HOT TOPICS
Quality Early Learning: Nurturing Children’s Potential Report Launch
The World Bank will host an event on Tuesday, May 17 at 9 a.m. EDT to launch their new publication, Quality Early Learning: Nurturing Children’s Potential. The publication, written by researchers and implementation experts, focuses on how young children learn, and provides evidence-based, cost-effective strategies for delivering quality early childhood education (ECE) in low- and middle-income countries. The event will be moderated by Sarah Bouchie, chief impact officer at the LEGO Foundation, and brings together eight panelists who, as policymakers, researchers, funders and practitioners, have focused on improving ECE. Registration is not required; the event will be livestreamed here, and participants can submit questions in advance here.
Dr. Cynthia García Coll: Frameworks, Perspectives, & Relevance for Today
Cynthia García Coll, who has championed developmental psychology throughout her decades-long career in higher education, will be featured in the Foundation for Child Development’s Scholars of Color Series on Wednesday, May 25. The series highlights contributions of scholars of color in the early childhood care and education field. García Coll was professor of education, psychology and pediatrics at Brown University for 30 years. Her research has focused on the interplay of sociocultural and biological influences on child development, especially among minority populations. She was editor of two major journals, Child Development and Developmental Psychology, and has published more than 160 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and books. García Coll is an adjunct professor at the University of Puerto Rico Medical School’s pediatric department. She is also the Charles Pitts Robinson and John Palmer Barstow Professor Emerita at Brown University. The webinar runs 1-3 p.m. EDT. Register here.
Call for Papers: Team Concepts in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)
The editorial board of the International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy invite submissions for a thematic issue centered on team concepts in early care and education. A variety of topics are eligible for inclusion, such as research on typical practices and trends, debates, policies, and the relationship of different team structures to child and staff outcomes. The deadline to submit an abstract has been extended to May 31. For more details, please visit here.
ECE RESEARCH
Content-rich instruction in pre-kindergarten consistently predicted math skills during the pre-K year, according to research conducted in 51 Boston Public Schools (BPS) pre-K classrooms. Findings also showed that classrooms used moderate levels of cognitively demanding and content-rich instruction, that gains were greater for children who started the school year with higher levels of math skills, and that classrooms who followed the BPS curriculum with greater fidelity typically used more cognitively demanding and content-rich instructional practices.
“Findings support the need for significant research devoted to better understanding and measuring the key levers in children’s PreK learning environments that support their development,” the researchers concluded. Read the full study here.
Kindergarten performance in language, literacy and math skills among children who attended Boston Public Schools’ pre-K program showed limited variation by kindergarten instructional experiences, researchers found. Findings “revealed limited evidence for the sustaining environments hypothesis,” which posits lasting effects of pre-K programs are contingent on the quality of the subsequent learning environment. Read the abstract here.
While most of the 2,764 pre-kindergartners in a national sample were well-adjusted to the preschool environment, nearly a quarter were classified into risk profiles, meaning they displayed consistent underactive or overactive behavior problems in classroom settings, researchers reported. Those with underactive problems showed the lowest academic proficiency, while those with overactive problems had the most negative teacher and parent relationships. Read the study, by Paul McDermott, Michael Rovine, Clara-Christina Gerstner, Emily Weiss, and Marley Watkins, here.
Pre-kindergartners from low-income families whose parents perceived greater child care instability had more behavioral problems that school year and more internalizing behavior problems in first grade, researchers found. The study examined data from 4,442 children in the Head Start Impact Study. The researchers note that “our findings suggest that policies that are designed to support families with low incomes with child care should include components that attempt to mitigate both perceptions of and objective indicators of instability in these settings.” Access the study, by Sara Schmitt, Brittany Mihalec-Adkins, Shannon Lipscomb, Megan Pratt, and Gregor Horvath, here.
In a meta-analysis of adult-child ratio and group size in early childhood classrooms, researchers found “surprisingly few high-quality studies exploring the effects of adult/child ratio and group size in ECEC using a methodologically suitable study design.” The meta-analysis results tentatively support the theoretical hypothesis that fewer children per adult and smaller group sizes are important to higher process quality in ECEC, but highlight a need for future high-quality research on group size and adult-child ratio. Read the study here.
Associations between Measures of Physical Fitness and Cognitive Performance in Preschool Children
Preschoolers who were more physically fit, especially those with good coordination, had better attention capacity than less fit 4- to 6-year-olds, a study found. High performance in hopping on one leg and similar complex fitness tasks tended to predict attention in preschoolers, they reported. Read the study, by Kristin Wick, Susi Kriemler, and Urs Granacher, here.
OPPORTUNITIES