[Federal Register: September 30, 2002 (Volume 67, Number 189)]
[Notices]
[Page 61441-61444]
From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:fr30se02-101]
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Part III
Department of Education
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Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research; Notice
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DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research
AGENCY: Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Department of
Education.
ACTION: Notice of proposed priority.
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SUMMARY: The Assistant Secretary proposes a priority for Preschool
Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER). The Assistant Secretary may use
this priority for competitions in fiscal year (FY) 2003 and in later
fiscal years. We take this action to implement rigorous evaluations of
preschool curricula that will provide information to support informed
choices of classroom curricula for early childhood programs. We intend
this priority to focus support on research that will determine, through
randomized clinical trials, whether one or more curricula produce
educationally meaningful effects on children.
DATES: We must receive your comments on or before October 30, 2002.
ADDRESSES: Address all comments about this proposed priority to Heidi
Schweingruber, U.S. Department of Education, 555 New Jersey Avenue,
NW., room 602-c, Washington, DC 20208-5501. You may fax your comments
to (202) 219-1402. If you prefer to send your comments through the
Internet, use the following address: heidi.schweingruber@ed.gov.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Heidi Schweingruber. Telephone: (202)
219-2040 or via the Internet, heidi.schweingruber@ed.gov.
If you use a telecommunications device for the deaf (TDY), you may
call the Federal Information Relay Service (FIRS) at 1-800-877-8339.
Individuals with disabilities may obtain this document in an
alternative format (e.g., Braille, large print, audiotape, or computer
diskette) on request to the contact person listed under FOR FURTHER
INFORMATION CONTACT.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
Invitation To Comment
We invite you to submit comments regarding this proposed priority.
We also invite you to assist us in complying with the specific
requirements of Executive Order 12866 and its overall requirement of
reducing regulatory burden that might result from this proposed
priority. Please let us know of any further opportunities we should
take to reduce potential costs or increase potential benefits while
preserving the effective and efficient administration of the program.
During and after the comment period, you may inspect all public
comments about this proposed priority in room 602-c, 555 New Jersey
Avenue, NW., Washington, DC, between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.,
Eastern time, Monday through Friday of each week except Federal
holidays.
Assistance to Individuals With Disabilities in Reviewing the Rulemaking
Record
On request, we will supply an appropriate aid, such as a reader or
print magnifier, to an individual with a disability who needs
assistance to review the comments or other documents in the public
rulemaking record for this proposed priority. If you want to schedule
an appointment for this type of aid, please contact the person listed
under FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT.
General Information
The Secretary believes that research that provides evidence about
the effectiveness of preschool curricula for supporting school
readiness is essential to improving educational opportunity for all
children.
The proposed priority is based on responses to the first PCER
competition held in FY 2002. In reviewing the content of applications
and feedback from applicants, we have revised the priority. For
background information, you may view the original notice soliciting
applications for the FY 2002 PCER competition on the Internet at:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leavingFR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/announcements/2001-4/121701b.html.
We will announce the final priority in a notice in the Federal
Register. We will determine the final priority after considering
responses to this notice and other information available to the
Department. This notice does not preclude us from proposing or funding
additional priorities, subject to meeting applicable rulemaking
requirements.
Note: This notice does not solicit applications. In any year in
which we choose to use this proposed priority, we invite
applications through a notice in the Federal Register. When inviting
applications we designate the priority as absolute, competitive
preference, or invitational. The effect of each type of priority
follows:
Absolute priority: Under an absolute priority we consider only
applications that meet the priority (34 CFR 75.105(c)(3)).
Competitive preference priority: Under a competitive preference
priority we give competitive preference to an application by either
(1) awarding additional points, depending on how well or the extent
to which the application meets the competitive priority (34 CFR
75.105(c)(2)(i)); or (2) selecting an application that meets the
competitive priority over an application of comparable merit that
does not meet the priority (34 CFR 75.105(c)(2)(ii)).
Invitational priority: Under an invitational priority we are
particularly interested in applications that meet the invitational
priority. However, we do not give an application that meets the
invitational priority a competitive or absolute preference over
other applications (34 CFR 75.105(c)(1)).
Priority
Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research
Background
The importance of early child-care and preschool experiences in
supporting cognitive development and other skills essential to a
successful transition into school is a focus of the administration's
early childhood initiative--Good Start, Grow Smart. This initiative
calls attention to the need for preschool programs to enhance their
instructional content in order to ensure that young children start
school with the skills that will lead to continued academic success.
The evidence that would allow informed choices of classroom
curricula for early childhood programs is weak. Rigorous preschool
program evaluations that exist are for programs designed and delivered
decades ago. The results from historical evaluations of preschool
curricula and current research on the learning and development of young
children provide some insights into general features of successful
preschool programs. However, they give little guidance for selecting
from among the ever-expanding list of available preschool curricula.
