"Head Start family services: Family characteristics as predictors of service use by Latinx families"6/15/2021
Fourth-year doctoral student Melissa S. Dahlin, Research Associate Guadalupe Díaz (Sobrato), Assistant Professor Jade M. Jenkins, and Professor Stephanie M. Reich published an article in Children and Youth Services about Latinx families’ use of Head Start. The title of the article is “Head Start family services: Family characteristics as predictors of service use by Latinx families.” Dahlin studies early childhood education, child development, educational leadership, equity, family engagement, parenting, early childhood policy, and program evaluation. Her experience includes early childhood education research, policy analysis, and technical assistance to build the capacity of state education agencies to lead sustained improvements in early learning opportunities and outcome, monitoring and evaluation and classroom instruction. Prior to doctoral studies, she was an Associate Director at Education Development Center. For her doctoral studies she is specializing in Human Development in Context and Education Policy and Social Context. Reich and Jenkins serve as her co-advisors. Jenkins studies early childhood development, child and family policy, and policy analysis and management. She is director of UCI's Early Policy Research Group. Jenkins's work focuses on program evaluation and understanding the mechanisms that promote child and family wellbeing. She currently is researching factors in persistence and fadeout of early childhood intervention on a grant funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development. Reich’s research foci include socio-emotional development, parent-child interactions, peer networks, and social affordances of technology. The bulk of her work explores direct and indirect influences on the child, specifically through the family, online, and school environment. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Community Research and Action. At UCI, Reich is director of the Development in Social Context Lab (DISC) and serves as the associate director of the Ph.D. in Education program. She holds additional appointments in Psychological Science and Informatics. Abstract This study seeks to understand characteristics that predict use of Head Start family services by Latinx families. Head Start requires programs to offer services that are tailored to individual family needs. While the offer of services is important, what is critical is the use of these services. Few studies have explored whether families access services when offered and how the contextual risk around the family predicts their likelihood of uptake, especially for Latinx families who are increasingly enrolling in Head Start programs. This study examines patterns of service use by cumulative risk and by individual risk factors. Results indicate that Latinx families with more risk are more likely to use services, as well as use more of them. Findings related to specific individual types of risk were mixed. We include a discussion of Head Start’s comprehensive service delivery model as it relates to service use for Latinx families. "The Observed Quality of Caregiver-Child Interactions With and Without a Mobile Screen Device"6/15/2021
Postdoctoral scholar/alumna Wendy Ochoa (Tufts University, Ph.D. ’19), Professor Stephanie M. Reich, and Distinguished Professor George Farkas published an article in Academic Pediatrics analyzing the impact of caregivers’ mobile device use. The title of the article is “The Observed Quality of Caregiver-Child Interactions With and Without a Mobile Screen Device.” Ochoa is a postdoctoral scholar in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. Her research centers on understanding how factors such as socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, language, media, and the home environment influence parenting and child development among families with young children from ethnic minorities, particularly Latino parents. At UCI, Ochoa specialized in Human Development in Context. Dr. Reich served as her advisor. Reich’s research foci include socio-emotional development, parent-child interactions, peer networks, and social affordances of technology. The bulk of her work explores direct and indirect influences on the child, specifically through the family, online, and school environment. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Community Research and Action. At UCI, Reich is director of the Development in Social Context Lab (DISC) and serves as the associate director of the Ph.D. in Education program. She holds additional appointments in Psychological Science and Informatics. Farkas’s research expertise includes special education needs and consequences, pre-school readiness, disparities and impacts of childcare, children’s growth trajectories in reading, math, and science, and early interventions for students who have fallen behind in reading. His research has made a major contribution to understanding the school achievement gap for low income and ethnic minority students. Farkas has authored or co-authored four books and more than 125 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Collectively, his work has been cited more than 14,000 times. Recently, he was honored with the American Sociological Association Willard Wallen Award for lifetime achievement in the field of sociology of education. (Read more here.) At UCI, Farkas directs the Reading One-to-One Reading Program. Abstract This study investigated how caregivers’ mobile device use