The Carolina Abecedarian Project was a controlled experiment that was conducted in 1972 in North Carolina, United States, by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute to study the potential benefits of early childhood education for poor children to enhance school readiness. It has been found that in their earliest school years, poor children lag behind others, suggesting the fact that they were ill-prepared for schooling. [1] The Abecedarian project was inspired by the fact that few other early childhood programs could provide a sufficiently well-controlled environment to determine the effectiveness of early childhood training.
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The participants in this experiment were 111 infants born between 1972 and 1977. Of these, 57 of which were given high-quality child care while another 54 acted as a control group. An overwhelming majority (98 percent) of the children who participated in the experiment were African-American. The average starting age of participants was 4.4 months.[2] Whereas other childhood programs started at age two, the Abecedarian Project started from infancy and continued for five years, a period longer than most other programs. The participants received child care for 6–8 hours a day, five days a week. Educational activities were game-based and emphasized language. The control group was provided with nutritional supplements, social services, and health care to ensure that these factors did not affect the outcomes of the experiment.[3] All the 111 infants were identified as "high risk" based on maternal education (which was on average 10th grade), family income, and other factors. The teacher-child ratio was low. It ranged from 1:3 for infants to 1:6 at age 5.[4]
Follow-up assessment of the participants involved in the project has been completed. Progress was monitored at ages 3, 4, 5, 6.5, 8, 12, 15 and 21.[5] The areas covered were cognitive functioning, academic skills, educational attainment, employment, parenthood, and social adjustment. The significant findings of the experiment were as follows:[6][7]
Impact of child care/preschool on reading and math achievement, and cognitive ability, at age 21:
Impact of child care/preschool on life outcomes at age 21:
The project concluded that high quality, educational child care from early infancy was therefore of utmost importance.
Other, less intensive programs, notably the Head Start Program, but also others, have not been as successful. It may be that they provided too little too late compared with the Abecedarian program.[4]
Campbell, Frances A., Craig T. Ramey, Elizabeth Pungello, Joseph Sparling, and Shari Miller-Johnson. “Early Childhood Education: Young Adult Outcomes From the Abecedarian Project,” Applied Developmental Science, 2002, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 42-57.
Leonard N. Masse and W. Steven Barnett, A Benefit-Cost Analysis of the Abecedarian Early Childhood Intervention, New Brunswick, N.J.: National Institute for Early Education Research, 2002. http://nieer.org/resources/research/AbecedarianStudy.pdf
Campbell, Frances A., Elizabeth Pungello, Shari Miller-Johnson, Margaret Burchinal, and Craig T. Ramey. “The Development of Cognitive and Academic Abilities: Growth Curves From an Early Childhood Educational Experiment,” Developmental Psychology, 2001, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 231-242.
The research program has been featured in the TV program "My Brilliant Brain" sent by National Geographic Channel in 2007.[8][9]