Dear Colleagues,

At the ECEI we have been busy during February, March, and April with three big tasks. The first is the search for new colleagues to join us in the near future; the second is preparing for spring/summer conferences; and the third is completing our winter data collection and transitioning to spring data collection protocols for our current projects.

Relative to welcoming new colleagues, I’m pleased to announce that Cara Kelly will be joining us as an ECEI Post Doctoral Fellow in late summer. Cara completed her Ph.D. at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation title was: Investigating Classroom Quality in a Head Start Context: A Mixed Methods Approach. Her committee included our colleagues Jason T. Hustedt (chair), Rena A. Hallam, Anamarie A. Whitaker, and Laura L. Brock. Cara has a focus on Head Start and is already working with Anamarie Whitaker to develop an OPRE Secondary Analysis Grant for the upcoming late April deadline using the FACES datasets.

In the winter newsletter I noted that I plan to retire at the end of this calendar year (December 31, 2024) and the search for the new Director of the ECEI and George Kaiser Family Foundation Endowed (GKFF) Chair was beginning. Our plan was to identify a senior faculty colleague at the advanced associate or full professor level by spring, with an August 1, 2024 start date. I plan to “work beside” the new ECEI Director and GKFF Endowed Chair through December 31, 2024 to facilitate a smooth transition. We have interviewed two candidates and negotiations are underway. Stayed tuned for an announcement very soon!

Our staff have been actively representing the ECEI at recent conferences including the Texas Early Childhood Summit in College Station, Texas and the World Forum on Early Care and Education in Vancouver, British Columbia. We have more conferences planned for the near future including the Educare Learning Network in Sioux City, Iowa in May and have several accepted proposals for the June National Research Conference on Early Childhood (NRCEC) in Washington, DC. Please look for us there!

Most of our ECEI projects involve classroom observations in the winter and then turn attention to child assessments in the spring. Our projects have successfully wrapped up observations and the staff are looking forward to interacting with the children—the component of our work that most staff enjoy the most.

As always, I welcome your suggestions and comments. Please email me (dhorm@ou.edu) or call (918-660-3907).

In closing, as the end of the semester approaches, I wish you a calm May and June.

Sincerely, Diane

ECE Research Receives Federal Funding

Research has shown that childhood peers can influence the behavior and development of young children, but a team of researchers from University of Oklahoma - composed of Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education faculty from both Tulsa and Norman campuses, have received a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to delve further into this interesting finding.

“Current research mainly focuses on the influence of caregivers like teachers and parents, on children's learning and development. The research gives less attention to the impact of peers on young children's outcomes,” says Dr. Wonkyung Jang, principal investigator on the project and assistant professor in the department of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum (ILAC) at OU-Tulsa. “We will use cutting edge machine learning techniques to dig into data on peer effects in early care and education settings.”

He goes on to explain that most peer effect studies have explored simply whether or not peer effects exist, but their research will examine the ways in which exposure to peers has an impact on young children, infancy to five years of age, as well as how different contexts play a role in these interactions.

The research proposal, “Innovative Approaches to Studying Peer Effects in Head Start and their Implications for Policy, Research, and Practice,” has been granted an expected $100,000 for the 18-month duration of the data study. The team will use data collected from Head Start and Early Head Start programs that are part of the Educare Network.

“The Educare Learning Network currently is a collaborative of 25 high quality early childhood programs designed for children birth to age five across the country. It goes from Maine to Southern California, from Seattle to Florida, with many programs clustered in the Midwest,” says Dr. Diane Horm, founding director of the Early Childhood Education Institute at OU-Tulsa, the George Kaiser Family Foundation Endowed Chair of Early Childhood Education, and a member of the team for this project. “The sample is really diverse. And that's an exciting thing about this project - not only is our sample so large, but it's current and diverse. This feature distinguishes our study from others using datasets that are older and thus not as reflective of the current composition of young children across the US.”

According to Dr. Jang, there are four areas of research the study will address:

• How peer ability and background characteristics influence children's developmental outcomes, including social, emotional, language, and cognitive outcomes

• How the duration of peer exposure affects the strength and nature of peer effects. Some children experience the same peers for just one or two years. On the other hand, with Educare, there are mixed age group classrooms for infants and toddlers. So, some children can spend two or three years together in the same classrooms.

• How exposure to other children with varying ability and background characteristics, such as dual language learners, children with disabilities, or experience with very young children influence children's developmental outcomes

• How contextual factors such as group composition, classroom quality, and continuity of care, play a part in peer effects on children's developmental outcomes

Once the review and analysis of the data has been completed, the Educare Network – including the Head Start and Early Head Start programs - will benefit from the findings to use in future policy and program decisions.

