The Georgia Prekindergarten Program (Pre-K), established in 1993, provides Georgia's fouryear-old children with high quality preschool experiences in order to prepare them for kindergarten. Immediate gains resulting from Pre-K can be lost if teachers in later grades are not prepared to capitalize on the increasing capabilities of students. To sustain the positive effects of the Pre-K program, teachers in later grades need both to recognize that students are better prepared for school and to adapt their instructional practices to take advantage of their students' increasing capabilities. Research implies that teachers adopt practices in their classrooms relative to how their beliefs match assumptions inherent in new programs. Thus, this study investigates teacher awareness of the impact of Pre-K on students, teacher beliefs about instructional practices, current instructional practices, and the relationship between beliefs and practices.

The Council for School Performance launched this study to examine the implications of the Pre-K program for teachers of children in kindergarten through third grade. Through a survey of teachers in Georgia, the Council has found that teachers believe that the Pre-K program has positively affected students in elementary school, despite observations that students are, overall, changing for the worse. The majority of teachers believe in child-centered instructional practices, but this belief has not been adopted into their own instructional practices. Overall, teachers are as likely to use child-centered practices as they are to use teacher-directed activities.

A long-standing school reform program in Georgia, known as the League of Professional Schools, has succeeded in improving the performance of its member schools. The League of Professional Schools is a Georgia based reform effort that emphasizes teacher participation in informed decision-making within schools. More than 100 schools throughout the state have enrolled themselves in the League. The Council for School Performance, which is housed within the Applied Research Center in the School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, found a pattern of higher performance in League elementary schools than in similar elementary schools. Using the indicators of student achievement from the Council for School Performance elementary school reports, researchers found that schools participating in the League of Professional Schools performed better on all indicators and significantly better on one-third of the indicators. The evaluation concludes that this broad-based reform effort had specific and measurable impacts on student performance.

Findings reported here are from the second year of a longitudinal study of the Georgia Prekindergarten Program (Pre-K) conducted by staff of the Applied Research Center at Georgia State University. The study, which is being funded by the Office of School Readiness, is designed to follow a sample of Pre-K children through their school careers to study the effects of Pre-K on future educational success. For the second year of the study, 3,201 children were followed into 1,672 kindergarten classes. Sources of data for this year of the study included surveys of teachers and parents, as well as on-site visits to a random sample of classrooms.

The Georgia Prekindergarten Program (Pre-K), established in 1993, provides Georgia's fouryear-old children with high quality preschool experiences in order to prepare them for kindergarten. Immediate gains resulting from Pre-K can be lost if teachers in later grades are not prepared to capitalize on the increasing capabilities of students. To sustain the positive effects of the Pre-K program, teachers in later grades need both to recognize that students are better prepared for school and to adapt their instructional practices to take advantage of their students' increasing capabilities. Research implies that teachers adopt practices in their classrooms relative to how their beliefs match assumptions inherent in new programs. Thus, this study investigates teacher awareness of the impact of Pre-K on students, teacher beliefs about instructional practices, current instructional practices, and the relationship between beliefs and practices.

The Council for School Performance launched this study to examine the implications of the Pre-K program for teachers of children in kindergarten through third grade. Through a survey of teachers in Georgia, the Council has found that teachers believe that the Pre-K program has positively affected students in elementary school, despite observations that students are, overall, changing for the worse. The majority of teachers believe in child-centered instructional practices, but this belief has not been adopted into their own instructional practices. Overall, teachers are as likely to use child-centered practices as they are to use teacher-directed activities.

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