Head Start REDI

While Head Start children do significantly better than their counterparts on some cognitive and social-emotional indices, a 2005 study (USDHHS) showed no significant improvement on important aspects of school readiness such as oral comprehension skills, phonological awareness, aggressive behaviours, and social skills.

Head Start REDI was therefore developed in partnership with Head Start programs to target the promotion of specific school readiness skills in the domains of social-emotional development and cognitive development. Targeted skills in the social-emotional domain include prosocial skills, emotional understanding, self-regulation and aggression control. Targeted skills in the cognitive domain include language and emergent literacy skills.

Summary of findings to date

Compared to children in usual practice Head Start classrooms, children in REDI classrooms showed enhanced gains in:

  • Emergent literacy skills, including vocabulary growth, phonemic awareness, and letter recognition
  • Social behaviour, including higher levels of positive social behaviour and lower levels of aggressive behaviour
  • Learning engagement, including gains in concentration and task focus

Working memory and attention control predicted growth in emergent literacy and numeracy skills during the pre-kindergarten year, and made unique contributions to the prediction of kindergarten math and reading achievement.