Tag Archives: Research

Are You an Early Childhood Special Educator? Invitation to join dissertation study on staff health and wellness

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Study Purpose: The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding of wellbeing of early childhood special education teachers and their experiences in the field as well as your profile on certain positive psychology variables (e.g., wellbeing, mental health, and workplace satisfaction). 

Who can participate?
If you: 

  • Are an early childhood special education teacher serving children 3 years to 8 years old 
  • Hold a special education and early childhood licensure from one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia
  • Teach in early childhood special education in preschool settings (push in our pull out/ public and non-public setting

You can participate! 

Why should I participate?
By participating, you have the opportunity to share your experience. You will help people better understand early childhood special education teacher’s wellbeing. 

What can I expect if I participate?
There are two parts to this study: 

  1. Survey: A 20-minute survey will ask about (1) demographic information (2) individual profile on teacher and general well-being scales and then a career wellbeing scale and (3) profile of mental health symptoms (depression and anxiety inventories) 
  2. Interview: If chosen a one-hour interview will be conducted at a place of your choice.

 The consent form will provide you with more information about what to expect. 

Consent & Confidentiality:
Participation is voluntary, and you will complete a consent form. Consent can be withdrawn at any time without penalty. All information obtained is strictly confidential. Please see the consent form for additional information about risks to confidentiality. 

About the researcher:
Heather Walter is a doctoral student in special education at George Washington University in Washington, DC. She is interested in learning about early childhood special education teacher’s wellbeing. The dissertation is titled: Exploring early childhood education teacher’s wellbeing through a multidimensional framework: A Mixed Methods Study.

For additional information contact: Heather Walter: hwalter@gwu.edu or (585) 451-6043 

The National Research Conference on Early Childhood

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Title: NRCEC 2018 Document Header. - Description: NRCEC 2018. The Administration for Children and Families presents the National Research Conference on Early Childhood. June 25-27, 2018. Crystal Gateway Marriott. Arlington, VA.Registration is open!

We are pleased to invite you to attend the Administration for Children and Families’ 2018 National Research Conference on Early Childhood (NRCEC 2018). The conference will be held June 25–27, 2018, at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, VA.

This conference, presented by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in conjunction with the Office of Head Start, is the leading venue for research on the development, education, and care of young children and their families and the policy and practice implications of their findings.

Please visit http://nrcec.net/ to register to attend the conference or for more information about the event. There is no cost to attend the conference, although all participants should register in advance through the conference website.

Please download, print, and share the registration flyer with colleagues!

 For hotel reservations, please contact the Crystal Gateway Marriott at (888) 421-1442 and provide the reservation attendant with the group name “NRCEC18” to receive the discounted room rate. Additionally, reservations can be made through the online reservation system. The group code for the discounted conference room rate will automatically be applied when you make your reservation on line. To receive this discounted rate, attendees must make reservations with the hotel by Wednesday, June 1, 2018. After this date, reservations will be accepted on a space-available basis and may be at a significantly higher rate.

 If you have any questions about the conference, please contact us at nrcec@impaqint.com.

 We look forward to seeing you in June!

The NRCEC 2018 Logistics Team
Office of Child Care
Administration for Children and Families
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Mary E. Switzer Building, Fourth Floor, MS 4425
330 C Street, S.W.
Washington, DC  20201
General office number: (202) 690-6782
Fax: (202) 690-5600
General email: occ@acf.hhs.gov
Website: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/occ

Child Care Aware® of America Symposium and Gala Celebrating Passion and Persistence. Igniting Possibilities

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April 17-20, 2018

Marriott Marquis

Washington, DC

Child Care Aware® of America 30th Anniversary

Child Care Aware® of America is celebrating 30 years in the child care community at the Child Care Aware® of America Symposium 2018. The Symposium is the biennial event that brings together individuals from across the country come together to discuss the hottest topics of research, policy, and practices of interest to the early child care and education community.

This year has been extremely special as Child Care Aware® of America celebrated 30 years of growth and accomplishments. We are honored to have you help celebrate the closeout of Child Care Aware® of America’s 30th Anniversary.

Speakers/Program

We’re excited to announce that the digital version of the 2018 Symposium program is now available for download on the Child Care Aware® of America website. Download the PDF to browse the agenda and explore the sessions and speakers most relevant to your work.

 

Learn more about plenary topics that were covered during the 2016 Symposium here.

Who Should Attend?

The Symposium is the biennial event that brings together child care experts, Child Care Resource and Referral leaders and staff, child care providers, researchers, policymakers, parents, students, and anyone interested from across the country come together to discuss the hottest topics of research, policy, and practices of interest to the early child care and education community.

Why Should You Attend?

  1. Hear from Outstanding Experts in the Community
  2. Find Solutions
  3. Share Ideas and Learn From Others
  4. Put Faces to Names
  5. …and more!

Registration

Register Early and Save! Get the best rates when you register early. Bring your family, staff or become a Child Care Aware of America member and save even more.

