Evaluation of Child Care Subsidy Strategies: Massachusetts Family Child Care Study, 2005-2007

The Massachusetts Family Child Care study is a two-year evaluation, conducted by Abt Associates Inc, the Manpower Development Research Corporation (MDRC) and the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), of the impacts of the LearningGames program on providers and children in family child care. LearningGames is designed to train caregivers to stimulate children's cognitive, language, and social-emotional development through a set of 200 simple games that encourage intensive, one-on-one interactions as a platform that allows the adult to engage the child in meaningful conversation, to listen to the child and respond to the child's questions and actions, and to scaffold and build on the child's growing skills at using and understanding language. The goal of LearningGames is to increase the frequency of rich language interactions between caregivers and children due to the importance of oral language development in children's understanding of words and concepts, in their ability to become competent readers, and in their long-term academic success and of the role played by rich language stimulation in promoting children's development. This evaluation of LearningGames examines the effectiveness of the program in changing the behavior of the family child care providers and the developmental outcomes for the children who are cared for by providers trained on LearningGames.

<b>Units of Response: </b>Massachusetts child care providers.

<b>Type of Data: </b>Administrative

<b>Tribal Data: </b>No

<b>Periodicity: </b>One-time

<b>Demographic Indicators: </b>Indigenous Population;Sex

<b>SORN: </b>Not Applicable

<b>Data Use Agreement: </b>Yes

<b>Data Use Agreement Location: </b>https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/31581/datadocumentation

<b>Granularity: </b>Childcare Providers;Individual

<b>Spatial: </b>States

<b>Geocoding: </b>Unavailable