External Newsletter-January 2025

Dear Friends of the ECEI,

Spring has sprung! And if you are lucky enough to be in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is glorious! The azaleas and dogwoods are in full bloom and the parks are filled with people and pets. So good to be present with some beauty and joy in the world right now.

I’m pleased to share other bits of joy in this letter:

Dr. Cara Kelly has joined our team as a senior research associate, having originally joined the ECEI as a postdoctoral research fellow in July of 2024. Dr. Kelly earned her Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Sciences from the University of Delaware where she specialized in early care and education. Her research focuses on early care and education programs and policies that impact young children’s development. At the ECEI, Cara works across projects to support research capacity, including data analysis, dissemination, funding development, and mentorship. In addition to bringing her excellent research skills and rich community-engaged values and experience to our team, Cara is delightful to work with!

To continue to build our capacity to do impactful applied research, we recently posted a position for a data manager to lead our data processes and structure at the Institute. The ECEI stewards a rich repository of longitudinal data, allowing our team and colleagues to examine essential features of young children’s experiences that support healthy learning and development. Our position announcement and application can be found here.

This week, the University of Oklahoma launched its refresh of our strategic plan, originally released in 2020. In President Harroz’s inspirational presentation of how we will achieve success related to our five pillars, he encouraged us to live our OU purpose: We Change Lives!

Changing lives is exactly what we are about at the ECEI:

We have partnered with colleagues at the University of Oklahoma College of Public Health to launch the Children’s Environmental Health Center, with the aim of researching and implementing interventions to transform the environmental health of children’s learning environments, such as air and water quality. The center is led by Dr. Changjie Cai and our ECEI founding director, Dr. Diane Horm.

We engage in research-practice partnerships with Tulsa Educare and CAP Tulsa, leading evaluation and research efforts to examine how these Head Start/Early Head Start programs provide quality care and education for children, connect families with basic needs and essential parenting skills, and support the ongoing learning and professional development of their dedicated professionals. While families with young children are struggling to be well and do well across the U.S., HS/EHS programs and services are life-changers, and we are privileged to partner and learn with them in our evaluation and applied research. You’ll read more about our partnership with CAP Tulsa in this newsletter, and other efforts in future issues.

The ECEI is intimately connected to our career academic programs in early childhood education at OU-Tulsa. We prepare early childhood educators for the workforce in our bachelor’s completion program, offer an interdisciplinary Master in Childhood Well-Being, and train the next generation of researchers in our doctoral program.

Finally, Oklahoma’s record in supporting early care and education is nationally recognized. Recognizing the value of high-quality early childhood and pre-K programs for changing lives, Vox producer Coleman Lowndes jumped at an opportunity to visit Tulsa to learn more. Lowndes visited with Head Start and public pre-K leaders and programs in Tulsa and stopped by the ECEI to speak with Dr. Diane Horm and me to discuss the state and national ECE climate. Look for this short documentary – scheduled for release in summer.

As our project teams at the ECEI wrap up data collection for the spring semester at our research-practice partner sites, we at the ECEI are changing lives. And we also recognize we need to do more and better to meet the challenges faced by children, families, and educators today. I look forward to sharing more about our research in the coming months. And in the meantime, let’s all get outside and play!

Best Wishes,

ECEI Director Kate Gallagher

RESEARCH-PRACTICE PARTNERSHIP

The ECEI partners with community, state, and national partners with a focus on applied research to enhance programs and systems for young children, their families, and early childhood professionals. We have partnered with the Community Action Project of Tulsa County (CAP Tulsa) since 2006.

“I believe our partnership with CAP Tulsa has been very important and mutually supportive over time,” noted former ECEI Director Diane Horm. “Since the inception of the ECEI, we have collaborated with CAP Tulsa on two on-going projects. For the first project, which started as the State Pilot Program to Enhance and Expand Infant/Toddler Services (SPP) and is now called the Oklahoma Early Childhood Program (OECP), we collaborated with CAP Tulsa to serve as the evaluation partner on their initial proposal to the State Department of Education to establish the program. This partnership continues today. The second project was serving as the Local Evaluation Partner for CAP Tulsa’s Head Start programs, starting with Tulsa Educare in 2007. The ECEI continues this partnership as well with the Child Achievement Research Partnership (CARP)."

Providing evaluation and research, the ECEI supports CAP’s mission to help young children in lower-income families grow up and achieve economic success. CAP Tulsa is an Early Head Start/Head Start grantee, with ten early childhood program sites providing two-generation services, including home-based and family programs. ECEI’s role is to supply data that CAP Tulsa uses to inform their programming.

