New Report Calls for Culture of Innovation in ECE

Is more innovative research & development needed in early childhood education? A recent report from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child argues yes. Authors say the absence of a platform that encourages risk-taking and fresh thinking “threatens the future of all communities in which the needs of children and families are not being fully met by existing policies and programs.”

The scientific community has made great strides over the last fifty years when it comes to the neuroscience of child development. We now know that the first few years of a child’s life are crucial as the brain develops, forming 700 to 1,000 new synapses each second. We also know the important influence of warm, responsive caregivers in constructing a child’s brain architecture. Science has also shown that caregivers and teachers have the ability to help young children develop the important skills of executive function and self-regulation that act as the brain’s “air traffic control system” and enable children to plan ahead and monitor their own behavior. And we now know a lot more about how early brain development in young children can be disrupted by repeated exposure to adverse experiences such as physical or emotional abuse.

But for the most part, according to the Center on the Developing Child’s report, the early childhood research development community has failed to keep pace with these advances in scientific knowledge. In other words, while the evidence base supporting investment in early childhood interventions continues to grow, the effects of these interventions have not shown substantial improvement over the last fifty years.

The report’s authors place much of the blame for this lack of progress on cautious researchers, policymakers, and practitioners who prefer evidence-based programs over riskier, more innovative ideas that might turn out to be unsuccessful. According to Dr. Jack Shonkoff, the director of the Center on the Developing Child, early childhood research agreements typically operate along the lines of, “We’ll give you funding to test this specific policy intervention and if you can prove it worked in three years, we’ll give you more.” According to the report, this way of doing business stifles innovation and discourages responsible risk-taking that could result in the development of new interventions with the potential to unlock dramatic improvements in early childhood programs.

The report highlights the harm in focusing only on whether a particular intervention “works” on average rather than asking which specific subgroups of children benefit most from the intervention, which benefit least, and which don’t benefit at all. Early Head Start is a helpful example here. Despite being the largest system in the United States for disadvantaged infants and toddlers, the report argues that we’ve learned few lessons on how to improve its effectiveness or explain which types of children benefit most from the program and why.

So what would this new, more innovative R&D approach to early childhood programs look like? According to the authors, it would focus heavily on the importance of continuous experimentation and learning from failure. This new approach would recognize that randomized control trials that take several years to complete are still the gold standard for assessing a program’s effectiveness, but emphasize the importance of learning quickly through the use of small-scale feasibility studies and pilot testing of interventions. These micro-trials involving small groups of children and parents could allow researchers to quickly figure out if a certain intervention works, for which subgroups it works, and then potentially replicate the program on a quicker scale.

The Center on the Developing Child is already working with several programs to test this early childhood R&D approach. These small-scale studies offer a lower-stakes environment to test innovative programs, strategically scale them up if they appear to work, and only later perform a lengthy, full-scale experimental evaluation such as a randomized control trial to assess overall effectiveness.

For example, the center has partnered with Childhaven, an organization that serves young children who have experienced abuse or neglect, to experiment with using games to improve executive functioning skills of children. Through a 20-week pilot intervention with five Childhaven classrooms, researchers found that one classroom displayed significant improvement in executive function skills compared to the other four. The research team discovered that the teacher of the classroom showing large improvements implemented the program more frequently and in a different manner than the other teachers. The researchers then used the lessons learned from the classroom pilot to enhance the design of a home visiting program also aimed at improving the executive functioning skills of young children.

In another micro-trial designed to increase the quality of child-parent interactions, researchers used video footage to highlight positive parent-child interactions and shared the video with parents during weekly coaching sessions. Based upon initial feedback received from parents, the researchers modified the program manual to simplify the text and make it easier for parents to understand. The program is being used as part of a home visiting program, in a rural home-based childcare setting, and with at-risk fathers to better understand which population benefits most and least. Then, based on the findings, researchers will attempt to scale up the intervention.

Shonkoff acknowledges that this shift towards a more innovative early childhood research culture won’t be easy. Since governments prefer to fund programs with a long track record of success, Shonkoff says “a new breed of philanthropy” will be needed from individuals such as venture capitalists who are more comfortable taking financial risks. “