Problem

If you interested in learning more about the problem of the absence and/or low quality of pre-school care and education, see Education Challenge: Early Childhood Care and Education]

Goals

Our goals in this project are twofold: a) to improve the quality (software and hardware) of preschool in rural areas in order to raise the school readiness of rural children; and b.) to help policy makers and professional educators design policies, implementation plans and infrastructure blueprints to achieve effective Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) for children in poor, rural areas. If successful, the work in this study will allow policy makers to compare the effectiveness of delivering teacher training in ECCE on the school readiness of rural children.

To meet this overall goal, we will pursue three specific objectives:

• a) Document the nature of China’s preschool in poor rural areas, including
  • 1) how many children attend preschool and how many do not;
  • 2) the quality of preschools, including the facilities, teachers and healthcare;
• b) Measure the educational readiness of rural children;
• c) Test the effect of teacher training on educational readiness of rural children.

Approach

To generate believable, transparent and powerful evidence that can be used by policy makers to push those programs that work and modify or stop programs that do not, we will use a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) approach in the evaluation. In implementing the RCT, one of our main tasks is to choose the sample villages, preschools, households and children within 20 townships of Lushan County in Henan province for the baseline survey and then divide these 20 townships into the treatment group and the control group according to the baseline information.

The process for choosing the sample villages, preschools, households and children within 20 townships includes:

• From two comprehensive listings of all children in the county—one in the local township health center in each township and one from the local police station also in each township—we made a list of all 4 year old children in the county. According to our definition, 4 year olds include all children who turned four between July 1^st, 2003 and June 30^th, 2004.
• With the help of: a.) the department of education in the county; b.) education officials in the township and village leaders in the village; and c.) administrators in each pre-school in the county, we divided the list of all villages into the following five groups:
  1. those with fewer than 2 children in pre-school during the first semester of 2008;
  2. those with 3-5 children in pre-school during the first semester of 2008;
  3. those with 6-8 children in pre-school during the first semester of 2008;
  4. those with 9-12 children in pre-school during the first semester of 2008; and
  5. those with 13 or more children in pre-school during the first semester of 2008.
• From each group of villages above (i. through v.) in the township, we randomly selected one village. Thus, we have 5 sample villages in each township. In the case of any group for which there were zero villages, we randomly chose a sample village from one of the neighbor groups.
• We then took a random sample of children, as follows:
  1. from each randomly selected village with fewer than 2 children, age 4, in pre-school, we surveyed each 4 year old attending preschool. We also randomly selected and surveyed 2 children, age 4, from those not attending preschool;
  2. from each randomly selected village with 3-5 children, age 4, in pre-school, we randomly selected and surveyed 2 children, age 4, from those attending preschool and 1 child, age 4, from those not attending preschool;
  3. from each randomly selected village with 6-8 children, age 4, in pre-school, we randomly selected and surveyed 4 children, age 4, from those who attend preschool and 2 children, age 4, from those not attending preschool;
  4. from each randomly selected village with 9-12 children, age 4, in pre-school, we randomly selected and surveyed 6 children, age 4, from those attending preschool and 3 children, age 4, from those not attending preschool;
  5. from each randomly selected village with 13 or more children, age 4, in pre-school, we randomly selected and surveyed 8 children, age 4, from those attending preschool and 4 children, age 4, from those not attending preschool.

After randomly selecting the sample villages, preschools, households and children within the 20 townships, we conducted the baseline survey and collected a set of information from township officials, village leaders, preschool workers, households and children in Henan province. With this information we created a set of variables that can be used to describe the characteristics of each individual in the baseline survey.

Map of Lushan County in Henan Province in China

Finally, we randomly divided 20 townships into two groups, with 10 townships as the treatment group and the other 10 townships as the control group. We checked to make sure that the observed variables of the randomly selected treatment group and the control group are, on average, identical. That is, the two groups are ‘balanced’ prior to the intervention.

Treatment group

Teachers from the preschools of 10 townships, randomly selected from poor areas of Henan province in rural China, will receive an intensive training course on the care and education of young children. The training will cover what is appropriate curriculum, child-teacher interaction, daily care, etc.

Control group

In order to establish the baseline against which the results from the treatment groups can be judged, we randomly selected 10 additional townships. The control group consists of pre-schools NOT receiving teacher training (or any other REAP “treatment”).

This research design will allow us to be able to compare the effectiveness of the training treatment against the “do nothing” control group.

The RCT control and treatment townships in Lushan county. [1 = means in the treatment group , 0 means in the control group]

The main characteristics of the control and treatment townships in Lushan county

The main characteristic of preschools in control and treatment townships in Lushan County

The main characteristics of households in control and treatment townships in Lushan County

The main characteristics of children in control and treatment townships in RCT county

Implementation: Plan International

Founded over 70 years ago, Plan International is one of the oldest and largest international development agencies in the world. Plan International works in 49 developing countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas and directly supports more than 1,500,000 children and their families. Plan works to achieve lasting improvements for children living in poverty in developing countries. For more detail information, see http://www.plan-international.org.cn

Evaluation

Baseline

REAP will document the baseline at several levels, including township, village, pre-school, teacher, household and of the children. First, we will conduct a baseline survey to collect the socio-economic and other information about preschool education in the treatment and control townships and villages.

Second, REAP will randomly select 256 four-year old children from 50 villages within the 10 randomly selected ‘treatment’ townships and 246 four-year old children from 50 villages within the 10 randomly selected ‘control’ townships. The children will be chosen from among those attending a pre-school. Those chosen for the ‘treatment’ and ‘control’ townships, respectively, will be considered a representative sample of the children attending a pre-school center.

For each child selected, we have done the following things in the baseline survey:

• Test her/his physical readiness, emotional maturity, social competence, cognitive readiness and communicative competence.

• Survey of the characteristics of her/his family and household.

• Survey of the school manager and of the teachers to document the quality of preschool services in the sample townships.

The photo below shows some of our testing of the 4 year olds. If you want to see more, please click to see a slide show [LINK].

Copies of the surveys in English and Chinese are available in the Survey and Data section of the website.

Post-treatment

REAP will follow up after 12 months and periodically in the years thereafter (as funding allows) to examine the status of students in the treatment and control groups, in the cognitive, physical, psychological and socioeconomic dimensions recorded at baseline.

Results

On-going project

Funding

Nokia group; for more details, please visit: http://www.nokia.com