An NPR feature story recently covered Tulsa, Oklahoma's free preschool program, which began about 10 years ago. Like some other cities around the U.S., Tulsa introduced a free pre-K program, with the goal of helping children from all economic backgrounds get ready to succeed in school. Developmental psychologist Deborah Phillips of Georgetown University has tracked children who participated in the Tulsa program, and is especially interested in how the kids are doing as they start high school. According to the story:
"These children did show huge gains in early math and early literacy skills," says Deborah Phillips, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown University who has been overseeing the study. "They were more likely to be engaged in school, less timid in the classroom and more attentive."
Phillips says preschool gave them a good, strong boost into elementary school, Today, as eighth-graders, says Phillips, most of these kids are still doing really well.
Phillips didn't just look at grades and test scores. Her team looked at student mobility, whether kids were in advanced or special education classes. They examined retention rates, absenteeism, and they even surveyed students' attitudes about school.
Researchers then compared these eighth-graders to a large sample of Tulsa eighth- and seventh-graders who did not attend preschool. They found that those students were not doing nearly as well.
a) What kind of study is this? What are its independent and dependent variables? This is one of those studies that has multiple dependent variables. Make sure you include all of them in your answer!
Although Dr. Phillips' conclusion is that Tulsa's preschool improved kids' abilities to do well in school, the NPR piece interviewed some folks who objected. Here's one example:
....Russ Whitehurst, senior fellow with the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank....says he's looked closely at the Tulsa study and takes issue with the way researchers compared kids who were in the program with those who were not.
"What Dr. Phillips and her colleagues have done is scrounge up a bunch of kids who for whatever reason — and they don't know that reason — did not attend pre-K at all," he says.
"We don't know if they were similar to the kids who went to pre-K," Whitehurst adds. "That's why the design [raises] question marks about the ability to conclude that pre-K had the affects attributed by Dr. Phillips."
b. What kind of criticism is Dr. Whitehurst raising about this study? (What terms from the text can you apply here?) What, if anything could have been done to prevent the problem?What are the practical and ethical limitations to such research?
Here's another example of a person who is skeptical of the study's results:
...[high school] principal Nanette Coleman ... says she doesn't know how many of her ninth-graders this year attended Tulsa's preschool program, and has not seen the research. But she has a hard time believing that preschool, no matter how good the program, is going to have an impact on a student 10 years later.
"They're going to struggle when they get to me because there are so many outliers that can have a student not be successful," she says. "Let me be clear," she adds, "I've never made a direct linkage between a pre-K program and their high school success."
c) On what source of information (from Chapter 2) is Principal Coleman basing her beliefs? What are some problems with that source of information?