influenced the quality of their interactions with their children. The associations between quality of interactions and the type of activity (eg, typing/swiping, looking at screen), setting, caregiver-child proximity, and child behaviors were also examined. Researchers anonymously and systematically observed and coded the behavior of 98 caregiver-child dyads in public settings (eg, parks, food courts) during real-time, naturally occurring interactions using time sampling. Caregivers who used a mobile device for the entire observation engaged in less joint attention and were less responsive than caregivers who used the device some of the time. When looking at patterns within caregivers who used the device intermittently, the probability that they would engage in joint attention, initiate interactions with their child, talk, and display positive emotions was lower when they used a mobile device than when they did not. Child talking and positive affect were unrelated to caregiver device use. Activity type with the device, caregiver-child proximity and setting also related to interaction quality. Caregiver device use was negatively associated with adult behaviors that are key components of high-quality caregiver-child interactions. Additionally, setting, activity type, and caregiver-child proximity are factors that should be considered because they relate to the quality of caregiver-child interactions in the context of mobile screen technologies.
Abstract
Retrospective self-report assessments of adults’ childhood experiences with their parents are widely employed in psychological science, but such assessments are rarely validated against actual parenting experiences measured during childhood. Here, we leveraged prospectively acquired data characterizing mother–child and father–child relationship quality using observations, parent reports, and child reports covering infancy through adolescence. At age 26 years, approximately 800 participants completed a retrospective measure of maternal and paternal emotional availability during childhood. Retrospective reports of childhood emotional availability demonstrated weak convergence with composites reflecting prospectively acquired observations (R2s = .01–.05) and parent reports (R2s = .02–.05) of parenting quality. Retrospective parental availability was more strongly associated with prospective assessments of child-reported parenting quality (R2s = .24–.25). However, potential sources of bias (i.e., depressive symptoms and family closeness and cohesiveness at age 26 years) accounted for more variance in retrospective reports (39%–40%) than did prospective measures (26%), suggesting caution when using retrospective reports of childhood caregiving quality as a proxy for prospective data. "Behavioral Economics and Parent Participation in an Evidence-Based Parenting Program at Scale"6/15/2021
Abstract
Evidence-based and culturally relevant parenting programs strengthen adults’ capacity to support children’s health and development. Optimizing parent participation in programs implemented at scale is a prevailing challenge. Our collaborative team of program developers, implementers, and researchers applied insights from the field of behavioral economics (BE) to support parent participation in ParentCorps—a family-centered program delivered as an enhancement to pre-kindergarten—as it scaled in a large urban school district. We designed a bundle of BE-infused parent outreach materials and successfully showed their feasibility in site-level randomized pilot implementation. The site-level study did not show a statistically significant impact on family attendance. A sub-study with a family-level randomization design showed that varying the delivery time of BE-infused digital outreach significantly increased the likelihood of families attending the parenting program. Lessons on the potential value of a BE-infused approach to support outreach and engagement in parenting programs are discussed in the context of scaling up efforts. Doctoral candidate Ta-yang Hsieh, Professor Sandra D. Simpkins, Distinguished Professor Jacquelynne S. Eccles published an article in Contemporary Educational Psychology assessing motivational beliefs. The title of the article is “Gender by racial/ethnic intersectionality in the patterns of Adolescents’ math motivation and their math achievement and engagement.” Hsieh researches adolescent development, educational underachievement, academic motivations, out-of-school learning, cultural competencies, and social interventions. Under the advisement of Simpkins, she studies the ecological factors of student academic motivation and underachievement. Simpkins is a developmental psychologist, studying child and adolescent development. She researches how families, friendships, and social position factors (such as ethnicity and culture) shape adolescents’ organized after-school activities and motivation. She is currently working on research focused on the positive outcomes of youth’s participation in activities as well as the predictors and correlates of high school students’ STEM motivational beliefs. She is PI on grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the National Science Foundation to support positive development from childhood through young adulthood. Simpkins directs the Center for After School and Summer Excellence (CASE) and Project REACH and co-directs the After School Activities Project. Eccles is a member of the National Academy of Education, a World Scholar at the University of London, Visiting Professor at the University of