Preschool instructional approach and adult well-being

Historically, early childhood education programs were developed to promote children's cognitive, literacy, and social-emotional development for school entry and beyond and to counteract the negative effects of poverty that are transmitted fromgeneration to generation. In response to President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, preschool programs, such as the federally funded Head Start, emerged in the 1960s with the belief that environmental context can have an impact on children's cognitive and social-emotional development (Condry, 1983). After several decades of research, there is now strong evidence documenting that investments aimed at improving school readiness for economically disadvantaged children are an effective strategy to prevent problems before they arise (Duncan and Murnane, 2011). Since the emphasis on early childhood education interventions proposed in the 1960s, American society has come to rely on its schools to reduce the achievement gap particularly among children born into poverty (Duncan and Murnane, 2011). Currently, a large variety of curricula under the broad framework of several instructional approaches have been developed and implemented in response to the multiple perspectives of best practices for promoting early childhood learning. However, with so many curricula and instructional approaches in existence, early education researchers, teachers, and policymakers have questioned which preschool instructional approach is most effective and whether or not gains due to preschool programs are sustained over time.