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

• In Event: 2-021 - Impacts and moderators of school-based social-emotional learning programs in low- and middle-income countries

Integrative Statement

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 (Sandefeur, 2016).

The government of Ghana expanded to two years of universal pre-primary education in 2007 [kindergarten (KG) 1 for 4-year-olds, KG2 for 5-year-olds], and the country has among the highest ECE enrollment rates in Africa (UNESCO, 2015). This paper uses data from the Quality Preschool for Ghana (QP4G) study, an evaluation examining impacts of an ECE teacher training and coaching program, with and without a parental awareness meetings (Wolf et al., 2018). This cluster-randomized trial assigned schools to one of three treatment arms: (a) teacher-training; 82 schools, (b) teacher-training plus parental awareness meetings; 79 schools, and (c) control; 79 schools. Class rosters for all KG classrooms were collected. An average of 15 children (eight from KG1, and seven from KG2) were randomly selected from each roster to participate in direct assessments. The implementation and first-year evaluation of the QP4G intervention 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 paper 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; Gertler et al. 2014), longer-term impacts of ECE have rarely been assessed. The longer-term persistence or fadeout of gains from ECE has received increasing attention in the U.S. (Bailey et al., 2016; Jenkins et al., 2018), but similar estimates are not yet available for LMICs. Long-term impacts from one year post-program implementation show marginally statistically significant sustained impacts on overall school readiness (d=0.13, p<.07), and when broken down by domain, this is driven by social-emotional development (d=0.13, p<.05).

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). Results on whether educational contexts moderate impacts one year later – as children as in primary 1 and primary 2 – will also be presented. Educational contexts will include teacher credentials and education, observed classroom quality using the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS; Seidman et al., 2013; Wolf, Raza et al., 2018), and household educational contexts measured through caregiver surveys.

Authors

• Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Lawrence J. Aber, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jere R. Behrman, University of Pennsylvania
  Non-Presenting Author