Zhiling Shea awarded AERA/NSF Dissertation Grant

​The American Educational Research Foundation (AERA) awarded doctoral candidate Zhiling Shea a 2021 Dissertation Grant in support of her research examining interventions for disadvantaged children in early childhood education.
 
The grant, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), provides a $25,000 stipend, professional development, and training activities to connect Shea with a community of scholars.
 
Shea’s dissertation research focuses on the effects of early programs on disability, special education, and social-emotional outcomes for disadvantaged children.
 
“Compared to more economically advantaged children, many children with special needs from low-income families exhibit alarming gaps in academic and social-emotional outcomes,” Shea said. “A central question my research addresses how well early programs and policies build early learning foundations for disadvantaged children.” 

Zhiling Shea

​Shea will gather data from multiple national-level data sets including American Community Service (ACS) data, Digest of Education Statistics (DES), Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Head Start Classroom-based Approaches and Resources for Emotion and Social Skill Promotion (HS CARES) data.
 
By providing insight into the implementation of state disability policy and identifying effective skill-specific interventions and classroom processes for disadvantaged children in early educational programs, Shea’s research will address three field-specific needs:

1. The need for evidence on the percentage of children identified with learning disability, including how these children are being placed and served at the state level
2. The need for understanding who benefits from skill-specific curricula interventions in the Head Start population
3. The need for clarifying casual evidence of classroom process quality on child social-emotional development in preschool interventions

 
“Ensuring that young children benefit from their early learning experience is critical to forming a strong and productive society,” Shea said. “Effective early learning experiences should allow all children to exhibit positive behavior and achieve their developmental potential in later learning.”
 
“Zhiling’s dissertation is award-worthy because she uses rigorous methods to answer important questions in ECE policy for children with developmental vulnerabilities,” said Assistant Professor Jade Jenkins. “That is very rare.”

Jenkins and Distinguished Professor Greg Duncan are Shea's co-advisors.

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The grant detailed above is 100% funded by the IES.