As funding and support for early childhood education (ECE) increases, so too have questions about how to best structure ECE classrooms to support our nation’s youngest learners. There has been an ongoing debate as to whether children are best served in classrooms that focus on the development of specific academic skills or in classrooms that spend more time in child-directed play. This issue is of particular concern for publicly funded settings, as evidenced by recent Head Start reauthorizations which have prioritized the promotion of school readiness skills. This study uses five waves of nationally representative Head Start data to inform this debate by providing descriptive evidence about children’s experiences in Head Start classrooms from 2001 to 2015 across two key areas: Time spent on academic content and classroom instructional format. We find that the amount of time children spend on language and literacy content has increased, though time spent on mathematics lags behind. Children in full-day classrooms are also increasingly exposed to more teacher-directed instruction. Future work should consider how to continue to promote academic content while continuing to provide children the opportunity to direct their own activities and practice nonacademic skills.

随着对早期儿童教育（ECE）的资助和支持的增加，关于如何最好地构建ECE教室以支持美国最年轻的学习者的问题也越来越多。关于是否最好在侧重于特定学术技能发展的教室里或在花费更多时间从事儿童游戏的教室里为孩子服务，争论一直在进行。对于公共资助的环境，此问题尤其令人关注，最近的“重新开始”重新授权已证明了这一点，该部门已将提高学校的准备技能列为优先事项。这项研究使用五波全国代表性的Start Start数据，通过在两个关键领域提供有关2001年至2015年儿童在Head Start教室中的儿童经历的描述性证据，为这场辩论提供了信息：花在学习内容上的时间和课堂教学形式。我们发现，尽管儿童花在数学上的时间落后了，但儿童花在语言和识字内容上的时间却在增加。全日制教室中的孩子也越来越多地接受更多由老师指导的教学。未来的工作应考虑如何继续提高学术内容，同时继续为儿童提供指导自己的活动和练习非学术技能的机会。