The Carolina Abecedarian Project was a controlledexperiment that was conducted in 1972 in North Carolina, United States, by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute to study the potential benefits of early childhood education for poor children to enhance school readiness. It has been found that in their earliest school years, poor children lag behind others, suggesting they were ill-prepared for schooling. The Abecedarian project was inspired by the fact that few other early childhood programs could provide a sufficiently well-controlled environment to determine the effectiveness of early childhood training.
Overview
The participants in this experiment were 111 infants born between 1972 and 1977. Of these, 57 were given high-quality intervention, consisting in part of educational games based on the latest in educational theory. The other 54 acted as a control group. An overwhelming majority of the children who participated in the experiment were African-American. The average starting age of participants was 4.4 months. Whereas other childhood programs started at age two, the Abecedarian Project started from infancy and continued for five years, a period longer than most other programs. The participants received child care for 6-8 hours a day, five days a week. Educational activities were game-based and emphasized language. The control group was provided with nutritional supplements, social services, and health care to ensure that these factors did not affect the outcomes of the experiment. All the 111 infants were identified as "high risk" based on maternal education, family income, and other factors. The teacher-child ratio was low. It ranged from 1:3 for infants to 1:6 at age 5.
Significant findings
Follow-up assessment of the participants involved in the project has been ongoing. So far, outcomes have been measured at ages 3, 4, 5, 6.5, 8, 12, 15, 21, and 30. The areas covered were cognitive functioning, academic skills, educational attainment, employment, parenthood, and social adjustment. The significant findings of the experiment were as follows: Impact of child care/preschool on reading and math achievement, and cognitive ability, at age 21:
An increase of 1.8 grade levels in reading achievement
An increase of 1.3 grade levels in math achievement
A modest increase in Full-Scale IQ, and in Verbal IQ.
Impact of child care/preschool on life outcomes at age 21:
Completion of a half-year more of education
Much higher percentage enrolled in school at age 21
Much higher percentage attended, or still attending, a 4-year college
More likely to have been employed consistently over the previous two years
Five times less likely to have used public assistance in the previous seven years
Delayed becoming parents by average of almost two years
The project concluded that high quality, educational child care from early infancy was therefore of utmost importance. Other, less intensive programs, notably the Head Start Program, but also others, have not been as successful. It may be that they provided too little too late compared with the Abecedarian program.
Cost
The total per-child cost of the project was ~$67,225, or ~$13,900 for each of the five years ; Masse & Barnett 2002 estimated that the total annual cost of a comparable program for all poor children in 2002 would have been ~$3 billion.
Criticisms
Some researchers have advised caution about the reported positive results of the project. Among other things, they have pointed out analytical discrepancies in published reports, including unexplained changes in sample sizes between different assessments and publications. Herman Spitz has noted that a mean cognitive ability difference of similar magnitude to the final difference between the intervention and control groups was apparent in cognitive tests already at age six months, indicating that "4 1/2 years of massive intervention ended with virtually no effect." Spitz has suggested that the IQ difference between the intervention and control groups may have been latently present from the outset due to faulty randomization. In fact, it is known that randomization was compromised in the Abecedarian program, with seven families assigned to the experimental group and one family assigned to the control group dropping out of the program after learning about their random assignment.
Books
Campbell, Frances A., Craig T. Ramey, Elizabeth Pungello, Joseph Sparling, and Shari Miller-Johnson. “Early Childhood Education: Young Adult Outcomes From the Abecedarian Project,” Applied Developmental Science, 2002, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 42-57. Leonard N. Masse and W. Steven Barnett, A Benefit-Cost Analysis of the Abecedarian Early Childhood Intervention, New Brunswick, N.J.: National Institute for Early Education Research, 2002. https://web.archive.org/web/20030315145225/http://nieer.org/resources/research/AbecedarianStudy.pdf Campbell, Frances A., Elizabeth Pungello, Shari Miller-Johnson, Margaret Burchinal, and Craig T. Ramey. “The Development of Cognitive and Academic Abilities: Growth Curves From an Early Childhood Educational Experiment,” Developmental Psychology, 2001, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 231-242.
Media
The research program has been featured in the TV program "My Brilliant Brain" sent by National Geographic Channel in 2007.