Tubingen, Germany, and Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia. Her academic research focuses on gender-role socialization, classroom influences on student motivation, and social development in the family and school context. She is internationally recognized for her development of the expectancy-value theory of motivation and her concept of stage-environment. Eccles directs UCI's Motivation and Identity Research Lab (MIRL). Abstract Individuals' math motivational beliefs are theorized to shape their STEM achievement and engagement in high school and beyond. Combining situated expectancy-value theory and intersectionality framework, the goals of this study were to (a) identify the unique patterns of U.S. high school students' math motivational beliefs, (b) examine differences in the patterns based on the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity, and (c) test the extent to which these patterns predicted differences in students' math achievement and classroom behavioral engagement for each of the gender by racial/ethnic groups. The current study included 16,120 high schoolers (50% female; 63% White, 17% Latina/o, 11% Black, and 9% Asian Americans; Mage = 14.46 at Grade 9) from the High School Longitudinal Study. There were six unique patterns of students' math motivational beliefs: Overall High, Above Average but not Identified, Identified but Average Value, Average, Low Identity, and Overall Low. Pattern membership at the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity showed nuances that could not be represented by gender or race/ethnicity alone; for example, male and female Asian American adolescents had similar patterns, but many male and female adolescents of other racial/ethnic groups had different patterns. Adolescents' math motivational belief patterns were associated with their Grade 11 math achievement and behavioral engagement even after controlling for prior math achievement and family socioeconomic status, and the associated varied by the gender and racial/ethnic groups.
Youth workers are educators who play an essential role in the social, emotional, and academic development of youth in afterschool contexts (Fusco and Gannett, 2012; Pozzoboni and Kirshner, 2016). They build expertise on the job, learning implicit know-how through contextualized and relationally constructed practice and reflection (Polanyi, 1966; Taylor, 2007). The field, however, has under conceptualized how to foster implicit knowledge development in youth workers. Most youth workers learn experientially throughout their time in-service as they gain the skills and knowledge necessary to navigate complex dilemmas that arise in the field. Van Steenis builds on other scholars of youth work to argue that dilemmas crack open for the learner – who in the case of this paper are novice youth workers – tensions that exist at the nexus of their personal and professional identities. Structuring learning around “dilemmas” offers a key pedagogical move that affords the field a framework from which to build novice youth workers' implicit skills. Van Steenis takes a case study approach to present how and what four novice youth workers learned in their experience with dilemmas of practice, which were leveraged as a pedagogical in a higher education course called "Adolescent Development and Educational Psychology" (ADEP).
Reich is a community psychologist studying contexts that support children’s development. Her research focuses on children’s direct and technologically mediated interactions with family, peers, and educational settings. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Society for Community Research and Action. Reich is director of UCI's Development in Social Context Lab (DISC) and associate dean of UCI’s Graduate Program.
Starks’ research interests include the intersection of child development and digital technologies, partnerships between schools and families, patterns of media use among different populations, and digital learning. She is a former teacher and technology integrator in K-12 public schools, with experience in project-based learning, creating comprehensive digital citizenship programs at the district level, and facilitating family-school partnerships around technology. Her past research includes adolescent digital privacy practices across contexts and equitable technology-enabled learning within special education. She is particularly interested in bringing a developmental lens to technology integration practices, across family, school, and child level interactions. Abstract Middle school is a period when young adolescents become more engaged with social media and adults become increasingly concerned about such use. Although research finds that parents often post about their children on social media, little is known about how adults’ social media behaviors relate to youths’ online behaviors. We surveyed 466 middle-school students about their social media habits, privacy-respecting behaviors, and their parents’, other adults’, and their own posting behaviors on social media. While 68% used social media, only 41% posted pictures. Of those, 33.5% also had parents and/or adults that posted about them. Using this subset, we found that adults’ privacy-respecting behaviors (e.g., asking permission to post, showing post first) were significantly related to youth using these same privacy-respecting behaviors when posting on social media. Like many areas of development, young adolescents may learn about social media use by modeling their parents’ and other adults’ behaviors.
