Efficacy of an intensive home-based educational intervention programme for 4- to 6-year-old ethnic minority children in the Netherlands

This paper reports the results of an intensive home-based educational intervention programme for 4- to 6-year-old children at risk of educational failure. The programme, Opstap Opnieuw (“Step-up Anew”), was developed in the Netherlands as an alternative to the well-known HIPPY-programme, of which a Dutch version was carried out in the early 1990s for ethnic minority groups, without apparent success. Building on the basic intervention strategy of HIPPY (i.e., involving mothers and paraprofessional aides), a new curriculum was developed based on recent theoretical insights in cognitive and language development, and emergent literacy and numeracy. The programme was carried out with Turkish and Moroccan immigrant families. For the Turkish group, the results were partly positive: There were modest effects of the programme on cognitive development and emergent numeracy, small effects on Turkish language development, but no effects on Dutch language development. In contrast, for the Moroccan group the effects were disappointing. The results are evaluated with respect to recent insights into effective strategies and essential ingredients of early educational intervention programmes.