Veda Bright
U.S. Department of Education
National Institute on Early Childhood Development and Education
The National Institute on Early Childhood Development and Education within the Office of Educational Research and Improvement has funded six new Field-Initiated Studies grants totalling approximately $1.059 million for the first year. Projects last up to three years. Selected from 104 proposals, the grantees and their projects are:
Regents of the University of California--Assessing Low-income Children's Changing Environments and Effects on School Readiness. The University of California is tracking at least 250 mothers with preschool-age children who receive welfare in two impoverished communities in Tampa, Florida. The study will assess changes in developmentally relevant facets of the home environment and in non-parental child care and preschool settings during welfare reform implementation. The study investigates how early learning settings of young children already at risk of school failure may be reshaped by welfare reform and the ongoing devolution of public early childhood support. It empirically examines how variability in neighborhoods, especially their early care and education infrastructures, may condition parents' decisions and effects on children's early learning and school readiness.
Project Director: Bruce Fuller
The Media Group of Connecticut--Parenting Through Play for School Readiness. This project proposes to improve early childhood learning by fully applying video, text, graphics, and online media to develop an empirically-tested, low-cost, easily replicable program to train parents and caregivers of low-income preschoolers. The goal is to foster children's ready-to-learn skills. The project will develop, test, refine, and nationally disseminate a video-based program for use in training low-income parents and other caregivers. The video will engage 3-5 year-old children from low-income families in play techniques which research has shown to enhance children's key cognitive, social and motor skills for school readiness. Once a statistical analysis demonstrates effectiveness, 2500 copies of the complete video-based training program will be distributed nationally. An online web site will be established and a national evaluation will be conducted. By disseminating free copies of an empirically-tested training video, and the accompanying printed manual, the project will help to train large numbers of parents and caregivers in simple, effective techniques to improve low-income children's school-readiness skills.
Project Director: Harvey Bellin
University of Colorado Health Sciences Center--Home Activity and Play Intervention.
The University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in collaboration with the University of Denver, will develop, implement and evaluate an early intervention service that: facilitates young children's developmental progress and intellectual growth through play and family routines, and increases parental involvement in their children's learning. This project will playfully integrate into the child and family's typical daily routines interventions which are based upon functional goals. In this project, at least 54 children and families will receive intervention through the Home Activity and Play Intervention (HAPI) model. Entry and exit data will be collected and compared to a contrast group of 54 children who will receive intervention through currently existing services. It is expected that the HAPI group will show increases in child developmental gains and functioning, successful incorporation of interventions into the family?s daily routines and increased satisfaction on the part of parents.
Project Director: Cordelia Robinson
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill--Engagement as an Outcome of Program Quality. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill is studying 68 infants and toddlers and 68 preschoolers who attend child care centers in central North Carolina for an average of at least six hours a day. The study is measuring relationships among child age, temperament, child engagement, home environment, socioeconomic status, child care center classroom quality, and children?s developmental outcomes. The purpose is to understand the relationships between child care quality and how children spend their time in child care centers, how quality mediates the effects of child and family variables on child outcomes, and how engagement moderates the effects of quality on child outcomes. The study is based on the premise that child engagement, (i.e., the amount of time children spend actively involved with adults, other children, and materials) is useful for determining the impact of different levels of child care quality. Increased understanding about engagement is expected to contribute to theory and knowledge in the area of child care quality, since it provides a basis for looking at what children do in child care settings.
Project Director: R.A. McWilliam
Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service--The Effects of Discrepancies in School Readiness Expectations on Young Children Living in Poverty. Universal school readiness has been embraced as a national education goal. While experts debate what school readiness is and how it should be assessed, parents, preschool and kindergarten teachers put into daily practice their explicit and implicit expectations regarding the attitudes and attributes children need to be ready to succeed in school. Unfortunately, there is little communication among them, and research suggests there are disparities in their readiness expectations. To build a common vision of readiness and strengthen connections between families, preschools and schools that ease children?s transition to school and promote school readiness, communities need to better understand the impact of these diverse expectations on young children, particularly in high poverty areas. This study addresses these issues by adopting a collaborative, community-based approach to studying the impact of discrepancies in the readiness expectations of parents, preschool teachers, and kindergarten teachers on children?s transition to kindergarten and on their kindergarten teachers? ratings of their school readiness. Data will be gathered from the parents, preschool teachers, and kindergarten teachers of 85 randomly selected ethnically diverse preschool children who attended a Head Start program and are now entering kindergarten in two high-poverty school districts in New York City. Results will inform the national dialogue on school readiness by highlighting its ecological context.
Project Director: Dr. Chaya S. Piotrkowski
Arizona State University and Southwest Human Development--Promoting Children's Language Development in Head Start Classrooms: Explorations with Collaborative Research Teams. This study is a collaborative effort between Arizona State University's Infant-Child Communication Research Programs and Southwest Human Development. The latter is a private, non-profit agency that provides comprehensive services, including Head Start, to young children and their families. The overall purpose of the project is to develop and evaluate a full partnership, research-to-practice model designed to facilitate the integration of validated language enhancement strategies into preschool children's everyday environments. Collaborative research partnerships will be formed with the parents, Head Start teachers, aides, and university researchers. The objectives of the research are to: (a) promote Head Start children's language development, with an emphasis on beginning school with essential language-based learning strategies; (b) link Head Start classroom practices with the children's homes; and (c) investigate the effectiveness of the collaborative research teams.
Project Director: Jeanne Wilcox
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