Featured Abstract: Promoting Academic and Social-Emotional School Readiness: The Head Start REDI Program

A new study in the November/December 2008 issue of Child Development looks at the impacts of an intervention designed to improve Head Start students’ language, literacy, and social-emotional skills:

Forty-four Head Start classrooms were randomly assigned to enriched intervention (Head Start REDI—Research-based, Developmentally Informed) or “usual practice” conditions. The intervention involved brief lessons, “hands-on” extension activities, and specific teaching strategies linked empirically with the promotion of: (a) social-emotional competencies and (b) language development and emergent literacy skills. Take-home materials were provided to parents to enhance skill development at home. Multimethod assessments of three hundred and fifty-six 4-year-old children tracked their progress over the course of the 1-year program. Results revealed significant differences favoring children in the enriched intervention classrooms on measures of vocabulary, emergent literacy, emotional understanding, social problem solving, social behavior, and learning engagement. Implications are discussed for developmental models of school readiness and for early educational programs and policies.

Most Head Start programs use either the High/Scope curriculum or the Creative Curriculum, two child-centered, comprehensive curriculum models. While these curricula have much to recommend them, they were developed before recent research on how preschool children develop language, literacy, and social-emotional skills in quality early education programs, and, as a result may not do enough to prepare disadvantaged preschool children to succeed in school.

The Head Start REDI intervention aims to improve the quality of language, literacy, and social-emotional supports available to Head Start students by supplementing the High/Scope or Creative Curriculum approaches that Head Start classrooms are already using. These findings suggest that it is possible to integrate explicit instruction in language and literacy skills into Head Start programs in a way that is both developmentally appropriate and consistent with their existing practices, and that doing so can improve children’s school readiness outcomes. These findings also demonstrate that there does not have to be a trade-off between promoting school readiness and supporting children’s social-emotional development. Well-designed approaches, such as REDI, can do both.

As policymakers consider ways to improve the return on existing early education investments, these findings suggest one promising path for improving outcomes for Head Start and other pre-k students.

For more information on the Head Start REDI intervention, click here.