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Press release: Abecedarian study results

Newsmakers:
The Magic of Early Care
by Cate House

Sometimes there’s something to a name. Abecedarian, for instance, sounds almost magical.

Meaning one who teaches the alphabet, Abecedarian happens to be the title of a recent study that shows there might be something extraordinary about preschool education.

A landmark study of the potential benefits of early childhood education for poor families, the Abecedarian Project spans more than two decades and owes much of its success to the dedication of the 111 families involved and to researchers at Carolina’s Frank Porter Graham (FPG) Child Development Center.

Begun in 1972, the project started with 111 infants, all from low-income families, of which 98 percent were black. The infants were randomly divided into two groups: 57 were placed in a high-quality child-care setting at FPG from infancy to age five; the remaining 54 were cared for at home or attended other full-time child-care centers.

Twenty-one years later, researchers have completed their study on 104 of the original 111 children and have found that the effort to provide high-quality child care from birth does make a difference. From 18 months onward, those children in the high-quality child-care program scored higher on mental tests, as well as on reading and math achievement tests from the primary grades through young adulthood. They were also more likely to attend college.

Frances Campbell, principal investigator of the project, says she hopes the findings will convince national, state, and local officials that preschool education is valuable and worth funding. “The importance of high-quality, educational child care from early infancy is now clear,” she says.

The Abecedarian Project was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Maternal and Child Health Bureau, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute on Early Childhood Development and Education, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Article by Cate House
Photo courtesy FPG Child Development Center
© Copyright 2000 Endeavors magazine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

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