6/2013

Report Summary

Effectiveness
Doors to Discovery™ was found to have potentially positive effects on oral language and print knowledge and no discernible effects on phonological processing and math for preschool children.

Program Description
Doors to Discovery™ is a preschool literacy curriculum that uses eight thematic units of activities to help children build fundamental early literacy skills in oral language, phonological awareness, concepts of print, alphabet knowledge, writing, and comprehension. The eight thematic units cover topics such as nature, friendship, communities, society, and health. Each unit is available as a kit that includes various teacher resources.

Research
The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) identified three studies of Doors to Discovery™ that both fall within the scope of the Early Childhood Education topic area and meet WWC evidence standards. One study meets standards without reservations and two studies meet WWC evidence standards with reservations. Together, these studies included 585 preschool children aged three to five years old in three locations.

The WWC considers the extent of evidence for Doors to Discovery™ on the school readiness of preschool children to be medium to large for one outcome domain—print knowledge—and small for three outcome domains—oral language, phonological processing, and math. There were no studies that meet standards in the two other domains, so we do not report on the effectiveness of Doors to Discovery™ for those domains in this intervention report.

Source: What Works Clearinghouse

Available at: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/interventionreport.aspx?sid=153