Preschool Curricula and Professional Development Features for Getting to High-Quality Implementation at Scale - A Comparative Review Across Five Trials

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Cipher

Article synthesizes findings from five large-scale evaluations of the “strongest hope” model for improving instructional quality in public preschool at scale. It addresses the lack of systematic compilation across studies and identifies six implementation features associated with successful adoption, spanning instructional content, detailed scripts, teacher voice, planning time, real-time data use, and administrator training. Evidence draws on 6,500 children, 750 teachers, and 19 localities.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages16

Reading Time40 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Public support and scale of preschool access

Instructional quality challenges

The strongest hope model and analysis approach

Cross-study comparative synthesis

Six identified implementation features

Implications for practitioners

AERA Open January-March 2018, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 1–16 DOI: 10. 1177/2332858418757735 © The Author(s) 2018. [http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Preschool Curricula and Professional Development Features for Getting to High-Quality Implementation at Scale: A Comparative Review Across Five Trials Christina Weiland University of Michigan Meghan McCormick Shira Mattera Michelle Maier MDRC Pamela Morris New York University Experts have heralded domain-specific play-based curricula coupled with regular coaching and training as our “strongest hope”for improving instructional quality in large-scale public preschool programs. Yet, details from different evaluations of the strongest hope model are not systematically compiled, making it difficult to identify specific features across studies that distinguish the most successful implementation efforts. We performed a cross-study review across five diverse large-scale evaluations (n = 6,500 children and n = 750 teachers across 19 localities and multiple auspice types) to identify common features that have characterized successful implementations of this model to date. We identified six features in our exploratory review that may help to flesh out the strongest hope model for localities considering it—a significant focus on specific instructional content, inclusion of highly detailed scripts, incorporation of teacher voice, time for planning, use of real-time data, and early childhood training for administrators. These six features provide more specific guidance for practitioners and helpmeet calls in preschool and K–12 for more synthesis of implementation lessons from large-scale research trials. Keywords: descriptive analysis, early childhood, multisite studies, professional development, program evaluation, teacher education/development There is strong public support for expanding the availability of high-quality public preschool in the United States. Abipartisan research team found that 86% of Americans thought that the federal government should help states and local communities build better preschool services and improve access to preschool (Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research, 2014) . The Head Start program presently serves approximately 800,000 preschoolers nationally (Office of Head Start, 2015), and 42 states and a handful of cities fund their own public preschool programs (Barnett, Carolan, Squires, Clarke Brown,& Horowitz, 2015b) . Some cities—New York, Seattle, San Antonio, and Boston—have dramatically expanded access to public preschool in the last few years, adding thousands of publicly funded slots in a short time. In November 2016, voters in Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio, passed ballot initiatives to expand public preschool, and in April 2017, New York announced an expansion to serve 3-year-olds. To date, increasing the number of slots has proven to bethe easier part in expanding preschool nationally. The harder part has been ensuring that all slots are of high quality. In particular, instructional quality—the aspect of a preschool classroom most related to children’s school readiness (Pianta, Downer, & Hamre, 2016)—is stubbornly low inmost public programs (Weiland, 2016) . Work to date suggests that a combination of preschool curricula intentionally focused on specific domains, such as literacy, math, or social-emotional skills, and supported by teacher training and coaching—called the “strongest hope” model (Yoshikawa et al., 2013; Yoshikawa, Weiland, & BrooksGunn, 2016) or, most recently, the “good bet”model (Phillipset al., 2017)—may be our most promising tool for moving the needle on preschool instructional quality. Analysis of curricula in this category has highlighted two shared traits: first, they were developed by experts in the given domain (e.g., a math curriculum developed by math development experts); second, they are characterized by intentional playbased activities 1 that are fun and

FAQs

What problem does the article address about the strongest hope model?

The article notes that details from different evaluations of the model are not systematically compiled, making it hard to identify specific features tied to more successful implementations.

Which six features characterize successful implementations identified by the review?

The review identifies focus on specific instructional content, inclusion of highly detailed scripts, incorporation of teacher voice, time for planning, use of real-time data, and early childhood training for administrators.

What evidence base does the comparative review use?

It synthesizes five diverse large-scale evaluations, covering 6,500 children and 750 teachers across 19 localities and multiple auspice types.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Cipher