The role of primary school contexts in supporting sustained long-term impacts of the Quality Preschool for Ghana intervention

• In Event: Highlighted session: Early childhood development programs at scale: examining the evidence for program and system effectiveness

Proposal

Early childhood education (ECE) programs have expanded rapidly in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), but there are widespread concerns about whether they are of sufficient quality to promote children’s learning and development. In addition, there is concern that quality ECE alone will not sufficiently address the learning crisis in LMICs, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa where primary school education is also very poor quality (Sandefur, 2016).
The government of Ghana expanded to two years of universal pre-primary education in 2007, and the country has among the highest ECE enrollment rates in Africa (UNESCO, 2015). This presentation will use data from the Quality Preschool for Ghana (QP4G) study, an evaluation examining impacts of a teacher training and coaching program, with and without parental awareness meetings (Wolf et al., 2018). Schools were randomly assigned to: (a) teacher-training; 82 schools, (b) teacher-training plus parental awareness meetings; 79 schools, and (c) control; 79 schools. The implementation and first-year evaluation occurred between September 2015 and June 2016; data presented in this study were collected in June 2017 and June 2018, one- and two-years post intervention.
This presentation will address two critical questions about ECE quality improvements. First, do efforts to improve existing ECE quality that have positive short-run effects (e.g., over one school-year) also promote long-term sustained gains for children (i.e., one and two years after implementation)? While several studies have evaluated longer-term impacts of early caregiving and stimulation programs in LMICs on young children (Walker et al. 2011), longer-term impacts of ECE have rarely been assessed.
Second, do sustained ECE impacts differ by educational characteristics? We hypothesize that high quality ECE programs need to be coupled with high quality primary school education if long-term impacts are to be realized. There is some evidence from the US to suggest that impacts of ECE interventions last in to early primary school only if children enter high quality schools (Zhai, Raver & Jones, 2012).
Long-term impacts from one-year post-program implementation show marginally statistically significant sustained impacts of the TT treatment (but not TTPA) on children’s social-emotional skills (d=0.13, p<.05). Preliminary results indicate that in the two-years follow-up, when children were in the first and second years of primary school, there were sustained impacts of the TT condition on literacy skills (dwt=0.21, p<.001) and social competence as reported by teachers (dwt=0.15, p<.05). There were marginally statistically significant impacts on executive function (dwt=0.10, p<.06) and social-emotional development (dwt=0.12, p<.06). Results on whether educational contexts moderate two-year impacts will also be presented. Educational contexts will include teacher credentials and education, observed classroom quality using the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS; Wolf, Raza et al., 2018), and household educational contexts measured through caregiver surveys.
Findings suggest that a brief and relatively affordable in-service teacher training, built into existing governmental systems and implemented over the course of one school-year, can lead to longer-term gains in children’s early learning and development, particularly in developmental domains that may not otherwise be promoted by Ghanaian teachers.

Authors

• Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania

• J. Lawrence Aber, New York University Steinhardt

• Jere R. Behrman, University of Pennsylvania

• Edward Tsinigo, Innovations for Poverty Action