Early Childhood Education Commons^™

Unlv Mental Health Initiatives: Unifying Through Innovation And Collaboration, The Lincy Institute, Unlv Practice, Behere Nv, Unlv Department Of Psychology

Lincy Institute Events

Nevada persistently ranks at or near the bottom in the country for overall access to mental health services despite the need (Mental Health America, 2015-2023). UNLV faculty are developing initiatives to change this unacceptable situation. The Lincy Institute, in partnership with UNLV PRACTICE, BeHERE Nevada, and researchers from the Department of Psychology, offered a community forum showcasing three mental health initiatives harnessing faculty collaboration and innovation to drive overdue changes in Nevada’s mental-health landscape. Following the presentations policymakers engaged in open discussion with UNLV presenters and the audience. The three main initiatives showcased in this forum …

Acknowledgments, Matt Wappett

Developmental Disabilities Network Journal

No abstract provided.

Advancing Strength-Based Inclusive Mental Health Research In Intellectual And Developmental Disabilities, Luther Kalb, Joan B. Beasley

Developmental Disabilities Network Journal

No abstract provided.

Intentional Conversations: Co-Creating Global Family, School, And Community Engagement Research, Emily Markovich Morris

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

As part of the Brookings Scholar Lecture Series, Brookings Mountain West presents a lecture titled "Intentional Conversations: Co-Creating Global Family, School, and Community Engagement Research" by Brookings fellow in global economy and development, Emily Markovich Morris. The more that families, schools, and communities work in partnership, the more students and schools have the support needed to thrive. This lecture explores a school and community-based research study representing education institutions in 14 countries across 6 continents. The project identifies beliefs held by families, educators, and students on the purpose of school, and global barriers to family, school, and community engagement. Surveys …

Estimating The Impacts Of Legislation To Expand Affordable Quality Child Care And Early Education In Massachusetts: Initial Findings On Utilization, Employment, And Financial Assistance. Research Brief #1, Randy Albelda, Alan Clayton-Matthews, Anne Douglass, Christa Kelleher, Songtian Zeng, Laurie Nsiah-Jefferson

Publications from the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy

The UMass Boston Early Education CUSP is led by a multidisciplinary team that designed the simulator and uses it to produce current, relevant, accurate, and responsive estimates about the key impacts of proposed legislation to expand access to affordable, quality child care and early education. One of the simulator’s valuable features is that it can produce estimates for a range of policy parameters and provisions. The team will release additional briefs in the coming months to offer a more detailed look at the impacts outlined in this initial publication. Other planned briefs will examine key topics, such as impacts related …

Does Play Belong In The Primary School Classroom?, Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Rachel Parker

2021-2030 ACER Research Conferences

Learning through play has emerged as an important strategy to promote student engagement, inclusion, and holistic skills development beyond the preschool years. If we want to build an education system preparing children for lifelong learning, we can use these strategies and achieve a balance of academic growth, holistic skills and a joy of learning. This presentation addresses the disconnect between policy, research, and practice, by summarising 5 key findings from international studies and 4 challenges to connect policy and practice. The evidence that play supports learning is considerable, and a new framework can create continuity between the early years learning …

Making Pla(Y)Ces: Softening The City Through Play, Shivani Pinapotu

Masters Theses

Cities that grow naturally over time integrate spaces of gathering that allow for serendipitous happenstance. However, the cities we design today instruct and codify through intentional planning and design; they assign use, hardening specific function to place. Such strategies lead to spaces devoid of spirit, inculcating in city-dwellers to a sense of disconnect from the city.

In contrast to this, the places we make as children, express our intuitive, direct, and unselfconscious relationships with space and one other. These spaces embody softness through their malleability and adaptability, borrowing from the world around them and imbuing the ordinary with imagination. …

Of Boys And Men: Why The Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, And What To Do About It, Richard Reeves

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

Boys and men are struggling. Profound economic and social changes of recent decades have many losing ground in the classroom, the workplace, and in the family. While the lives of women have changed, the lives of many men have remained the same or even deteriorated. Our attitudes, our institutions, and our laws have failed to keep up. Conservative and progressive politicians, mired in their own ideological warfare, fail to provide thoughtful solutions.

