Promoting positive transitions through coherent instruction, assessment, and professional development: The TRIAD Scale-up model

The fundamental question of whether preschool effects "fade" is hotly debated in arenas of theory, research, and policy. Few of these debates consider the role of transitions. Might it be that poor transitions are at least partly to blame? That is, if transitions are neglected, present educational contexts may be unintentionally aligned against the long-lasting impact of early interventions. We conducted a series of studies of an implementation of a scale-up model that evaluated the persistence of effects of a research-based model for scaling up. The largest of these research projects was explicitly based on the theory that fade-out of effects would be mitigated by attention to transitions. Results indicated that the intervention condition that included the model's transition strategies maintained gains of the pre-K mathematics intervention better than the condition that did not include such strategies. However, more extensive and effective transition strategies should be developed and evaluated that expand on children's learning in preschool and thereby completely close equity gaps in mathematics through the primary grades.