Effects of an Infant/Toddler Intervention in Denmark: Sustained Impacts to Preschool Entry

• In Event: Ensuring Quality Care for Infants/Toddlers: Early Language Development and Program Characteristics and Opportunities

Abstract

Many of the skills, including early language skill, that are important for later educational attainment develop in the early years of life where many children participate in formal infant/toddler childcare. Presently, more than one-third of infants and toddlers (36% of children between birth and age two years) are enrolled in formal Early Childhood Education (ECE) settings among the 36 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2022, https://www.oecd.org/els/family/database.htm). Therefore, it is concerning that empirical assessments of the quality of infant/toddler childcare settings indicate a generally low quality with respect to instructional content and quality of interactions across OECD-countries. Moreover, there is limited understanding of how to enhance young children’s experiences in formal childcare to ensure that they receive interactions and experiences that foster early cognitive development. In particular, there is limited intervention research that provides promising models for improving the quality of existing childcare contexts serving infants and toddlers, both in the short and the longer run (Walker et al., 2020).
One exception in the recent research literature is the effectiveness trial of [BLINDED], a 20-week low-cost infant/toddler school-readiness intervention that provides instructional content and supportive tools for teachers to be more explicit and intentional in their interactions with children (Author et al., 2020, 2021). Intervention effects were estimated for 2,170 children attending 111 center-based (305 teachers) and 144 groups of family-based (391 teachers) childcares in Denmark. Results showed that children in the treatment classrooms significantly outperformed those in control classrooms on measures of receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, math language, and numeracy, with short-term positive effects ranging from 0.10 - 0.59 SD. Of relevance to this study, the effects were 0.10 for productive vocabulary and 0.13 for receptive vocabulary.
The present quasi-experimental follow-up study examined the extent to which the main effects of We Learn Together were sustained at preschool entrance for language skills approximately one year after the intervention. We examined the impact using data from the mandatory national language assessment program in Denmark. Because the control group eventually also got the intervention in the original study, we compared mandatory municipal language assessment outcomes of 2,552 children in the We Learn Together intervention group to matched non-intervention children using entropy balancing to reduce selection bias in the estimation of treatment effects (Hainmueller, 2012). To estimate follow-term effects at age 3 years, we ran Ordinary Least Squares regression models. The study showed that the short-term intervention effect was maintained at the same magnitude at the 1-year follow-up on language skills (ES 0.12-0.13) with spill-over effects for rhyming skills (ES 0.18). The current study provides a promising model for improving the quality of infant/toddler childcare with effect sizes for language that were slightly higher than those found in a meta-analysis of preschool language and literacy interventions by Chambers and colleagues (2016), which showed average short-term impacts of the magnitude of 0.08 for language.

Author

• Dorthe Bleses, Aarhus
  Presenting Author