Curricula in Early Childhood Education Preschool Settings

This chapter summarizes the current state of knowledge regarding Early Childhood Education (ECE) curricula in the United States, focusing on curricula used in public preschool and Head Start programs. First, the authors explore the foundational developmental theories undergirding most ECE curricula and they offer a brief overview of curricula used in early 1960s model preschool programs, as those remain relevant today. Subsequently, the authors describe the current landscape of public preschool curricula and review evidence on curricular causal effects, focusing on both whole-child and domain-specific curricula. They also describe the extent to which widely used preschool curricula have been found to include the following components: parental/family engagement, professional development for teachers, cultural and/or linguistic responsiveness, and availability of resources to support individualized instruction. The authors find that evidence on the causal effects of widely used ECE curricula is sparse, and that very few curricular studies follow children longitudinally or explore heterogeneity of causal effects.

Keywords: early childhood education; whole-child curricula; domain-specific curricula; curricular effects