Outliers Pre-school centres where children made significantly greater/less social/behavioural
developmental gains than predicted on the basis of prior social behaviour and other significant
child, parent and home learning environment characteristics.
Pedagogical strategies Strategies used by the educator to support learning. These include the
face-to-face interactions with children, the organisation of the resources and the assessment
practices and procedures.
‘Peer Sociability’ At primary school entry, teachers rated the social behaviour of EPPE children
using the CSBQ. A factor analysis of the 45 items resulted in the extraction of 6 underlying
factors. Primary school entry factor 3 measures the child’s ability to play or work well with peers
and in groups and is termed ‘Peer Sociability’. Similarly, a factor analysis of the ASBI (rated by a
pre-school worker at entry to the study) resulted in the extraction of 5 underlying factors with
entry to study factor 2 measuring ‘Peer Sociability’.
Pre-reading attainment Composite formed by adding together the scores for phonological
awareness (rhyme and alliteration) and letter recognition.
Principal components analysis This is a statistical technique for extracting the most important
underlying factors from the correlations (measures of association) between a set of variables,
and hence enables many separate variables to be reduced to a few underlying factors.
Prior attainment factors Measures that describe pupils’ achievement at the beginning of the
phase or period under investigation (e.g. taken on entry to primary or secondary school or, in this
case, on entry to the EPPE study).
Quality Measures of pre-school centre quality collected through observational assessments
(ECERS-R, ECERS-E and CIS) made by trained researchers.
Sampling profile / procedures The EPPE sample was constructed by:
- Five regions (six LEAs) randomly selected around the country, but being representative of
urban, rural, inner city areas.
- Pre-schools from each of the 6 types of target provision (nursery classes, nursery
schools, local authority day nurseries, private day nurseries, playgroups and integrated
centres) randomly selected across the region.
Significance level Criteria for judging whether differences in scores between groups of children
or centres might have arisen by chance. The most common criteria is the 95% level (p<0.05)
which can be expected to include the ‘true’ value in 95 out of 100 samples (i.e. the probability
being one in twenty that a difference might have arisen by chance).
Social/behavioural development A child’s ability to ‘socialise’ with other adults and children
and their general behaviour to others.
Socio Economic Status (SES) Occupational information was collected by means of a parental
interview when children were recruited to the study. The Office of Population Census and
Surveys OPCS (1995) Classification of Occupations was used to classify mothers and fathers
current employment into one of 8 groups: professional non-manual, intermediate non-manual,
skilled non-manual, skilled manual, semi-skilled manual, unskilled manual, never worked and no
response. Family SES was obtained by assigning the SES classification based on the parent
with the highest occupational status.
Standard deviation (sd) A measure of the spread around the mean in a distribution of numerical
scores. In a normal distribution, 68 percent of cases fall within one standard deviation of the
mean and 95 percent of cases fall within two standard deviations.
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