Substantial research has suggested preschool as an effective setting for preventive interventions to reduce children’s behavior problems, especially for economically disadvantaged children who often face higher risk of developing emotional and behavioral difficulties than their affluent peers. Using a clustered randomized controlled trial design in Head Start programs, the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) provided one-year multifaceted services to support teachers' classroom management and to reduce children's risk of elevated behavior problems. The interventions included teacher training on behavior management strategies, the placement of mental health consultants in classrooms to coach teachers in implementing the behavior management strategies, and individual mental health consultation services for children with high emotional and behavioral problems. The CSRP included a total of 602 children in 35 classrooms from 18 Head Start sites.

We examine both the effects of the CSRP on children's behavior problems reported by parents on the Behavior Problems Index (BPI). We focus on the two domains of BPI (i.e., Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior Problems) and further use the six subscales of BPI, including antisocial behaviors, anxious/depressed mood, headstrong behaviors, hyperactive behaviors, immature dependency, and peer conflict/social withdrawal. The covariates in the analyses include child, mother, and family characteristics as well as teacher and classroom covariates at baseline. Since the CSRP random assignment was conducted at the Head Start site level using a pairwise procedure, we also control for site-pair fixed effects.

We first investigate whether the CSRP interventions can reduce children’s behavior problems in kindergarten and third and fifth grades. We use hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to account for the multilevel structure of the CSRP data, in which children were nested within classrooms and classrooms were nested within Head Start sites. We further conduct growth curve modeling to assess the initial status as well as individual change over time and between individual differences in patterns of growth from Head Start to fifth grade using repeated BPI measures. We also examine whether the CSRP effects are moderated by child gender, race/ethnicity, poverty-related risks, and initial behavioral skills at baseline.

Our preliminary results show that children in the CSRP intervention group tend to have fewer Internalizing Behavior Problems in kindergarten and 3rd grade than those in the control group. For BPI subscales, compared to children in control group, those in intervention group have lower scores on immature/dependency in kindergarten and 3rd grade, as well lower scores on hyperactive behaviors in 3rd grade. Further analyses will include 5th grade data and will conduct growth curve models. The study may provide new evidence on the effects of classroom-based early interventions on low-income children’s behavior problems. The findings can provide important implications for policymakers and help them make decisions on allocating scarce public funds to preventive interventions that target economically disadvantaged children who face multiple family and developmental risks.