The proposed priority is intended to address the lack of rigorous,
systematic evaluation of preschool curricula currently in use.
PCER is intended to build on recent initiatives aimed at evaluating
the preschool experiences of children. These initiatives include The
Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) undertaken by Head Start,
and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Kindergarten (ECLS-K) and
the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), both
ongoing projects of the National Center for Education Statistics within
OERI.
The outcomes of greatest interest to PCER are those skills that are
most highly predictive of academic success in the early years of
elementary school and that are most amenable to influence by factors
within the realm of classroom curricula and practice. These outcomes
include language development, pre-
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reading and pre-math abilities, cognition, general knowledge, and
social competence.
The curricula of primary interest to PCER are those with sufficient
standardized training procedures and published curriculum materials to
support implementation of the curriculum by entities other than, and at
a distance from, the curriculum developers. In addition, the curricula
of interest to PCER are those that focus on the child outcomes
described in the preceding paragraph and those with instructional
approaches supported in the scientific literature on learning and
instruction.
An applicant is not expected to compare different well-articulated,
well-implemented preschool curricula, though we do not discourage
these. Rather, we anticipate that the typical applicant will propose to
implement a well-articulated, well-implemented curriculum and compare
it to the prevailing approach, which is likely to be a home-grown,
unlabeled preschool experience that lacks specific instructional goals
and a detailed curriculum.
PCER is not intended to support the development of new curricula,
nor to support research on interventions for children from birth to 3
years of age. These efforts are the focus of other programs of research
to be sponsored by other Federal agencies participating in the
Interagency Task Force in Early Childhood Development.
Grantees would coordinate with a national evaluation coordinator,
funded separately by OERI, to ensure that evaluations carried out in
different locations follow consistent protocols and use a core set of
comparable measures. The cross-site data collected by the national
coordinator would be returned to grantees in a timely manner for their
own use. For the purposes of planning proposed studies and calculating
participant burden, a full listing of the measures and procedures used
in the 2002-2003 PCER data collection can be found at: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leavingFR.html&log=linklog&to=http://pcer.rti.org.
Description of Priority
Each applicant must propose to (a) implement one or more pre-
kindergarten (pre-K) curricula, with attention to fidelity of the
curriculum implementation; and (b) coordinate with a national
coordinator the assessment of children and classrooms in the fall and
spring of the pre-K year, and in the spring of the kindergarten and
first grade year.
(a) Specifically, an applicant must--
(1) Provide a letter of cooperation from participating preschool
programs for the purposes of conducting the research. In the letter of
cooperation, representatives of the preschool would have to clearly
indicate and accept the responsibilities associated with participating
in the study. These responsibilities must include--
(i) Agreement to provide a sufficient number of preschool sites and
classrooms to participate in the study; and
(ii) Agreement to the random assignment of children or classrooms
to the curriculum being evaluated versus one or more comparison
approaches;
(2) Provide an on-site coordinator to manage all aspects of data
collection, curriculum implementation, and interaction with the
national coordinator;
(3) Be prepared to obtain informed consent of parents of children
participating in the study, and of all teachers and other
administrators from whom data will be collected;
(4) Be prepared to provide all necessary materials and professional
development to teachers and staff to implement the curriculum to be
evaluated in the intervention classrooms;
(5) Be prepared to make all on-site arrangements necessary for the
national coordinator to assess participating children and classrooms;
(6) Be prepared to conduct face-to-face interviews with parents and
provide incentives for parent participation in the interviews;
(7) Be prepared to work with the national evaluation contractor for
the collection of cross-site data, in coordination with any local data
collection activities; and
(8) Be prepared to send at least one representative to attend up to
two meetings each year of all of the grantees, national coordinator,
and Federal staff. The applicant's budget must include travel funds for
these purposes.
(b) An applicant must also do the following:
(1) Be able to guarantee access to a minimum of 10 classrooms with
a total of 150 children. The national coordinator can accommodate data
collection using the core PCER battery for a maximum of 20 classrooms
and 300 children for each applicant. An applicant that proposes to
include more than this maximum must include the costs of additional
data collection in its budget.
(2) Propose to include only children who are of an age in the first
year of the study to be eligible for entrance into public kindergarten
in the second year.
(3) Either focus on preschools that serve children from low-income
backgrounds or assure that these children are present in significant
numbers within the preschool classrooms that are sampled.
(4) Employ random assignment in the evaluation design. A preschool
program that is to be a site for curriculum implementation must agree
to cooperate fully with the random assignment as a condition for the
applicant to receive an award.