Registration Rates Regular Rate On-Site
1/23/18 – 4/8/18 After 4/8/18
Member $529 $579
Non Member $599 $649

 

Register Now

Head Start is underfunded and unequal, according to a new study

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12/14/16

Head Start, the federal program that provides education, nutrition and health services to low-income children and their families, is not adequately funded and is administered so differently from state to state that children do not benefit equally, according to a new report from the National Institute for Early Education Research.

The 478-page report, “State(s) of Head Start,” released Wednesday, calls for a near tripling of the program’s budget — to more than $20 billion — to fully meet its goals for serving 3- and 4-year-old children living in poverty. It also points to wide gaps in Head Start programs related to quality of instruction, amount of instruction, access to programs and levels of funding.

“Despite decades of bipartisan support for Head Start, we conclude that the program suffers from inadequate overall public investment,” the report’s authors wrote. “Simply put, the program is not funded at a level that would make it possible to provide child development services of sufficient quality and duration to achieve its goals while serving all eligible children even at ages 3 and 4, much less for those under age 3.”

The report, which compiled program data from 50 states, the District of Columbia and six territories, provides a deeper understanding of who Head Start serves and where it operates best, said Steven Barnett, executive director of NIEER and one of the study’s authors. But it also makes clear, he says, how and where the program has fallen short.

“The percentage of poor kids that Head Start serves nationally could be as low as a quarter, meaning that 75 percent of the children in poverty are not getting Head Start,” Barnett said in an interview. “I don’t think people understand that. And then if you say that the intended population is not just kids who are poor, but kids who are near-poor, then I think people don’t understand that that’s half the children in the country.”

The report arrives as Donald Trump prepares to step into the White House amid uncertainty about funding priorities in the new administration. The Health and Human Services Department, which is expected to be led by Trump’s nominee, Tom Price (R-Georgia), runs Head Start.

Barnett said that while there are questions about the new administration’s plans, he believes there is reason to be optimistic…

Source: The Washington Post

Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/head-start-is-underfunded-and-unequal-according-to-a-new-study/2016/12/14/54b01b24-c095-11e6-897f-918837dae0ae_story.html

High-Quality Birth-to-Five Programs Produce a Greater Return on Investment

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12/12/16

Professor James Heckman and colleagues have just released The Lifecycle Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program, the results of a new analysis demonstrating that high-quality birth-to-five programs for disadvantaged children can deliver a 13% per year return on investment—a rate substantially higher than the 7-10% return previously established for preschool programs serving 3 and 4-year-olds.

Heckman’s team used data from FPG’s Abecedarian Project and FPG’s Carolina Approach to Responsive Education, and this new analysis includes the value of health outcomes, as well as the economic benefits of providing child care to mothers.

In a two-page research snapshot, Heckman and colleagues recommend “more and better” programs for young children in poverty.”Child poverty is growing in the United States,” they write. “Investing in comprehensive birth-to-five early childhood education is a powerful and cost-effective way to mitigate its negative consequences on child development and adult opportunity.”The authors also suggest that policymakers coordinate early childhood resources “into a scaffolding of developmental support for disadvantaged children” and that such support “provide access to all in need.”According to the researchers, “the gains are significant because quality programs pay for themselves many times over. The cost of inaction is a tragic loss of human and economic potential that we cannot afford.”

Source: FPG Child Development Institute

Available at: http://fpg.unc.edu/node/8730

Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES)

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The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is proposing to collect data for a new round of the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES). Featuring a new “Core Plus” study design, FACES will provide data on a set of key indicators, including information for performance measures. The design allows for more rapid and frequent data reporting (Core studies) and serves as a vehicle for studying more complex issues and topics in greater detail and with increased efficiency (Plus studies).

The FACES Core study will assess the school readiness skills of Head Start children, survey their parents, and ask their Head Start teachers to rate children’s social and emotional skills.

Source: Office of Head Start

Available at: http://hsicc.cmail20.com/t/ViewEmail/j/117A8F86594F1FFD/2ABD24CF6E74000C0F8C96E86323F7F9

The National Research Conference on Early Childhood (formerly known as Head Start’s National Research Conference on Early Childhood) Save the Dates!

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July 11–13, 2016
Washington, DC

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), in conjunction with the Office of Head Start (OHS), is pleased to announce the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) National Research Conference on Early Childhood. This announcement includes details about the conference, and a call for presentations.

This conference was formerly known as the Head Start National Research Conference. Since 1991, Head Start’s National Research Conference on Early Childhood has highlighted cutting edge research on low-income families with young children. In order to welcome participation from researchers, practitioners, and policymakers across early childhood fields, the conference is now called the Administration for Children and Families’ National Research Conference on Early Childhood.

About the Conference

Head Start is the nation’s leader in early childhood care and education and a center of innovation. OHS sponsors this conference to identify and disseminate research relevant to young children birth to age 8 and their families. There is particular focus on research that considers low-income families with young children. The conference encourages collaboration across the early childhood research field in order to build upon the evidence base for policy and practice.

