In response to the RFA, we propose a planning grant to address two domains of school readiness: self regulation of attention and emotion and early language and literacy. We will build on our existing experience with clinical service programs funded by the California Children and Families Commission (CCFC) and the Children and Families Commission of Orange County (CFCOC). These programs are based on collaborations among groups from the University of California at Irvine (UCI), Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), Orange County Head Start (OCHS), and the Orange County Department of Education (OCDE), and they provide science-based modules to supplement comprehensive preschool programs such as Head Start. In the 1-year planning grant, we propose to do the following: (1) to expand the collaboration to include other California locations (e.g., Los Angeles County, Riverside County, San Diego County) as potential sites for CCFC programs at the state and county level; (2) to consult with a research advisory group that has surveyed the scientific basis for early interventions (Posner, Farah, Bruer and Rothbart, 2001), and evaluate and refine the conceptual models for programs on regulation of attention and emotion (Swanson and Watkins, 2001) and the development of language and literacy (Mann, 2001); (3) to make plans to integrate a rigorous research evaluation component into the CCFC-funded service delivery programs and to explore ways to organize a large, multisite randomized clinical trial (RCT) of innovative curricula modules that are endorsed by the scientific review and funded as CCFC programs; (4) to identify target populations of children and families, sampling methods to assign children and families to experimental conditions of a RCT, personnel required to implement and evaluate the new curricula, a protocol for implementing the curricula modules with rigorous control, a suitable set of outcome measures for evaluating the RCT, and a plan to maintain and follow-up the sample over time; (5) to make provisions for data management and analysis of large multivariate data sets and a cost-benefit analysis. Our overall goal is to develop a partnership between a large state funded clinical service initiative (CCFC) and an innovative federally funded research effort (described in the RFA) to efficiently evaluate programs designed to improve school readiness in preschool children.
