Contexts Inside and Outside of School Walls as Predictors of Differential Effectiveness in Preschool Professional Development

In collaboration with colleagues at Northwestern University, Harvard University, and the University of Virginia, Dr. Christina Weiland was awarded a grant by Northwestern University and the U. S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. The grant aims to explore the degree to which the effectiveness of a large-scale professional development study targeting teacher-child interactions—the National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education Professional Development Study (NCRECE PDS)—differs based on contextual characteristics within and directly surrounding schools. The original NCRECE PDS tested the independent and additive impacts of a 14-week professional development course and a year-long coaching program across 9 demographically diverse U.S. cities from 2008-2011. Overall, the NCRECE PDS intervention showed positive average effects on classroom quality and small, but positive gains in children’s outcomes (Hamre et al., 2012; Pianta et al., 2014; Jamil, Sabol, Hamre & Pianta, 2015). In the current study, Weiland and team will expand the evaluation of these main effects to retrospectively explore: 1) variation in impacts and predictors of this variation across cities and centers; and 2) whether variation in treatment effects is predicted by characteristics *within and outside *school walls.

In addition to Dr. Weiland, the study team includes University of Michigan alumna and Northwestern University assistant professor Dr. Terri Sabol (co-PI), Dr. Dana Charles McCoy (Harvard University; co-PI), and Dr. Jason Downer (University of Virginia, co-I).