West Virginia Evaluation Research Project

In 2015, the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at the Rutgers University, and Marshall University embarked in the first year of a what is to be a 5-year evaluation study of West Virginia’s Universal Pre-K Program. Funded by the West Virginia Department of Education, this multi-year, multi-site evaluation study includes a combination of designs to assess impact of Pre-K on children, continued impact over time as children progress through third grade, and quality of the pre-K program and early elementary classrooms. The main purpose of the WV impact evaluation is to estimate the effects of the program on children’s learning and development, by focusing on the seven counties with students with lower participation rates in the Pre-K program. These counties included Fayette, Greenbrier, Kanawha, Nicholas, Putnam, Roane and Wood. Two groups of children were assessed in the fall of 2015: (1) Children entering the Pre-K program and (2) children entering Kindergarten who have attended the Pre-K program the prior year. The first group of children became a part of our longitudinal sample. This longitudinal sample was followed through second grade across all the WV counties. 

The annual reports present each year’s findings from the evaluation. The focus is on the impact on children’s learning across various domains, the classroom quality they experienced, and how the impact varied for different children. In addition to describing these findings, the reports provide comparable findings from other preschool studies to contextualize the results. Overall, the reports demonstrate a continuous pattern of positive impacts of Pre-K on children’s learning and development as demonstrated in print knowledge and math assessments, where lower-income children benefitted most from Pre-K. However, positive impacts diminished by the end of kindergarten year and non-Pre-K attending children starting to converge with Pre-K attending children in the developmental outcomes measured through end of first grade year. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, child assessment data was not collected when the longitudinal cohort were in the third grade. Through the years, we also assessed quality in preschool and across the grades as the longitudinal children progressed in the early elementary system. The longitudinal cohort experienced lower classroom quality in Kindergarten and even lower levels of process quality in 1st grade, than they did in preschool. This could be the main contributor to the convergence observed. In 2nd grade, quality improved.