The father of three sons, a journalist, and a Brookings Institution scholar, Richard V. Reeves has spent twenty-five years worrying about boys both at home and work. His …

Nebraska Child Care Market Rate Survey Report 2023, Alexandra Daro, Greg W. Welch, Venessa Bryant

Buffet Early Childhood Institute Reports and Publications

The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act of 2014 was reauthorized with renewed emphasis on the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) program, which seeks to provide equal access to quality child care for families. The CCDF program is necessary to ensure children from families with lower income have the opportunity to experience stable, high-quality early experiences while their parents experience a pathway to economic stability. A primary goal of the CCDF program is to ensure that families with lower income receive CCDF funds to help them access quality child care in the same manner as families that …

Profiles Of Well-Being Among Early Childhood Educators, Amy M. Roberts, Alexandra Daro, Kathleen C. Gallagher

Buffet Early Childhood Institute Reports and Publications

Research Findings: This study used a person-centered data analytic approach to identify distinct subgroups of early childhood educators (n= 133) based on their responses to multiple indicators of well-being (psychological, financial, and health indicators). Various fit indices established a two-class solution. Specifically, one group was characterized by more positive well-being and the other by less positive well-being. Subgroup differences were the greatest for indicators of psychological well-being, including self-care and self-compassion. In addition, educators with less than a bachelor’s degree, working as assistant teachers, receiving less pay, with more adverse childhood experiences, were overrepresented in the less positive …

The Merit Of Inclusion: A Policy Review Examining The Convergence Of Special Education And Inclusions Policies With Compensatory Medicaid Policies In The Wake Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Corbyn Baggett

Capstone Experience

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) formally recognized the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak as a global pandemic. This global issue compelled governments to announce careful virus containing policies in order to prevent further spread and control of the disease. Although it has been proven that measures like social isolation could aid in scaling the spread of illness, the resulting extended school closures that occurred in response to an increased number of COVID-19 outbreaks posed significant challenges for all students, but especially those students with special needs. The unpredictable nature of COVID-19 at the outset of the pandemic …

Public Charter And District Public Schools In The Mountain West, 2019-2021, Zachary Billot, Kristian Thymianos, Vanessa Booth, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

K-12 Education

This fact sheet explores data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) report, “Voting With Their Feet: A State-Level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Trends.” Specifically, we examine enrollment trends for district public schools and public charter schools in the Mountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah) for the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years.

An Exploratory Multiple Case Study Of Discipline Practices In A Major Metropolitan Public School District: A Look Into The School To Prison Pipeline, Neil French, Kristin Calvert-French, Phyllis Jackson, Erin King

Dissertations

The school to prison pipeline is a phenomenon fed by exclusionary discipline practices that increase the likelihood that a student will have an interaction with the juvenile or criminal justice system at some time in their life; this phenomenon disproportionately affects Black students. Understanding the problem is key to slowing down the school to prison pipeline. This study of a school district in Missouri explores questions about how interpersonal relationships, implicit bias awareness, and school policies influence the learning environment, and how those factors relate to school discipline, which ultimately can lead to the school to prison pipeline. Drawing data …

Transforming Minnesota's Early Care And Education Infrastructure, Nicole Frethem

Student Scholarship

In 2021, the Minnesota legislature authorized the Great Start for All task force to present recommendations for how the state can provide “access to affordable, high-quality early care and education that enriches, nurtures, and supports children and their families,” to “all families” in Minnesota.

The early care and education landscape in Minnesota has experienced dramatic changes in programming and investments over the last twenty years. In the early 2000s, the state’s primary child care subsidy program, the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), was moved from the Department of Children, Families and Learning to the Department of Human Services in an …

State School Finance In The Mountain West, 2019, Kristian Thymianos, Ally M. Beckwith, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

K-12 Education

This fact sheet examines K-12 school finance indicators drawing from an original report by Albert Shanker Institute and Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. These indicators show whether states are funding school districts to national standards. This fact sheet examines state-level data for the Mountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah) from the State School Finance Profiles report for the 2018-2019 school year.

Assessing Professionals Working With Latinx Families With Special Needs In Monterey County, Jose Francisco Hernandez Rivera

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Special Kids Connect (SKC) is a nonprofit organization serving children with disabilities and their families in Monterey County. This capstone project concentrated on the professionals working with children as part of SKC’s Early Start Intervention Program. The project’s objective was to discover local agencies' professional development training needs that serve Latinx families with disabled children between 2 to 8 years. Seventy-five child-care providers, early intervention service professionals, regional center staff, and school district personnel responded to the survey. They indicated an overall 60 % needed an understanding of systems related to IEPs, Early Start Services, Developmental Screenings, Social-Emotional Screenings, Regional …

The Nebraska Covid-19 Early Care And Education Provider Survey Iii: “Holding It Together—And Hanging By A Thread” May 2022, Alexandra Daro, Kathleen C. Gallagher, Kristen M. Cunningham

