Early Training Project, 1962-1979

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of a preschool educational intervention on attitudes relating to achievement, and on academic performance. Initiated in 1962, the study followed a group of 92 African-American children born in 1958, all of whom were from low-income homes and lived in two small cities in the Upper South. Children were selected for participation in the study if they lived in either poor and deteriorating housing or public housing, had a low family income, and had parents with less than a high school education who worked in an unskilled or semiskilled occupation. Half of the children took part in an early educational intervention program prior to school entrance, and the other half comprised both a local control group and a distal control group. The intervention program consisted of a ten-week summer preschool program for the two or three summers prior to the first grade, plus weekly home visits during the remainder of the year. The program focused on two broad classes of variables: attitudes relating to achievement (including motivation to achieve in school, persistence, delay of gratification, interest in school-type activities, and identification with achieving role models), and school performance (including learning of basic concepts, perceptual discrimination, and language development). Data from this study include tests of intellectual development prior to, during, and after intervention; tests of school achievement from first grade to high school; various indices of the affective domain; school records; ratings by teachers and counselors; interviews with participants in 1976 and 1979; annual interviews with the parents from 1962 to 1966 and again in 1975; and demographic and family data. The Murray Research Archive holds microfiche and numeric file data from this study