Early Head Start was designed in 1994 as a 2-generation program to enhance children's development and health, strengthen family and community partnerships, and support the staff delivering new services to low-income families with pregnant women, infants, or toddlers. This document contains the final technical report, appendixes, and local contributions to understanding the programs and their impacts. The final technical report examines the impact of Early Head Start on 3,001 families from 17 research programs from all U.S. regions in both rural and urban settings. A consistent pattern of statistically significant, modest, favorable impacts across a range of outcomes when children were 2 and 3 years old, with larger impacts in several subgroups was found. There was evidence that effects on children when they were 3 years old were associated with effects on parenting when children were 2. The impact findings suggest several lessons for programs, including the importance of the performance standards and the need to see new or alternative strategies for families with many risk factors. The second part of this document includes the appendices for the technical report. The appendixes acknowledge the contributions of individuals and organizations in conducting the study over 6 years and present information on the methods for data collection, sources of nonresponse, and the father study response rates; provide supplementary information on measures used in the evaluation for the impact and implementation analyses; describe details of analyses conducted to test assumptions underlying the analytic approach taken in the assessment of Early Head Start's impact on children and families; and present supplemental data tables. The third part of this document contains brief write-ups of 21 site-specific local research studies from 9 of the local research teams and from staff in 2 of the programs. The write-ups cover topics such as parent responsiveness and children's developmental outcomes; mothers' socialization of toddler conflict resolution; coping strategies of low-income mothers; functions of language use in mother-toddler communication; father-child interactions; a pattern of Early Head Start participation; and Early Head Start support of families in obtaining services for children with disabilities. Each write-up contains references. (KB)