Buffet Early Childhood Institute Reports and Publications

In February 2022, the Buffett Early Childhood Institute conducted the Nebraska COVID-19 Early Care and Education Survey III, in collaboration with state agencies, University of Nebraska faculty, and organization partners. This third survey examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Nebraska’s child care professionals and its implications for practice and policy. Results from the previous surveys, released in April and August 2020, indicated that early care and education professionals in Nebraska, who were already vulnerable prior to the pandemic, have been negatively impacted from the start of the pandemic. The first survey elevated providers’ immediate needs, including funding relief, …

The Ethics And Philosophy Of Outdoor Education: Hidden Lessons Within The Leikskoli Curriculum In Isafjordur, Iceland, Cici Conroy

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The Icelandic curriculum structures itself amongst six pillars: “literacy, sustainability, health, and welfare, democracy, and human rights, equality and creativity” (Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, 2014). The United States national standards for their state public schools focus on two central points: math and English language learning (Participant 6, personal communication, 2022). The way these structures are upheld reflect values, goals, and systems of knowledge. Depending on where a child is raised, the skills learned in the classroom will result in a completely different attitude toward environment, place, and success. In the United States, success seems to be defined by …

Policy Effects On New York City Early Education Centers: Ecological Case Studies, Maria S. Mavrides Calderon

Theses and Dissertations

NYC’s universal Pre-K (PKFA) was implemented through New York Early Education Centers (NYCEECs) and public schools, without considering compensation parity across settings. This study investigates the impact of unequal compensation policies on the experiences of directors, teachers, and parents affiliated with NYCEECs, and how they compare or contrast with the policymakers’ discourse around those policies. While other studies have investigated the PKFA implementation (Akaba et al., 2019; Falk & Souto-Manning, 2020; Fuller & Leibovitz, 2021a; Reid et al., 2019), none have privileged the ecology of those working at and attending NYCEECs. Through critical policy analysis, this study utilized Bronfenbrenner's (1979) …

Neo-Emancipatory Sex Education In Germany: Sexual Abuse And Gender Confusion, Bernd Ahrbeck, Karla Etschenberg, Marion Felder

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

This article focuses on two related areas of concern with regard to sex education and implications for children and youth in Germany. The first one is the history of the currently dominant neo-emancipatory sexual education and its implications for today. This direction of sex education is highly influenced by theories of Helmut Kentler who with the help of the German city of Berlin youth protection services department sent homeless and troubled boys to known pedophiles for care. This experiment went on for 30 years, ending in 2001. Only now has the extend of this horrific practice been fully discovered. The …

Improving K-12 Education For Hispanic Students In Las Vegas And Beyond, Richard Reeves, Ember Smith

Policy Briefs and Reports

Public K-12 education serves as a launching pad for economic mobility and opportunity, preparing students for college or a good-paying job. Despite K-12 education’s influence on later-in-life outcomes, schools often underserve students of color. Hispanic students in particular constitute a significant and growing portion of the U.S. student population yet are often overlooked in education literature because they are not the lowest performing demographic. In this brief, we examine how well public K-12 education serves Hispanic students in Clark County, where nearly half of students are Hispanic. We then consider factors that may influence student performance, including both in-school factors …

Nebraska Child Care Market Rate Survey Report 2021, Greg W. Welch, Elizabeth Svoboda, Alexandra Daro, Venessa Bryant, Caitlyn Glissmeyer

Buffet Early Childhood Institute Reports and Publications

Consistent with the 2019 MRS, the Institute conducted a survey of all licensed child care providers across the state to obtain private pay child care rates for children with or without medical and behavioral needs. Categories of focus for data collection and reporting included: 1. Geographic location: rural or urban 2. Type of care: Family Child Care Home I, Family Child Care Home II, Child Care Center, and School Age License 3. Age group of children: infant, toddler, pre-school, and school-age 4. Status of medical and behavioral needs 5. Accreditation 6. Extent to which child care providers participate in Child …

K-12 Discipline Disparities In The Six Largest U.S. School Districts, Marie A. Falcone, Saha Salahi, Olivia K. Cheche, Peter Grema, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

K-12 Education

This fact sheet highlights K-12 school discipline disparities by race in the six largest school districts in the United States. The districts include New York City Public Schools, NY; Los Angeles Unified, CA; Chicago Public Schools, IL; (Miami) Dade County, FL; Clark County School District (CCSD), NV; and Broward County, FL. Data are compiled from the Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2015-2016 academic year. Specifically, we examine the data for the discipline strategies of in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, and expulsions.