Oklahoma Early Childhood Program (OECP) Evaluation

The Oklahoma State Legislature established Oklahoma Early Childhood Program (originally the SPP) in 2006 to improve the quality of early education and expand capacity to serve children from birth through age three and their families statewide. The ECEI partners with CAP Tulsa to evaluate and research the effectiveness of the program’s goals which include enhancing childcare quality, elevating teacher qualifications, achieving pay equity for educators, providing professional development, and supporting families’ basic needs. The ECEI conducts classroom observations and teacher surveys to identify classroom and teacher characteristics that support children’s learning and development. Approximately 25% of all OECP classrooms (including ~700 children) across the state are sampled in the evaluation.

This year’s teacher survey was distributed to all teachers employed at an OECP-funded agency. Of the 435 responding teachers, 78% have been teaching for at least three years and 89% plan to stay in early childhood for at least five years. Over time, the OECP has increased the number of children experiencing high-quality caregiving and supportive interactions between children and teachers (Horm et al., 2009).

Child Achievement Research Partnership (CARP)

Through the Child Achievement Research Partnership (CARP), the ECEI works with CAP Tulsa to document understanding of children’s growth and achievement during their time in the early childhood program. We examine instructional quality and children's development in the CAP Tulsa program longitudinally and situate the program’s success in the context of other nationally representative early childhood programs. Since 2022, approximately 850 children and 350 teachers have participated in this study. Classroom observations and direct assessments of children’s development and learning are conducted. Teachers also complete ratings on the behaviors of their students and an annual survey to understand their workplace experiences and perspectives.

CAP Tulsa serves a demographically diverse group of young children and families. Their sizeable group of Spanish-speaking families has enabled ECEI researchers interested in dual-language learning (DLL) in young children to use the CARP data to investigate research questions of interest to CAP Tulsa and the larger field. For example, a 2023 publication (Frechette et al.) reported findings that emphasize the importance of young dual-language children developing proficiency in both English and Spanish. The analysis of the CARP data examined how variations in DLL-language proficiency impacted development. The results suggested several benefits of being a proficient bilingual, including better social-emotional skills compared to monolingual peers. Proficient bilingual children also saw cognitive advantages when their executive functioning (EF) skills were high, regardless of the neighborhood environment risks they were exposed to, suggesting that proficient bilingual children may have more opportunities to grow their EF skills when switching between English and Spanish regardless of their neighborhood context. These findings have implications for families and teachers, reminding them that it’s important to support dual-language learners to become proficient in both English and Spanish.

RESEARCHER SPOTLIGHT

Craig Van Pay, Junior Researcher

Craig is pictured here with ELQA Team members Jennifer Quillian and Diane Horm with their poster "Early Learning Quick Assessment as a Tool for Identifying Early Reading Difficulties."

Tell us about where and what you studied (your path to getting here).

I bounced around a bit, starting as a business major as a freshman, then moving to community college for my gen eds. I finally found my place at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where I majored in Psychology and Human Development. This is also where I got my first taste of research in an undergraduate research lab studying language development. I then started a PhD program in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, but the program and mentor were not a good fit for me, so I left after two years.

I then worked for Head Start as a Family Development Specialist, and later as the project coordinator of a local effort to boost pre-K enrollment and third-grade reading. In this role, I worked with researchers at Iowa State University, and they ultimately recruited me to go back to school. I got my MS in Education from Iowa State and then started a PhD program in Language, Literacy, and Learning. After a year, I added a second major of Human Development and Family Studies with a focus in Early Childhood Education. I joined the OU ECEI as a postdoctoral research fellow in August 2022 and that’s where I still am, now as a Junior Researcher.

What influenced you to become a researcher?

I was always an extremely curious child and asked a lot of questions, and those who know me would say I have had a scientific mind since birth. However, I really owe becoming a researcher to several great mentors in my undergraduate program. I had phenomenal professors who let me try out research in various fields like social psychology, counseling psychology, neuroscience, and developmental psychology. One mentor in particular, Dr. Jennifer Lanter, helped me understand what research really was. I was a first-generation college student and did not know much about academia or research, and she helped open my eyes to it in a fun, non-judgmental, and empirical way.

Describe your recent research.

Recently I have been involved in work to better understand classroom environments and children’s outcomes, specifically around language. I am a firm believer in the power of early intervention and education and my work aims to identify classroom practices and experiences that benefit all children in a positive way.

What are some next steps for your research?

Some of the next steps for my research are finding empirical ways to use the rich observational data we collect at the ECEI to help drive children’s outcomes and program improvement. I am also always interested in dual language learners’ experiences and outcomes in pre-K and am examining their experiences in several ways.

REWARDING RESEARCH

Click here to read the full University of Delaware announcement of award.

UPDATES FROM THE FIELD

Our ECEI Research Associates enjoy spending time with children both while working in the field and at home. Here are a couple of interactions with family members:

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