EPSC Presentation: "Unpacking Microlevel Features of Classroom Quality to Improve Early Childhood Education at Scale"

Alumna Tutrang Nguyen, Ph.D., will share her research perspectives with members of the School of Education Educational Policy and Social Context (EPSC) Lab on Wednesday, December 4, 2019, 12:00 to 1:00 pm, in Education 2005. The title of her presentation is "Unpacking Microlevel Features of Classroom Quality to Improve Early Childhood Education at Scale." 

Dr. Nguyen is an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Postdoctoral Training Fellow in the Curry School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. She is affiliated with both the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) and EdPolicyWorks. Her research focuses on identifying and accurately measuring essential features of early childhood education settings that support children’s development and learning in the short- and long-term, and explores how they can be brought to scale successfully. Much of her current work centers on the role of curricula, teacher-child interactions, and the combination of the two in promoting the positive development of children facing early risk and disadvantage. She received her PhD in Education from the University of California, Irvine in 2018.

Presentation Abstract

​There is strong consensus in the early childhood field on the importance of quality, broadly defined. However, there is often a lack of precision and specificity about the malleable features most likely to make a difference in improving young children’s experiences and outcomes in early care and education settings. In this presentation, Dr. Nguyen focuses on curricula and teacher-child interactions in preschool classrooms as two specific, potential levers for improving early childhood education programming at scale. She will summarize findings from a meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies that quantifies and compares the overall effectiveness of whole-child and domain-specific preschool curricula. She will also share results from a study examining within-classroom variability of observed teacher-child interactions across instructional content domains and activity settings. To conclude the presentation, she will describe future work examining the longitudinal associations between aspects of classroom quality and children’s developmental outcomes. Implications of this work for early childhood research, practice, and policy will be discussed.