Kyong-Ah Kwon, the Cable Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Education, an associate professor and leader of the OU Happy Teacher Project Team, explains the value of these findings.

“This study will have very important implications for how all Head Start and Early Head Start [programs] will consider their current policy and practices to maximize children's learning and potential and then offer a more equitable learning environment for those children,” she says.

Dr. Jang will lead the OU team alongside Dr. Kwon, Dr. Horm, and Dr. Tim Ford, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, program coordinator for Tulsa programs and the director of the Leadership and Policy Center for Thriving Schools and Communities.

Collaborators at the Educare Learning Network and researchers at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, including senior research scientist Noreen Yazejian, will also join the OU team for this project.

The collaboration of several OU units, researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill, and colleagues representing Educare ensures the research is informed by multiple perspectives. This intentional design will increase the relevance of the findings for informing practice, policy as well as future research. This approach aligns with OU’s research focus on transdisciplinary, convergent research that is robust and meaningful.

UPDATES FROM THE FIELD

Our ECEI Research Associates spend a significant amount of time observing and playing games with the young children who take part in our various research studies. Here are a few of our favorite interactions:

Resilience: Supporting Children’s Self-Regulation in Infant and Toddler Classrooms

Diane Horm, Shinyoung Jeon, Denise Vega Ruvalcaba, and Sherri Castle

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1271840

Resilience is a process that develops as a complex transaction as children experience and shape their social-ecological contexts. The dynamic development of self-regulation is an aspect of resilience that has received increased attention as a key mechanism predicting a variety of important short- and long-term outcomes. The current study examined how the self-regulation skills of infants and toddlers in a classroom could potentially shape classroom interactions and quality which, in turn, could potentially shape the development of self-regulation skills of the individual infants and toddlers enrolled in the classroom across an early childhood program year. The unique contribution of this study is the focus on a critical component of resilience, self-regulation, in an understudied age group, infants and toddlers, in an important and understudied context, the infant-toddler early childhood classroom.

Optimizing Health Services for Young Children in Poverty: Enhanced Collaboration Between Early Head Start and Pediatric Health Care

Diane Horm, Holly Brophy-Herb, and Carla Peterson

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1297889

Given the importance of health to educational outcomes, and education to concurrent and future health, cross-systems approaches, such as the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) framework, seek to enhance services typically in K-12 settings. A major gap exists in cross-systems links with early care and education serving children birth to age 5. Both pediatric health systems and early family and child support programs, such as Early Head Start (EHS) and Head Start (HS), seek to promote and optimize the health and wellbeing of infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and their families. Despite shared goals, both EHS/HS and pediatric health providers often experience challenges in reaching and serving the children most in need, and in addressing existing disparities and inequities in services. This paper focuses on infant/toddler services because high-quality services in the earliest years yield large and lasting developmental impacts. Stronger partnerships among pedicatric health systems and EHS programs serving infants and toddlers could better facilitate the health and wellbeing of young children and enhance family strengths and resilience through increased, more intentional collaboration. Specific strategies recommended include strengthening training and professional development across service platforms to increase shared knowledge and terminology, increasing access to screening and services, strengthening infrastructure and shared information, enhancing integration of services, acknowledging and disrupting racism, and accessing available funding and resources. Recommendations, including research-based examples, are offered to prompt innovations best fitting community needs and resources.

Development of Inhibitory Control in Head Start Children: Association with Approaches to Learning and Academic Outcomes in Kindergarten

Amber Beisly and Shinyoung Jeon

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2024.101434

Inhibitory Control (IC) and Approaches to Learning (AtL) are two critical domain-general indicators of school readiness that develop rapidly in early childhood and are associated with children's academic outcomes. IC undergoes rapid developmental changes between the ages of 3 and 5, and more studies are needed to examine this change over time. AtL describes how children learn in a classroom, and as such, it may mediate the relationship between IC and academic outcomes. AtL may mediate the relationship between IC and academic achievement for children; growth in IC supports children's ability to direct attention to teachers and peers during interactions, while AtL helps children persist and seek learning opportunities during interactions. Using the Age 3 cohort from the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey 2009 (FACES 2009), a latent growth curve analysis was used to examine how both the initial level and growth of IC in HS years to kindergarten were associated with children's academic outcomes in kindergarten as well as the potential mediational role of AtL. The intercept and slope of IC were found to predict children's abilities in AtL, language, and math scores in kindergarten. Moreover, AtL was identified as a mediator between the development of IC and the subsequent gains in math skills from Head Start to kindergarten. These findings underscore the significance of fostering IC development before children enter kindergarten, with AtL emerging as a crucial factor influencing their achievements in mathematics.

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