Effectiveness of an Enrichment Program for Young Children Enrolled in Head Start Programs

ABSTRACT

The Developmental Screening, Monitoring, and Enrichment (DSME) program for low-income children and families is an initiative developed to support the goal of the Healthy People 2020 and 2030 that aims to increase the number of healthy young children to be ready for school. The 8-week DSME program focuses on reducing health disparities and improving the health of low-income children. A quasi-experimental research study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of the DSME program in 43 children enrolled in three Head Start programs. The children received weekly enrichment activities for 8 weeks. Each child was administered with Denver Developmental Screening Test-II at three intervals (week 1, week 4, and week 8) to identify their developmental levels and monitor their progress in four areas including personal-social, fine-motor, language, and gross-motor. Additionally, the parents received two 1-hour educational trainings to learn about children’s developmental milestones and strategies used to monitor and address their children’s developmental concerns. The data were analyzed using repeated measures ANOVA and paired t-test. The DSME program was found to be effective and can be easily implemented to any Head Start programs. The DSME program can help to increase the proportion of young children who are ready for school.

KEYWORDS:

• Child development
• developmental screening
• early intervention

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dale Coffin, Stacy Gropack and Mickey Ronan-Grosshtern for their expertise and assistance. The author thanks Allon Scheyer, Brittany Goldstein, Carrie Ma, Christie Toledo, Christina Phillip, Christine Gendy, Elina Rafailova, Elliot Stroh, Kim Ashley Chua, Michelle Kontarovich, Natalia Shalomayev, Natalia Verbitsky, Nushaba Ragimova, Paula Mugerman, Pearl Natanel, Radmila Isakharova, Rochel Klien, Rona Mahpour, Nirron Ingwer, Steven Guterman, Valeriya Svhevchenko, Yelena Badalov, and Yelizaveta Lyubomudrova for their assistance with data collection. Special thanks to all participating Head Start programs, children and parent participants and their families, who took part in this study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.