Efficacy of an intensive home-based educational intervention programme for4-to 6-year-old ethnic minority children in the Netherlands

This paper reports the results of an intensive home-based educational inter vention programme for 4- to 6-year-old children at risk of educational fail ure. 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 group s, without apparent success. Building on the basic intervention strategy of HIPPY (i.e., involving mothers and paraprofessional aides), a new curricul um was developed based on recent theoretical insights in cognitive and lang uage development, and emergent literacy and numeracy. The programme was car ried out with Turkish and Moroccan immigrant families. For the Turkish grou p, the results were partly positive: There were modest effects of the progr amme on cognitive development and emergent numeracy, small effects on Turki sh language development, but no effects on Dutch language development. In c ontrast, for the Moroccan group the effects were disappointing. The results are evaluated with respect to recent insights into effective strategies an d essential ingredients of early educational intervention programmes.