Understanding how to support the early learning opportunities of children from under-resourced communities

Mobility grants North America in educational research (UTNAM) enables researchers at The department of Education, University of Oslo to invite Prof. C Cybele Raver and Dr. Tyler Watts, New York University, to visit University of Oslo spring of 2019. Raver and Watts are currently working on a number of studies that could be of critical importance to the UiO educational research community. Their collaboration on the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) has uncovered promising evidence that early interventions focused on promoting self-regulation and improving the quality of teacher and child interactions can have meaningful long-term impacts on children’s development. The CSRP intervention was tested in 18 preschool centers serving some of the most vulnerable neighborhoods in the inner-city Chicago area, and the children attending these preschools came from low-income, ethnic minority, families (65% of the sample was African American; 17% of the sample was born to an immigrant parent). The program was designed to transform teachers’ approaches to behavioral management by introducing teachers to techniques empirically shown to promote the self-regulation and executive function of young children. The intervention also supplied teachers and children with access to mental health professionals who served as “coaches” to assist teachers as they implemented the intervention techniques, and they also provided direct intervention services to children and families. Evaluation work showed that the CSRP intervention substantially altered the quality of teacher/child interactions in the preschool classrooms, and it also had large, positive effects on measures of children’s behaviors, school readiness skills and executive functioning (Raver et al., 2011). Please join us on May 27th at 10am for an open lecture by Dr. Raver, and click here for more information on the PhD course options.

In this application, we detail plans to strengthen our collaboration with the goal of developing a deeper understanding of empirically-supported methods designed to support the early learning opportunities of children from low-income families. We propose inviting two scholars with extensive experience in early childhood development and education from New York University, Deputy Provost C. Cybele Raver and Research Assistant Professor Tyler Watts, to collaborate on our current and planned research projects and to conduct methods training with graduate students. The proposed research stay will last for a period of 2 weeks. During this time, we will run a PhD course, and arrange other venues of knowledge sharing, and build on our existing research collaborations. Raver and Watts are currently working on a number of studies connected to their collaboration on the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP). They have uncovered promising evidence that early interventions focused on promoting self-regulation and improving the quality of teacher and child interactions can have meaningful long-term impacts on children’s development. Raver and Watts are currently tracking the children who first participated in the study to test whether the intervention altered children’s long-term developmental trajectories, and they recently published an article reporting promising long-term intervention impacts on adolescent measures of executive function and academic achievement (Watts et al., 2018). This work has important conceptual and methodological implications for the educational research conducted by Rydland and Lawrence (Grover, Lawrence, & Rydland, 2016; Rydland, Grøver, & Lawrence, 2014a, 2014b) and for their ongoing analysis of data from “Teaching for text comprehension: Supporting young second-language learners' text comprehension in urban multiethnic preschools (2013-2017)”. This visit will deepen the connection between these project and our two institutions.