Jade Jenkins is UCI Co-PI on 5-year NICHD Grant: "Factors in Persistence Versus Fadeout of Early Childhood Intervention Impacts"

Assistant Professor Jade Jenkins is UCI Co-PI for a $3,300,000 five-year grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study whether, for whom, and how the effects of successful early childhood school readiness interventions are sustained across a child's development. The title of the grant is "Factors in Persistence Versus Fadeout of Early Childhood Intervention Impacts." Kenneth Dodge of Duke University is PI. The second Co-PI is Alumnus Tyler Watts, Assistant Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University starting this fall.

Abstract

This project seeks to understand whether, for whom, and how the health, educational, and psychosocial effects of early childhood school readiness interventions are sustained across a child’s lifespan. A consortium of leading scholars (Phillips, Dodge, et al., 2017) recently concluded that contemporary preschool programs in general have a positive impact on kindergarten readiness, but long-term effects are “sparse.” Most programs have not been evaluated over the long-term. Among those programs that have been evaluated, some find that effects are sustained into elementary school, whereas others find that effects fade out. Among the reasons for differing effects is variability in participants’ subsequent school experiences. This project will provide the most comprehensive examination to date of the fadeout phenomenon. We propose first to test whether the initial positive effects of three early childhood interventions persist through elementary school and into adolescence, and whether effects hold across important subgroups (e.g., dual language learners). We then test the “Sustaining Environments” hypothesis by Bailey et al. (2017) that heterogeneity in persistence of program impact is conditioned on characteristics of the child’s later school environment. We hypothesize that some elementary school environments (e.g., classrooms with higher proportions of peers who had also benefitted from early programs and are ready to learn, teachers trained to recognize early beneficiaries and to promote their accelerated learning, and continuity of curricula and school buildings from preschool to elementary school) will be more likely than others to have sustained effects (a moderation effect).