This year’s theme is increasing access to high-quality early care and education experiences for low-income children from birth through early elementary school. Over the past decade, there has been substantial public investment at the national, state, and local levels. This support is aimed at improving the quality of early care and education. There also has been an effort to expand these services, including in Head Start, child care, home visiting, and pre-kindergarten.

It is clear that quality in early childhood has many components. It involves workforce training, practice improvement, and curriculum development. It requires accountability, measurement development and progress monitoring. Quality also includes parenting supports and parent engagement. The development of an evidence base to feed into continuous quality improvement is critical to the success of children, families, and programs.

Call for Presentations: Due Dec. 18 (extended from Dec. 9th)

The Conference Program Committee invites proposals for posters, symposia, and poster symposia. Presentations may discuss recent research (published or unpublished) or synthesized findings. The online submission system opens the week of Nov. 16, 2015. The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015.

Research presented at the 2016 Conference will address knowledge gaps across service delivery systems. Sessions will be consistent with the theme. They will focus on improving understanding of the quality factors that impact programs and families and the evaluation of approaches for improving quality. The sessions also will address obstacles and solutions regarding families’ access to high-quality care and education. Methods and measurement development for examining quality and family decision-making regarding early childhood education also will be in line with this theme.

See the Call For Presentations for more details about the theme and guidance for submitting a proposal. Learn more about the conference and what is required to submit a proposal online at www.rcec2016.net.

For general submission questions or details on how to submit a paper application, contact Jennifer Pinder at 1-800-503-8442, ext. 7054, or by email at rcec2016@impaqint.com.

For More Information

Select the link to review materials from previous conferences: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/events/head-start-national-research-conferences

Check back often for more details about this event and the call for presentations. We look forward to seeing you in July!

Poor kids who go to daycare may later do better in school

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11/23/2015

The more time low-income children spend in daycare, the better they’re likely to be doing in school at age 12, a Canadian study suggests.

While previous research has linked high quality daycare centers to better academic performance, the current study focussed on whether daycare might help reduce or eliminate income-based disparities in achievement through adolescence.

Researchers found that children from low-income families who spent the most time in center-based care scored 37 percent better on reading and writing tests and 46 percent better on math exams at age 12 than similar kids who logged the fewest hours in daycare centers.

“Children from disadvantaged families who remain at home have double risks – they evolve in a home environment that is less stimulating than that of non-disadvantaged children and they are not exposed to the learning experience that most children receive by going to child care,” senior author Sylvana Cote, of the University of Montreal in Canada, said by email.

Source: Reuters

Available at: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-kids-daycare-idUSKBN0TC1XN20151123

Measuring Child Outcomes in the Early Years

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11/2015

By W. Steven Barnett, PhD, Shannon Riley-Ayers, PhD, & Jessica Francis, PhD

As our nation increases public and private investments to support the care and education of young children, there is increased concern about how specific public policies affect children before they enter primary school. This desire to establish cause and effect and to estimate the magnitude of benefits to children’s learning, development, and wellbeing (LDWB) puts increased technical demands on assessment (discussed below). In addition, causal attributions require more than simply describing children’s development over time, it requires rigorous research methodologies that warrant strong causal inferences.

The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), partner to CEELO, was commissioned by OECD to provide a scholarly discussion paper that presented the pros and cons of various methods of and instruments used for reporting on international data of children’s cognitive and social outcomes. This report draws from the work for that paper to provide information to inform decision-making regarding the assessment of young children’s LDWB for state and national assessments designed to inform early childhood education (ECE) policy and practice. We include “wellbeing” because ECE should not merely be a means to improve a young child’s future success in school, or even life, but should enhance the child’s current quality of life. The primary focus here is on the preschool years. As there are many, many assessments available, this report does not review all of the individual assessments. Several much broader reviews with exhaustive compendia are already available such a publication from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (Snow & Van Hemmel, 2008). Instead, we describe and illustrate each of the general approaches from which policy makers can choose.

Source: Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes

Available at: http://ceelo.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ceelo_policy_brief_assessment_final_web_2015_11_11.pdf

Helping children hear better

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10/27/2015

Hearing well impacts every area of a child’s life—language and speech development, social skills, and future academic and personal success.

Yet little research has been conducted that focuses on infants and preschoolers with mild to severe hearing loss to determine what support or services will help them succeed.

A large-scale longitudinal study, the first-of-its-kind in the nation, followed children ranging in age from 6 months to 7 years old who experienced mild to severe hearing loss.

The Outcomes of Children with Hearing Loss (OCHL) study, conducted by researchers at the University of Iowa, Boys Town National Research Hospital, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, examined the impact of early identification and intervention on children with hearing loss.

The study’s findings were published online Oct. 27  in a monographic supplement to the November/December issue of the journal Ear and Hearing, published by the American Auditory Society.

Source: Iowa Now

Available at: http://now.uiowa.edu/2015/10/helping-children-hear-better