Overcoming the streetlight effect: Shining light on under-represented skills of human development in early childhood

• In Event: Beyond letters and numbers: Conceptualizing and measuring the inputs and outcomes of play across contexts

Abstract

Despite growing investments in early childhood programming, researchers have questioned whether contemporary interventions are maximally supporting children’s needs. Concerns regarding intervention effect fadeout (Bailey et al., 2020), the academicization of preschool curricula (Bassok & Rorem, 2009), and the use of colorblind, deficit-oriented frameworks for assessing program impacts (Bruno & Iruka, 2022) have collectively highlighted the need to broaden how target outcomes are conceptualized and measured in early childhood intervention research. Indeed, we argue that the field’s reliance on a narrow set of outcome measures for gauging intervention impacts has both obfuscated the true impacts of these programs and disincentivized the sorts of holistic, play-based intervention methods that theory suggests may be maximally effective in this age group.

This study aimed to address this so-called “streetlight effect” in early childhood intervention research by “shining light on” an alternative set of foundational, active, cross-cutting, developmentally-salient skills that can be targeted by early intervention during the preschool (age 3-5) period. We first we conducted a comprehensive, multidisciplinary literature review to better understand a proposed set of foundational skills, including curiosity, creativity, self-regulation and executive function, problem solving, critical thinking, perspective taking, and internal representations of self. A team of six doctoral and post-doctoral coders documented evidence for the malleability, measurability, predictive validity, and universality of each of these foundational skills to understand its conceptual and practical viability as a target outcome in future intervention research. Second, we used information from a recent systematic review (Draper et al., 2022) on 1,149 outcome measures from 572 evaluations of early childhood interventions published since 1990 to document the frequency with which our proposed foundational skills (versus other outcome domains, e.g., academic skills) have been included as intervention targets.

Our literature review identified strong evidence that our proposed foundational skills are malleable and measurable. Although longitudinal and cross-cultural evidence was weaker, the evidence we did identify also supported these skills’ predictive validity and universality. A summary of conclusions regarding curiosity is shown in Table 1 for illustrative purposes. Findings from our categorization of past intervention outcomes are shown in Figure 1. We found that just 12.7% of outcome measures used in early childhood intervention evaluations have targeted our proposed foundational skills, with the vast majority (n = 135 of 146) focusing on self-regulation and executive function, and the rest reflecting either problem solving (n = 8) or perspective taking (n = 3). The remaining outcome measures targeted academic (49.1%), social-emotional (15.9%), cognitive (9.1%), motor/sensory (7.8%), and other developmental (5.5%) skills that we hypothesize could be supported by children’s mastery of our proposed foundational skills.
Collectively, our findings suggest that current approaches for evaluating early childhood interventions may inappropriately prioritize children’s academic performance, contributing to the broader challenges of effect fade-out, curricular academicization, and deficit-based measurement noted above. We propose that targeting an alternative set of foundational, active, cross-cutting, developmentally-salient skills related to play (e.g., curiosity, problem solving, internal representations of self) could help build a more rigorous yet inclusive evidence base for improving the lives of children.

Authors

• Dana Charles McCoy, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Terri Sabol, Northwestern University