Early Childhood Interventions

Understanding and Finding Ways to Remedy Sources of Inequality

Since 2015, Professor Heckman and his team of researchers have worked to understand the sources of inequality in the family and educational environments of very young children. The projects focus on experiments that substantially enrich the early environments of children living in underresourced families. These studies demonstrate substantial positive effects of early environmental enrichment on a range of cognitive and non-cognitive skills, school achievement, job performance, and social behaviors–effects that persist long after the interventions have ended. Early mastery of a range of cognitive, social, and emotional competencies makes learning at later ages more efficient and therefore easier and more likely to continue. This work is regularly disseminated for a wider audience through the Heckman Equation Project.