Attachment A_EDIT Advance Letter

ATTACHMENT A

EDIT ADVANCE LETTER

Shannon Monahan Project Director

P.O. Box 2393 Princeton, NJ 08543-2393 Telephone (609) 799-3535 Fax (609) 799-0005 www.mathematica-mpr.com

[DATE]

[CENTER NAME]

[CENTER ADDRESS]

Dear [CENTER CONTACT]:

Your child care center is invited to be part of an important project called the Examining Data Informing Teaching (EDIT) project. Sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, this project will develop a research tool to help understand how early childhood teachers assess the progress of children in their classrooms and use the information (data) to inform instruction. The work on this project is being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, an independent policy research organization, and its partners. You can read more about the project on ACF’s website: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/research/project/early-childhood-teachers-use-of-progress-monitoring-to-individualize.

Your participation in this project will help in developing this research tool. Participation involves a one-day visit to your program with some supportive tasks. In the six weeks before the one-day visit, we will ask a lead teacher selected by your program to do the following:

• Provide and collect consent forms from parents

• Gather existing documents such as activity or lesson plans and ongoing assessment information (such as anecdotal records, ratings, or portfolios of work) for two children

• Video-record a combination of assessments and small-group instruction that include the two focal children (we will provide the equipment for recording)

During the one-day visit, we will look at the documents and video recordings and then interview the teacher for one hour during the most convenient time for the teacher. We will provide a $75 gift card in appreciation for each lead teacher. After the one-day visit, the teacher will be invited to participate in a 20-minute phone call to debrief on the experience.

Participation in this project is completely voluntary. The information we collect will be used for research purposes to make the measure better and to teach assessors how to use the tool. All information from this project will be private to the extent permitted by law and will not be shared with the program. Individuals in observed classrooms will not be identified by name in any published reports. Project results will discuss what we learned about the measurement of how teachers assess the progress of children and then use that data to individualize instruction. The results will not refer to individual people, classrooms, or programs.

A project coordinator will call you soon to discuss the project and your interest in allowing a classroom at your program to participate. The purpose of the call is to answer any questions you may have about the project and to determine your setting’s eligibility to participate. When you agree to participate and a select a classroom, the project coordinator will also collect general information about the classroom, such as the number of teachers, their job titles, and the number of children in the eligible classroom. To make this conversation as efficient as possible, we will ask that you pick a person who can serve as a liaison between the project, the teacher, and the families. This person will receive a $50 gift card to purchase materials for your setting as a thank you for his/her help.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me, either via email at SMonahan@mathematica-mpr.com or by phone at 609-275-2207. For more information on Mathematica, please visit our website at www.mathematica-mpr.com. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

S incerely,