The Search for a “Perfect” Curriculum
Wouldn’t it be great if we could figure out the perfect curriculum? Project Follow Through (FT) and the Head Start Planned Variation studies were research efforts that attempted to do exactly that (Stebbins, 1977). These two longitudinal studies emerged from the national Head Start program.
By 1967, the Johnson administration wanted to extend the benefits of Head Start early education through the primary grades 13, so they requested $120 million to fund the new FT program. When funding would not support that kind of an initiative, the FT effort became a research project. The purpose of FT was to determine the “best” curriculum for disadvantaged children by evaluating gains in academic achievement over time. Thus a planned variation research model was proposed that allowed participating schools to choose from twenty approved curricula.
In 1969, Head Start implemented a similarly structured effort, comparing eight models at demonstration sites (Klein, 1971). Unfortunately the findings from both studies were inconclusive and researchers as well as those with vested interests in one curriculum or another have been arguing about it ever since (Stebbins, 1977). However, these efforts did serve to (1) spur the development of new curricula, which remain with us today; (2) provide an incentive to reexamine traditional approaches, such as the Bank Street model; and (3) encourage thinking about early childhood curriculum in a structured, intentional way.
Today, the National Center for Early Development and Learning (NCEDL) and the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) sponsor the largest number of early education research initiatives. The NCEDL is funded through the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), and the NIEER is funded through a consortium of charitable organizations in collaboration with the U.S. DOE. The websites for these programs provide a great deal of information on current and past studies.
Brain Research
In the past two decades research in the field of neuroscience has provided irrefutable evidence of the importance of the early childhood period to the development of the brain (this is discussed more fully in Chapter 4 and later chapters). As a result, early childhood curriculum developers are learning more and more about the architecture of the brain and its structures, the nature of intelligence, and the influence of emotions (Rushton, 2011). This research confirms long-held theoretical and intuitive beliefs about the value of active learning and socially reciprocal relationships during early childhood.
We first mentioned Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (1983) in Chapter 1. Gardner is part of a research consortium at Harvard University known as Project Zero. Philosopher Nelson Goodman of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education initially began the project in 1967 to study ways to use the arts to improve education. Project Zero focuses on “understanding learning in and through the arts . . . while drawing together diverse disciplinary perspectives to examine fundamental questions of human expression and development” (Project Zero, n.d., para. 1). But many of the projects are inextricably linked with new information coming from neuroscience. Of particular interest to early childhood educators is the “Making Learning Visible” (MLV) project, which explores the benefits of group learning and the documentation processes, originally developed in the Reggio Emilia preschools in Italy, to represent learning visually over time. As a result, teachers are encouraged to use a wide variety of tools and strategies to describe what and how children are learning.