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The Taiwan Education Panel Survey (TEPS) is a national longitudinal project initiated by Academia Sinica and jointly funded by Ministry of Education, the National Science Council, and Academia Sinica. The objective of TEPS is to stimulate more basic research in the fields of education, sociology, economics, and psychology by employing large scale panel data on representative samples of students, and their parents, teachers, and school administrators. In a nutshell, TEPS has five distinguishing features: (1) Theory driven: The focus is on the skills, behavioral, values, and psychological consequences of schooling institutions and family environments of students. Factors that are found in the literature to affect students' learning outcomes are all included. Specifically speaking, an AOE model of learning outcomes, representing learning capabilities (Ability), learning opportunities (Opportunity), and the amount of effort made by the students (Effort), serves as a guiding framework for questionnaire development. Ability and effort are more on students themselves while opportunities covers family, teachers, and school environment, peers, and so forth.

(2) Student centered and multidimensional and multi-levels: Central to the project were questionnaire surveys of students. The data collection extends to cover the most influential actors in their learning environment: parents, teachers, and schools. It covered nested multiple levels of data - individual students, classes, and schools, etc.

(3) Panel surveys covering multiple programs and multiple cohorts: Students in junior high (G7 to G9), senior high (G10 to G12), vocational (G10 to G12), and junior college (G10 to G14) programs were administered for data collection. All students were followed at least twice. A portion of them were followed four times at G7, G9, G11, and G12. In light of the ongoing transformation of the Taiwanese educational system in 1990s, the project started with two cohorts of approximately 40,000 students, making it possible to employ a quasi-experimental design in future analysis.

(4) National representative samples of the students: Students under data collection were representative samples of the 1984/85 and 1988/89 birth cohorts. Weighting is provided according to the probabilistic sampling design.

(5) Public goods: Data are made available to the public as soon as the data collection and data cleaning is completed, thereby providing an important resource for both academic and policy research.

The Evaluation of Child Care Subsidy Strategies is a multi-site, multi-year effort to determine whether and how different child care subsidy policies and procedures and quality improvement efforts help low-income parents obtain and hold onto jobs and improve outcomes for children. Funding from the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) administered by the Child Care Bureau are divided into two purposes. The vast majority are aimed at assisting children of low-income working parents whose eligibility is determined by states within broad federal guidelines, while a much smaller portion (4 percent) work with state matching funds to improve the quality of child care for all children. For this studies series, four experiments were conducted, two test alternative subsidy policies for low-income families and two test approaches to the use of set-aside funds for improving child care quality for all children. The four study sites and focus of evaluation include: (1) effectiveness of three language and literacy curricula on teaching practices and children's language and literacy outcomes (Miami-Dade County, Florida); (2) impact of alternative eligibility and re-determination child care subsidy policies on parental employment outcomes (Illinois); (3) impact of alternative child care co-payment structures on use of child care subsidies and employment outcomes (Washington) and (4) effectiveness of training on Learning Games curriculum in changing care-giving practices in family child care homes and children's developmental outcomes (Massachusetts).

A two-year experiment, Project Upgrade tests the effectiveness of three different language and literacy interventions, Ready, Set, Leap! (RSL!), Breakthrough to Literacy (BTL) and Building Early Language and Literacy (BELL) implemented in child care centers in Miami-Dade County, Florida, that served children from low-income families. One hundred and sixty-two centers were randomly assigned to one of three research-based curricula or to a control group that continued with its existing program. The curricula, while grounded in a common set of research findings, differed in intensity, pedagogic strategies, and use of technology. In each center, one classroom that served four-year-old children was selected for the study. Teachers and aides assigned to the three treatment groups received initial and follow-up training as well as ongoing mentoring over a period of approximately 18 months, from Fall 2003 to Spring 2005. The study tested two kinds of outcomes: teacher behavior and interactions with children, and aspects of the classroom environment that support children's language and literacy development, measured through direct observation; and children's language and pre-literacy skills, measured by their performance on a standardized assessment.

To determine whether the interventions that had produced significant outcomes at the end of preschool had any lasting positive effects on early school performance, mathematics and reading follow-up assessments were done in the spring of the 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 school years. Of the 1,535 children assessed in the original Florida Upgrade study, follow-up measurements were taken on 1,137 children (74 percent). Also obtained were follow-up measurements on 127 children who were in the study centers in the original randomized design, but who were not present at the time of the initial child assessments.