Spotlight on Evidence: The Role of Curricula and Professional Learning in Improving Pre-K Quality

As the 2024-25 school year wraps up and state policymakers look to the fall, it’s critical not to lose focus on the early years, a period when about half of U.S. children are enrolled in a formal Pre-K program. Decades of research have pointed to the importance of investing in early childhood, a unique time of rapid brain development and learning. And it’s well documented that academic, behavioral, and social-emotional skills at kindergarten entry are predictive of positive outcomes through adolescence and adulthood, including key indicators of success like employment and educational attainment.

Funding for Pre-K is something policymakers across the aisle agree on. Public spending to increase access to Pre-K reached record highs in 2024-25, with a number of states, including Georgia, New Mexico, and California, implementing state-wide public Pre-K programs over the last decade. The National Institute of Early Education Research (NIEER) has awarded Alabama’s state-run Pre-K program with the highest quality rating for 18 consecutive years. And Mississippi’s state-run pilot Pre-K program has been identified as one driver of the state’s dramatic improvements in reading and math scores on the most recent NAEP evaluation.

There’s broad scientific agreement that Pre-K programs can have positive impacts on children’s learning and development, improving outcomes like literacy and math skills in the short term, and even increasing harder-to-move outcomes like high school graduation and college attendance in the longer term. While studies showing a “fadeout” or “convergence” of Pre-K impacts in recent years have renewed the debate about the value of investing in early learning, much of that discourse has largely ignored the critical role of program quality.

Simply providing access to Pre-K is not enough; just like in K-12, the quality of the program and the teaching matter greatly for student outcomes, as we wrote about last year. And even as access expands, the large majority of early learning programs in the U.S. still do not currently meet foundational quality standards, with only five state-funded Pre-K programs achieving all 10 of NIEER’s quality benchmarks.

Unsurprisingly, the markers of quality in Pre-K are similar to the markers in K-12: high-quality instructional materials and well-trained, supported educators. As states and districts make important funding decisions over the coming months, prioritizing efforts to improve Pre-K quality will be critical to realizing the impacts of these investments.

Invest in high-quality, evidence-based curricula that lay the foundation for high-quality instruction

Like in K-12 education, most publicly funded Pre-K programs rely on curricula to structure classroom activities that support children’s academic and social-emotional development. But not all curricula are equally effective; evidence across multiple randomized controlled trials (RCTs) finds that content-specific curricula, which support targeted learning domains like math, literacy, or executive functioning, may be most effective, regardless of Pre-K program type. These types of curricula also directly align with a recent recommendation from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) for early childhood programs to adopt and implement evidence-validated curricula that, when integrated coherently, support the learning and development of the whole child. Essential features of such curricula include developmentally appropriate learning goals, a scope and sequence, coherent alignment with specific domains, and rich content.

Curricula that incorporate these features and best practices are most likely to improve teachers’ instructional quality and boost school readiness outcomes for children. For example, an RCT funded in part by our foundation found that the Building Blocks Pre-K math curriculum, when coupled with teacher training and implementation support, greatly improved the amount and quality of math preschool teachers taught, and had lasting positive impacts on children’s math skills at the end of kindergarten.

Tools of the Mind, another curriculum that aligns with NASEM’s vision for high-quality Pre-K, has also shown promise for impacting student outcomes through several large-scale, external RCTs. In one RCT of Head Start programs, classrooms assigned to use Tools of the Mind, which explicitly supports children’s executive functioning skills, saw sizable improvements in the quality of teachers’ literacy instruction and ability to scaffold children’s learning. Another RCT done with Pre-K students in a low-income, urban school district, found that children in classrooms using Tools of the Mind saw significant boosts in executive functioning skills, compared with children receiving the school district’s standard curriculum. Since 2021, Overdeck Family Foundation has committed $4.35 million in funding to Tools of the Mind to support the organization in scaling its evidence-based curricula to more teachers and students.

As states make decisions about investments in early childhood, they should look to this type of rigorous experimental research to recommend curricula that are best set up to support effective teaching and learning in early childhood.

Support strong professional learning that incorporates proven practices to improve teacher quality at scale

Training is the main vehicle for helping teachers strengthen instructional practices and enhance the quality of their interactions with students. But training works best when teachers receive coaching and consistent professional learning opportunities. This pairing allows teachers to try out and reflect on new practices and to receive feedback on how to make these practices work in their classrooms. Research has found that teacher coaching is an impactful way to improve teacher quality and even student outcomes. Yet, in a recent nationally representative survey of Pre-K teachers, half reported that they had not received any coaching during SY 2023-24, and only about one in five reported that the coaching they received was very helpful.

Overdeck Family Foundation has used this evidence to guide investments in high-quality professional learning that can be scaled across a range of Pre-K and early learning programs. For example, the foundation has approved funding of $960,000 to scale SEEDS of Learning, a professional development and coaching program for early childhood educators that aims to promote children’s social, emotional, language, and literacy skills. This decision has largely been rooted in the strong evidence base for the approach. In a just-published analysis of a cluster RCT done in Pre-K programs in San Francisco, California, researchers from NORC found that SEEDS professional development for teachers translated into better outcomes for students. Specifically, children in classrooms exposed to SEEDS for two consecutive years demonstrated two to three and a half more months of growth in foundational literacy skills, relative to children in a control condition.

Since 2017, we’ve also provided $7.8 million in funding to LENA Grow, a professional development and coaching program designed to improve children’s language environments through educators’ use of conversational turns—or back-and-forth conversations—with children. LENA’s unique technology quantifies children’s language environments and provides educators real-time data to help them see where they are meeting or missing recommended language benchmarks. Hundreds of studies have leveraged the LENA technology for capturing data on language interactions, and LENA began scaling its own programs using its technology in 2016. Since then, emerging evidence on LENA Grow has shown the potential of this technology as a professional learning approach. In a recent South Carolina study, LENA researchers found evidence that children in Pre-K classrooms using LENA Grow scored higher on indicators of kindergarten readiness and language and literacy skills than a demographically matched comparison group of children. A study using a similar design in Kentucky found that children in classrooms using LENA Grow were more likely to be at or above average in language development at the start of kindergarten. Although more rigorous experimental research is needed, these findings highlight the potential for this type of professional learning to support children’s language development in the classroom.

More recently, Overdeck Family Foundation invested in FIND-PD, a virtual professional learning platform designed to improve early childhood educators’ responsive and supportive interactions with children. While FIND’s professional learning platform has yet to be evaluated, the classic FIND program (Filming Interactions to Nurture Development) has been well-studied with caregivers and childcare providers. In an RCT with low-income families, Stanford University researchers found that children in the FIND intervention showed stronger expressive communication skills at the end of the intervention period, compared with control group children. And in a quasi-experimental study with childcare providers serving low-income children in Washington, the same team of researchers found that FIND increased the number of adult words spoken and the total number of conversational turns, a critical factor for supporting a high-quality language environment. As FIND-PD continues to innovate, demonstrating further rigorous evidence on the newest iteration of the model will be critical for supporting continued success at scale.

A time of financial constraints makes evidence-based decisions even more important. The good news is that there’s significant research accessible, such as the National Academies’ recent report on Pre-K curricula, to guide states and districts grappling with how to build effective early learning programs. Selecting high-quality curricula and ensuring that early learning educators are well-trained is a strategic and cost-effective way to create Pre-K programs that strengthen student outcomes. By relying on evidence, public investment in early learning will be best positioned to deliver on its promise to boost student learning and development, both in the short and long term.

Header image courtesy of FIND-PD