Investments beyond ECE That Promote Early Learning

Overview | 23

A number of factors outside the ECE setting play a crucial role in shaping children’s developmental trajectories (Britto, Yoshikawa, and Boller 2011). Although the bulk of this volume focuses on the quality of classroom-based early learning and its effects on children’s development, factors such as parental engagement, learning resources at home, and learning resources in the community greatly influence children’s learning. These factors are important in and of themselves, but also interact with the quality of ECE in affecting learning outcomes. For example, quality early learning in a classroom setting can mitigate some of the effects of a poor home learning environment, and likewise a rich home learning environment can complement the effects of quality ECE (Anders et al. 2012; McDonald Connor et al. 2005; Melhuish et al. 2008; VotrubaDrzal et al. 2013).

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed new light on the crucial role that the home and community environments play in young children’s learning (box O.6). During the pandemic, learning has suffered greatly because of school closures (Azevedo et al. 2020), especially during children’s early years when the in-person interactions and relationships matter most (Lopez Boo, Behrman, and Vasquez 2020). As such, early learning interventions that target home and community environments play an important role in promoting resilience and equity while improving learning outcomes for all children.

The quality of parent-child interactions from the earliest years greatly influences children’s learning outcomes. As chapter 1 discusses, parents and caregivers are key decision-makers and stakeholders in their children’s education. Their beliefs about the purpose of ECE and how children should learn can affect the uptake and design of ECE programs (Wolf et al. 2019). Taken together, these factors highlight the need for interventions to empower parents to make evidence-based decisions about their children’s early learning, to help parents improve the quality of their parenting practices and interactions with children at home, and to increase parent involvement with the formal learning environment. These interventions are effective at both changing parents’ behaviors and improving child outcomes in LMICs (Barrera-Osorio et al. 2020; Britto et al. 2015; Jeong, Pitchik, and Yousafzai 2018). Design considerations and specific pathways to impact vary by local context, and more research is necessary on variations in caregiving beliefs and practices (Kabay, Wolf, and Yoshikawa 2017;