To facilitate random assignment, we encourage applicants to
consider the use of incentives for schools and families. These may
include, but are not limited to: compensation for additional preschool
staff time required to cooperate with the research effort; funding for
a new classroom; provision of additional resources to enable a program
to conduct new activities; securing vehicles for transportation; and
stipends to families.
(5) Provide a convincing rationale for its intervention being
likely to improve children's outcomes compared with the practices used
in the control or comparison conditions. In this regard and for all the
projects, we require a reasonable assumption that children in the
intervention classrooms will experience neutral to positive outcomes--
rather than negative outcomes--compared with children in the control
classrooms.
(6) Follow children who participate in studies of PCER curricula
that generate educationally meaningful effects at the end of the pre-K
year into kindergarten and first grade. The national coordinator will
assess all children at follow-up in both the intervention and control
or comparison conditions. However, each grantee would be responsible
for making arrangements for these assessments, including obtaining
parental permission and negotiating access to children for testing in
their schools.
The applicant must address how it will provide access to children
for follow-up testing. The grantee would also be responsible for
conducting interviews with parents, using the established PCER parent
interview, each time children and classrooms are assessed by the
national coordinator.
(c) Evaluation Design: The applicant must propose an evaluation
design that includes the following:
(1) A description of the control condition and the intervention
condition or conditions.
(2) An explanation of procedures for random assignment and
discussion of procedures for tracking fidelity to the assignment and
potential sources of contamination.
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(3) The logic of sampling so as to capture, to the degree possible,
diversity in the preschool population to be studied. Core variables an
applicant should consider for capturing diversity include: race,
ethnicity status or language status or both; household income; and
parental education.
(4) A discussion of possible variations in the structure of the
participating preschool program or programs (part-day or full day,
public or private, profit or non-profit, etc.) and how the applicant
will take these variations into consideration in the evaluation design.
(5) A discussion of how the applicant will document implementation
of and fidelity to the curriculum.
(d) Partners and consultants: An applicant that is not a research
organization must obtain the services of at least one consultant who is
an established researcher and who has committed enough time to the
project to assure the integrity of the local evaluation and to
participate in all required meetings.
An applicant that is a research organization may involve curriculum
developers or distributors in the project, from having the curriculum
developers as full partners in its proposal to using off-the-shelf
curriculum materials without involvement of the developer or publisher.
Involvement of the curriculum developer or distributor must not
jeopardize the objectivity of the evaluation and must not involve a
level of professional training or support for the curriculum that rises
above that available to ordinary adopters of the curriculum.
In addition, an applicant that is a commercial curriculum developer
must indicate in the budget summary the value of any nonfederal
resources that would be devoted to the research project, such as their
curriculum products.
Additional Considerations
In any given year, the Secretary may, in the application notice, do
either or both of the following:
(a) Give competitive preference to applicants proposing to evaluate
preschool curricula not currently under study by existing PCER
grantees.
(b) Request or require proposals that incorporate complementary
research studies to further knowledge of the mechanisms by which
curricula support children's learning. The complementary research may
address a range of issues related broadly to curriculum effectiveness,
such as the impact of curriculum implementation on preschool staff, the
influence of individual differences in children on program impact, the
development of instrumentation, or other related topics.
Complementary research provides an opportunity to identify outcomes
that, because of data constraints, are not explored in the core
evaluation or are specific to an individual site. It expands the
possibilities for multiple measures of the same variable, and for the
development of new measures. Complementary research designs may involve
continued pre-K implementations and ongoing research in the pre-K
setting for some or all years of the grant while children in the first
cohort are being followed into first grade.
Two areas of complementary research are of particular interest:
(1) Studies that address how individual or background differences
in children interact with the curriculum to influence developmental
outcomes. These studies would address the question: For which children
under which conditions is the curriculum most successful?
(2) Studies that compare different versions of the curriculum or
different approaches to implementation in order to identify key
features of the curriculum and approaches that might improve
effectiveness and ease of implementation. These studies would address
the question: Under what circumstances does the curriculum achieve the
greatest impact?
Intergovernmental Review
This program is not subject to Executive Order 12372 and the
regulations in 34 CFR part 79.
Electronic Access to This Document
You may view this document, as well as all other Department of
Education documents published in the Federal Register, in text or Adobe
Portable Document Format (PDF) on the Internet at the following site:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leavingFR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister.
To use PDF, you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is available
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Note: The official version of this document is the document
published in the Federal Register. Free Internet access to the
official edition of the Federal Register and the Code of Federal
Regulations is available on GPO Access at: http://
www.access.gpo.gov/nara/index.html.
(Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance Number 84.305J Preschool
Curriculum Evaluation Research Program)
Program Authority: 20 U.S.C. 6031.
Dated: September 24, 2002.
Grover J. Whitehurst,
Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement.
[FR Doc. 02-24656 Filed 9-27-02; 8:45 am]
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