The other day, I told you about how two professors from the University of Pittsburgh's School of Education came to be involved with Russia's orphanages. Now, I'd like to tell you what they have achieved through their work.

Their goals were two-fold: make care more consistent and more responsive. They had found that the average child in a Russian baby home could expect to encounter as many as 100 caregivers during his or her time there. Most of those caregivers had the equivalent of a high-school education, with essentially no specialized training in infant or toddler behavioral development.

Robert McCall and Christina Groark and their colleagues implemented a five-part training strategy modeled on widely accepted American training for work in early childhood. They trained a core group of caregivers in these methods, and how to teach them to others.

To carry out the structural changes, McCall and Groark began by dividing each group of 10-14 children in two. The groups still slept together, but they were given separate play and eating areas with the larger daytime room. They replaced the group playpens with living room-style furniture. And perhaps most importantly, they initiated a "family hour" a one-hour block in the mornings and afternoon when the group could not be disturbed by orphanage specialists or prospective parent visits. The goal was to replace an institutional setting with a create a family atmosphere.

They also created a new position, "primary caregiver", and assigned one to each group of five to seven children. Then they replaced the old work pattern (long days on, long days off) with four-day, seven-hour shifts staggered so that the children would see one or both of their primary caregivers every day.

What was the result of all these changes? Caregivers were found to be more responsive, and remained so for at least four years after their training. They also reported less job stress and anxiety. As for the children, without any changes in diet, exercise or medicine, they grew and functioned better. Their Battelle Developmental Inventory test scores (a key measure of development) jumped from 57 points to 92.

What happens next? I'll get to that in a future post. In the meantime, you can read more about the work of McCall and Groark here.