ABSTRACT
The EPPE research design allowed us to create thousands of individual developmental trajectories, one for each child in the study. To understand the impact of pre-school on the development of any one child, it was necessary to investigate the duration of attendance (in months) and how old the child was at the start of pre-school experience. But this is only part of the story: two children might begin pre-school at age 3 but one attends a nursery class in a local primary school for part of the day and the other attends a private day nursery for up to nine hours each day. The quality of their experiences may vary. Many studies on the effects of pre-school education focus exclusively on attendance at some form of nursery school, childcare centre or playgroup (Osborn and Millbank, 1987; Berrueta-Clement et al., 1984, Schweinhart and Weikart, 1997) along with hours’ or months’ experience. But EPPE wished to go much deeper than the type of provision and the hours of attendance; it sought to ‘open the nursery’s door and look inside the room’. It did this in several ways, but one of the most important ways was using direct observation to assess the quality of interactions, pedagogy, resources and relationships.
