Sparling – educational program

We believe that the results of this study, especially the first Abecedarian study and the big one we did on low birth weight children are the results of the educational program. That is the elements I talked to you about what happens in daycare. The reason we believe that is because we were careful for the kids who didn’t get into the program, the ones who were in the control group, to see that they had good health care, to see that they had good social services to make sure that they got nutritional supplements for example during the first years of life such as iron fortified formula and so forth. Those elements that we tried to equalize out across the two groups, and that really makes us believe that the effect was much more reasonably associated with the educational program.