The Mind Matters: Yoga And Mindfulness In Preschool And K-12 Schools, Anna E. Hall

Honors Theses

This study uses a systematic literature review to examine the efficacy of preschool and K-12 school based yoga and mindfulness programs. A collection of 47 sources were examined to compare and contrast results and determine best practices. The results of the literature review are divided into three primary categories: implementation methods, student outcomes, and teacher and student opinion. The results suggest that individual and whole school implementation methods are the most effective. The results also suggest that there are positive student outcomes in regards to classroom behavior, child executive functioning, and anxiety. Teacher and student opinion on these programs are …

Covid-19 And Early Childhood Workforce Emotional Well-Being: An Exploratory Investigation, Mark Nagasawa

Straus Center for Young Children & Families

This conference paper was presented at the 2021 meeting of the American Educational Research Association. It shares findings from a mixed method, exploratory study that sought to understand how New York State's early childhood (ECE) workforce was faring early in the COVID-19 pandemic (n=3,555). This was a project of the New York City Early Childhood Research Network, a research practitioner partnership organized to create evidence-informed early childhood public policy. Among the key findings were high levels of reported stress, for instance those working remotely were approximately one-and-a-half times more likely to rate their emotional well-being negatively than those whose settings …

Teaching To The Test Or Limiting Students?, Victoria Rivera

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The purpose of this paper is to shine light on the way the school systems have been teaching and how it is affecting students in a negative way. It focuses mainly on teaching to the test and how it stops students from learning creatively and also does not let teachers teach the way they might want to. It also shows how this is a wicked problem and is more than a small school system issue. This impacts students, teachers, and the society we live in. The results of this research was that there were a lot of other authors that …

Eliminating Exclusionary Practices In Early Childhood Education In Nevada, Melissa Beck Yarczower, Jenna Weglarz-Ward, Claire T. Tredwell

Policy Issues in Nevada Education: Policy Papers

Problem. Many young children under 5 years old spend a significant part of their days in early childhood settings which provide them access to environments and activities that foster their learning. Unfortunate- ly, in many of these early childhood settings, young children are expelled and suspended at a rate that is three times the rate of students in a K-12 setting leading to detrimental, long-term outcomes for young children, families, and the community. Purpose. This paper gives an overview of exclusionary practices in early childhood, discusses causes and consequences of these practices, and provides recommendations to eliminate exclusionary practices in …

Early Access: Elementary School Outcomes For Arkansas Better Chance Pre-Kindergarten Participants, Sarah Mckenzie, Josh B. Mcgee, Emily Jordan, Charlene A. Reid

Policy Briefs

The Arkansas Better Chance (ABC) program has been providing low-income and at-risk Arkansas children with tuition-free pre-K since 1991. Enrollment in the state’s public pre-K programs has increased modestly over the last ten years. This brief reports the results of an analysis of the 3rd and 5th grade outcomes for students who attended ABC pre-K in the academic years of 2011-12 through 2014-15. We find that students who enroll in ABC programs in the year prior to starting Kindergarten outperform similar peers on math and reading state tests in 3rd grade, but these effects largely fadeout by 5th grade.

Investigating Outcomes For English Language Learners In Arkansas Better Chance (Abc) Pre-K, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Josh B. Mcgee, Emily Jordan, Charlene A. Reid

Policy Briefs

Students with limited English proficiency face a number of educational challenges, and there are dramatic achievement gaps between these students and their English proficient peers. This brief describes the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade outcomes of English Language Learner (ELL) students who attend Arkansas Better Chance (ABC) pre-Kindergarten, a state-funded program that is free to income-eligible families. Results indicate that ABC has the potential to improve academic outcomes for ELL students in Arkansas.

Elevating Nebraska’S Early Childhood Workforce: Report And Recommendations Of The Nebraska Early Childhood Workforce Commission. April 2021 One-Year Update, Buffet Early Childhood Institute

Buffet Early Childhood Institute Reports and Publications

On Jan. 30, 2020, the Nebraska Early Childhood Workforce Commission released its report and recommendations, Elevating Nebraska’s Early Childhood Workforce. With a strong commitment to collaborative action, commission members vowed that the report would not just sit on the shelf—and they have been true to their word. Even the COVID-19 pandemic could not prevent commission members and the organizations they represent from engaging with partners in diverse communities across the state to pursue the report’s vision, goals, and recommendations.

In fact, the pandemic’s dramatic impact on the early childhood workforce and the children and families they serve has only served …