Experimental Impact of a Quality Improvement Early Childhood Education Intervention in Rural China

This study recruits a large-scale sample of village-level kindergartens in rural China and employs a randomized-controlled trial experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of a novel and affordable professional development solution tailored for new teachers from high-poverty regions. The CEREC intervention package integrates picture books, a well-structured curriculum, and progressive daily online teacher training. The estimation of the treatment effects shows that the CEREC intervention had positive effects on children’s vocabulary and teacher’s teaching quality improvement. We estimated the causal mediation effects to further our understanding of the feasibility of professional development for ECE teachers in low-resource communities. This study’s results inform a policy that guarantees universal and adequate early childhood education for all ECE students in China.