Abstract
Traditional reviews of arts education have focused on why the arts are valuable for learning, but the arts’ contributions to cross-disciplinary discourse remain undertheorized. In this article, we provide a theoretical review of the arts and learning to suggest a new way of thinking about how the arts contribute to learning across disciplines through a focus on the production of artifacts. Guided by a sociocultural constructionist view on learning, this review brings together research from across the field of arts education to demonstrate the benefit of policies that support the production and engagement of shareable artifacts. Findings are synthesized through what we name an artifact-oriented learning model, which merges constructionism with ecological systems theory. Our review points to two key pathways of learning through the arts (i.e., making and engaging) and suggests the arts support learning that is multimodal and transactive across settings. Thus, we consider arts education policy as part of a sociocultural process that has rippling effects across disciplines for all layers of a social ecology. Given this orientation, implications for researchers and policymakers are discussed to support decision-making and continued inquiry across arts education research and policy.
Olson is director of both the WRITE Center and the UCI/National Writing Project. A professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine, she received her Ph.D. in American Literature from UCLA. Olson has authored several books, including The Reading/Writing Connection, and published over thirty journal articles on interactive strategies for teaching writing, fostering critical thinking through writing, applying multiple intelligences theory to language arts instruction, using multicultural literature with students of culturally diverse backgrounds, and more.
Chung is the director of research for the UCI Writing Project overseeing the research efforts of the Pathway Project’s OELA and i3 grants. For his doctoral work, he specialized in Learning, Cognition, and Development and Language, Literacy, and Technology; his interests in teacher education and professional development for English Language Arts teachers bridge the two concentrations. Upon completing his dissertation, Chung served as a post-doctoral scholar at UC Davis managing and working on three federally funded programs regarding formative assessments in mathematics, testing accommodations for English Learners, and an evaluation of the Writing Reform and Innovation for Teaching Excellence (WRITE) professional development program. Abstract With a premium placed on academic writing in the U.S. secondary education context, adolescent L2 students are expected to develop advanced skills to analyze, interpret, and produce complex texts in a variety of content areas, which require proficiency in academic language. To enhance the academic literacy of developing L2 writers and to meet their linguistic needs, it is crucial to identify the unique language features of their academic writing. This study seeks to examine syntactic and lexical features of the text-based analytical essays written by Spanish-speaking L2 students (7th–12th grades) from a public school in a western state of the United States. Employing manual sentence coding and quantitative measures of selected linguistic variables from Coh- Metrix, we analyzed student texts (N = 86) to identify common linguistic patterns and to examine how these linguistic features predict writing quality. Our findings reveal that sentence boundary issues, lack of syntactic variety, the underuse of sophisticated subordination to show connections between ideas, and low use of advanced vocabulary are common in adolescent L2 students’ writing. The results of regression analyses show that syntactic complexity and lexical sophistication predict human-judged writing quality. Implications for pedagogy to address the linguistic needs of adolescent L2 students are discussed.
The introduction highlights a developmental perspective on children’s and youth prosocial behavior in risky and vulnerable contexts. The six empirical papers published in this Special Section are considered within a multilevel, multidimensional framework and reflect a diversity of methodological approaches. The studies each provide foundational work that informs theory, builds our knowledge base, and has important intervention implications. We highlight the contributions of each study and present recommendations for future developmental research on prosocial behaviors.
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