Evaluation of early childhood programs.

Unlike kindergartens for 5-year-old children, which are taken for granted, preschool programs for 3- and 4-year-old children are accepted tentatively in the United States, making them ideal candidates for evaluative research. Evaluative research compares the performance of program participants either with ideal performance, the performance of other children in general, or the performance of children who did not attend early childhood programs. Evaluative research assesses and compares child and family outcomes, after equalizing child and family background characteristics by design or statistical analysis and taking program characteristics into account. Evaluative research is either ideal-program research, typical program research, or specific-program evaluation. Ideal-program research has provided evidence of the value of ideal preschool programs. Typical-program research, however, has shown how far from ideal actual programs are, and thus sets the context for specific-program evaluations. Done well, such evaluations can improve school, Head Start, and child care early childhood programs by focusing the attention of teachers, parents, and other stakeholders on program processes and children's development.