The Lynda A. Cohen Center for the Study of Child Development

08/31/2019

Fascinating study on individual, experiential differences between young children in the same classroom. "They may all be in the same classroom together, but each child in preschool may have a very different experience, a new study suggests."

They may all be in the same classroom together, but each child in preschool may have a very different experience, a new study suggests. The researchers documented these different experiences using a novel technique in the classroom: They had children wear a video camera on their head for two hours o...

07/06/2019

Great infographic from Policy Matters Ohio on the cycle of poverty and poor health. We know that adverse childhood experiences have a profound impact on future outcomes. So, how can we ensure parents, teachers, and communities are ? To help accomplish this, one service we provide is training for teachers and parents in positive adult-child interactions that can help reduce the occurrence and impact of adverse childhood experiences.

06/29/2019

Interesting findings related to class size during the pre-k years help substantiate that lower class size improves outcomes for young children. There are, however, some caveats such as: (1) teachers may not be trained well enough to alter their approaches when working with smaller groups; and (2) teachers with poor instructional and interactional quality may not benefit from smaller class sizes since the one-on-one interactions may not be as supportive of children's development.

Class size reduction policy has been long debated in early education as well as the K-12 sphere. This is not surprising given the ambiguity in defining class size and the mixed findings across several research studies. The only true experiment for preschool class size found that children assigned to...

06/29/2019

Wonderful article on the efforts being made to help protect infants and young children from trauma. One key point in the article states, "when a child lives with abuse, neglect, or is witness to violence, he or she is primed for that fight or flight all the time. The burden of that stress, what Bruce McEwan calls 'allostatic load,' can damage small, developing brains and bodies. A brain that thinks it is in constant danger has trouble organizing itself, which can manifest itself later as problems paying attention, or sitting still, or following instructions—all of which are needed for learning."

What if we could find a way to identify which children are most vulnerable to stress while they're still in infancy?