preschool curriculum predicted children’s language growth in kindergarten. We studied instruction in small groups. Teachers were videotaped and the talk was transcribed in CHAT format from the CHILDES program (MacWhinney, 2001). Among the 32 intervention teachers, 22 teachers who taught activities that were based on the curriculum were chosen.
This study measured teachers’ level of adherence to the curriculum in three ways. First, the level of correspondence to the curriculum guide was measured on a five point scale with level one being low and five being high. Second, selected items from the project’s coding for fidelity of implementation to the curriculum measure related to vocabulary teaching and conceptual teaching were used. Lastly, we calculated the use of words teacher were encouraged to teach for the lesson.

Results

There was great variability to the extent to which teachers adhered to the curriculum (see Table 1). Teachers who had a higher curriculum correspondence level scored higher on the conceptual teaching items on the fidelity of implementation measure. Moreover, their students used more of recommended words. In addition, teachers’ use of recommended words was related to children’s use of the recommended words. Children were more likely to use the words targeted for instruction that were used the teacher and were repeated by the teacher more often. Lastly, teachers and children engaged in a science content small group activity were more likely to use the recommended words compared to teachers and children engaged in a non-science content small group activity.

Authors

• Jin-Sil Mock, Vanderbilt University

• David K. Dickinson, Vanderbilt University