An Impact Evaluation of West Virginia Universal Pre-K

• In Event: 3-044 - Evaluating Publicly-Funded Preschool Programs: Understanding Impacts, Impact Variation, and Lasting Effects

Integrative Statement

The West Virginia (WV) Universal Pre-K program serves 65% of four-year-olds in the state and serves as an exemplar program in terms of increasing access and improving quality standards. The state ranks 6th in the nation in access to preschool for four-year-olds and meets and sets high standards for staff qualifications including requiring lead teachers to have a bachelor degree in early childhood education and assistant teachers to have a Child Development Associate Credential (Friedman-Krauss, et al., 2018). WV Pre-K has also increased the program duration including expanding the required number of minutes per week and year.

Given these recent changes in the WV Pre-K program, a 5-year longitudinal study began in the fall of 2015 to estimate the short- and long-term effects of WV Pre-K. This paper focuses on results in kindergarten and first grade, addressing the following research questions:

1. What is the impact of the WV Pre-K program on children’s language, literacy, math, and executive function skills at Kindergarten entry, the end of Kindergarten, and the end of first grade?
2. Are there child subgroups (defined by family income or child gender) that benefit more from the WV Pre-K program than others?

The sample consists of 605 kindergarteners who attended the WV Pre-K program the previous year and another group of 366 kindergarteners who did not attend WV Pre-K. The sample (51.2% female) is predominantly white (91.9%) and low income (65.6%). Outcome measures include children’s language (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test IV (PPVT)), literacy (Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement (WJ) Letter-Word Identification Subtest), math (WJ Applied Problems Subtest), and executive function (Pencil Tapping Task (PT) and Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS)) skills. Intent-to-treat analyses were used to compare children who did and did not attend the WV Pre-K program at each of the three time points.

Results demonstrate positive impacts of the WV Pre-K program on children’s learning and development at kindergarten entry (See Figure 1). Results are presented as effects size expressed in terms of the standard deviation of the control group. Children who attended the WV Pre-K program, compared to those who did not, scored significantly higher on measures of language (receptive vocabulary; .15 SD), math (.15 SD), and literacy (.14 SD) at kindergarten entry. We did not find evidence of significant impacts on measures of executive functions. Further, results suggest that impacts of attending the WV Pre-K program were larger for low income children than their higher income peers in receptive vocabulary (.19 SD), math (.22 SD), and literacy (.23 SD). Impacts on math were smaller for females (.10 SD).

By the end of kindergarten, the positive impacts of WV Pre-K were no longer apparent for the overall sample as well as for low-income children (See Figure 2). Of note, classroom quality was observed to be much lower in kindergarten than Pre-K classrooms in the sample.

Analyses of the first grade data are underway and will be presented. Results will be discussed with respect to other preschool evaluations and the WV context.

Authors

• Milagros Nores, National Institute for Early Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Kwanghee Jung, NIEER/Rutgers University
  Non-Presenting Author