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.
Pre-reading attainment Composite formed by adding together the scores for phonological
awareness (rhyme and alliteration) and letter recognition.
Prior attainment factors Measures which describe pupils’ achievement at the beginning of the
phase or period under investigation (i.e. taken on entry to primary or secondary school or, in this
case, on entry to the EPPE study).
Quality of pre-school settings 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 LAs) 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, play groups 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 I, other professional non-manual II, skilled
non-manual III, skilled manual III, semi-skilled manual IV, unskilled manual V, 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% of cases fall within one standard deviation of the
mean and 95% of cases fall within two standard deviations.
Target centre A total of 141 pre-school centres were recruited to the EPPE research covering 6
types of provision. The sample of children was drawn from these target centres.
Value added models Longitudinal multilevel models exploring children’s cognitive progress
over the pre-school period, controlling for prior attainment and significant child, parent and home
learning environment (HLE) characteristics.
Value added residuals Differences between predicted and actual results for pre-school centres
/schools (where predicted results are calculated using value added models).
Year 1 Children completed assessments in the Spring term when aged between 5 years 6
months and 6 years 6 months.
Year 5 Children completed assessments in the Spring term when aged between 9 years 6
months and 10 years 6 months.
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