The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
Select a category below to narrow the list of publications about early childhood education. For the definition of each category, click here. If you are looking for a specific document, topic, or author, visit our Publications & Resources section to conduct an advanced search.
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A Conversation With Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn reflects on the breakthrough findings and new directions for research, evaluation, and practice in family-focused interventions.
Advocating for the Rights of Undocumented Families
Moria Cappio and Melanie Reyes from The Children’s Aid Society share their experiences reinventing family engagement strategies in their East Harlem Early Head Start/Head Start program to reach out to immigrant families by including parent civic advocacy. Cappio and Reyes also describe how using an advocacy evaluation tool helped them navigate these uncharted waters.
Alternative Designs for Community-Based Research: Pittsburgh’s Early Childhood Initiative
Stephen Bagnato, Robert Grom, and Leon Haynes describe an evaluation design that provides scientific rigor in a community setting.
Changing the Conversation About Home Visiting: Scaling Up With Quality
The purpose of this paper is to determine what the evidence and conventional wisdom say about scaling up home visiting as one of the best ways to support parents and promote early childhood development. To answer this question, we examined the available research evidence, interviewed leaders from six of the national home visiting models, and interviewed researchers who have studied home visiting. The area of interest for guiding future research, practice, and policy is whether home visiting can be delivered at broad scale and with the quality necessary to attain demonstrable, positive outcomes for young children and their parents.
Closing the Achievement Gap: Head Start and Beyond
Ed Zigler, Ron Haskins, and G. Reid Lyon discuss the past and future of Head Start, the country's first federally funded early childhood program.
Community Collaboration 90806: A Partnership to Increase School Readiness in Long Beach
Marielle Bohan-Baker describes the instructive and collaborative approach to planning and evaluation of six community partners in Long Beach, California.
Conjoint Behavioral Consultation: A Model to Facilitate Meaningful Partnerships for Families and Schools
Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln studied the effectiveness of a behavioral intervention model where parents, educators, and service providers work collaboratively to address children's developmental needs in a Head Start program.
Continuous Improvement: Being Responsive When There is Need for Change
Deborah J. Brown, external evaluator for Save the Children, discusses how continuous improvement processes have helped strengthen one of Save the Children’s language development and pre-literacy programs, Early Steps to School Success.
Data Collection Instruments for Evaluating Family Involvement
As evidence mounts that family involvement can support children's learning, there is an increasing call in the field for common data collection instruments to measure home–school communication and other aspects of family involvement. This resource from Harvard Family Research Project compiles instruments developed for rigorous program impact evaluations and tested for reliability.
Designing Quality Assessment Tools in Early Childhood Education and Youth Development
Ted Jurkiewicz and Charles Hohmann from the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation describe the design of High/Scope's new Youth Program Quality Assessment tool.
Early Childhood Programs and Evaluation
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange charts the course of early childhood programming and evaluation over nearly half a century. Contributing authors offer a range of views on how best to communicate the importance of investing in a child’s early years and how to improve early childhood programs and policies. Several articles consider the explosion of science—from longitudinal studies of child outcomes to a large-scale demonstration program—that has helped forward our understanding of how young children learn and grow. Finally, a number of articles suggest that better information is needed to close the persistent gap in achievement between children from low-income families and those from middle-income homes.
Early Head Start Research-Program Partnerships
An in-depth look at the challenges presented by the evaluation of the Early Head Start program - an evaluation which required the cooperation of multiple layers of research and program partners.
Early Head Start: Further Lessons
Catherine Ayoub and Barbara Pan, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, describe their work collecting and analyzing longitudinal data to supplement national findings from the Early Head Start study.
Early to Read: A Local Emergent Literacy Initiative
This article describes a Knight Foundation early literacy initiative in Philadelphia and its ongoing evaluation.
Embracing the Use of Data for Continuous Program Improvement
In this Commentary, Harvard Family Research Project’s Heidi Rosenberg discusses how continuous improvement processes can strengthen family engagement strategies, and outlines the mindset and key practices that organizations need to adopt in order to use data to understand and improve upon their work.
Engaging Families in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Project-Based Learning
To be successful, children need a strong science, technology, engineering, and math foundation. Learn how Iridescent, a project funded in part by the National Science Foundation, connects families, engineers, and children to develop these skills early on in school.
Evaluating a Professional Development “Cascade”: From Facilitators to University Faculty to Early Childhood Providers
Caroline Wilkinson and Shelley Billig from RMC Research Corporation describe their evaluation of the New England Professional Development Initiative's cascade approach to professional development in early childhood education.
Evaluating Early Childhood Services: What's Really Behind the Curtain
Jack Shonkoff, dean of the Heller School at Brandeis University, describes the highly politicized environment of program evaluation and its attendant challenges.
Evaluating Education Reform: Early Childhood Education
Over the past three decades, an enormous body of research literature has been amassed on early childhood education, parent education, and family support programs. This review summarizes these three areas of research and reports on relevant research in progress.
Evaluation Based on Theories of the Policy Process
Harvard Family Research Project explains how it helps to ground evaluation in theories of the policy process.
Examining the Efficacy of Two Models of Preschool Professional Development in Language and Literacy
Nancy Clark-Chiarelli from Education Development Center, Inc. describes an evaluation of two approaches to early literacy professional development—one with a traditional face-to-face mode of delivery and one with a technology-enhanced component.
Family Involvement News: September 2013
We are committed to keeping you up to date on what's new in family engagement. View our list of links to current reports, articles, resources, and events in the field.
Framing Program Evaluation: Why We Should Tinker With Theories of Change and Logic Models
While evaluation needs may vary, all organizations can benefit from utilizing theory-based evaluation tools to frame evaluation efforts. This article explores how three organizations developed their program’s theory of change and logic model.
From the Director's Desk
An introduction to the issue on Early Childhood Programs and Evaluation by HFRP's Founder & Director, Heather B. Weiss, Ed.D.
Grantmaking to School Districts: Lessons for Foundations
This brief offers lessons and best practices from foundations across the country on grantmaking to school districts. It offers advice to foundations that are considering school district investments for the first time. It also offers a useful "check" to more experienced foundations that want to examine their thinking and approaches against the lessons and practices of other foundations.