Recruitment
RECRUITMENT
Recruitment was targeted at center-based childcare programs in rural and semi-rural counties in Pennsylvania. Preferred characteristics included being open for full-day care, providing meals and snacks in the classroom, and serving at least 50% of Head-Start eligible families. To maximize the potential for change in child outcomes, we also targeted centers with a lower-quality care rating (3 or less on the 4-point Keystone Stars rating of childcare performance standards), given the positive association between childcare quality and children’s social and cognitive outcomes.Children were required to be aged 2–5 years at the start of the trial. Children were excluded from the study if they were younger than 3 years by January of the academic year, did not attend preschool during days/times that intervention lessons were taught, or if they had medical or developmental conditions that affected their ability to complete the research assessments. Caregivers were excluded if they were not responsible for feeding their preschool child at least 50% of the time or if they were not fluent in English. To avoid nesting within families, data from one randomly selected child per family was included. Because randomization occurred at the classroom level, all children participated in all classroom activities, but data were only collected from children with consent to participate. The study was approved by the Penn State Office for Research Protections and Institutional Review Board (CATS #2116).