Sharon Wolf, Assistant Professor, Human Development and Quantitative Methods Division, University of Pennsylvania

Longitudinal experimental impacts of the “Quality Preschool for Ghana” interventions

This presentation will present impacts of a teacher professional development program implemented during one school-year for public and private kindergartens in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana and examines impacts on teacher professional wellbeing, classroom quality, and children’s readiness. This school-randomized trial included 240 schools randomly assigned to one of three conditions: teacher training (TT), teacher training plus parental-awareness meetings (TTPA), and controls. The programs incorporated workshops and in-classroom coaching for teachers, and video-based discussion groups for parents. In year 1, moderate impacts were found on some dimensions of professional well-being and classroom quality, and small impacts on multiple domains of children’s school readiness in the TT condition. The parental-awareness meetings counter-acted the positive effects on child school readiness outcomes. One year after the intervention, only TT impacts on social-emotional development were sustained. Two years after the intervention, there were persistent positive impacts of TT on literacy, and negative impacts of TTPA on numeracy, but these depended on the quality of children’s classroom environments and the burnout levels of teachers in primary school. In addition, there were small persistent impacts of both treatments on children’s behavioral regulation, which were not conditional on subsequent classroom quality or teacher well-being. Implications for global early childhood education policy and research will be discussed.