Preschool center care quality effects on academic achievement: an instrumental variables analysis

Area of Science:

• Child Development
• Early Childhood Education
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Child care research often examines early childhood settings' impact on school readiness.
• Previous studies, limited by nonexperimental designs, struggled with causal inference.
• Statistical rigor in child care research has increased, yet causal links remain challenging.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate an instrumental variables approach for estimating causal impacts of preschool center care quality.
• To apply this method to a multisite study with randomly assigned preschool curricula.
• To investigate the causal effects of nonrandomly assigned program characteristics like care quality on child development.

Main Methods:

• Utilized data from the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Initiative (PCER) with 2,700 participants.
• Employed an instrumental variables approach within a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design.
• Exploited random assignment of preschool curricula across 18 research sites to address unobserved confounding.

Main Results:

• Preschool care quality showed significant, modest positive effects on children's academic achievement.
• A 1 standard deviation increase in quality correlated with a 0.03 to 0.14 standard deviation increase in academic readiness.
• The instrumental variables method successfully estimated causal impacts of care quality.

Conclusions:

• The instrumental variables approach offers a robust method for developmental researchers to study causal impacts of program characteristics in multisite studies.
• Preschool center care quality is a significant factor influencing children's academic school readiness.
• Findings have implications for early childhood education policy and practice regarding quality improvement.