Research

Our research focuses on how educational and home settings relate to children and youth's well-being and academic development. We have two broad domains of focus, which often overlap: early childhood care and learning and psychosocial wellbeing. Additionally, a newer cross-cutting area of ours involves the study of sociopolitics of health and education.

In early childhood, we focus on various factors and practices in childcare, educational, and home settings related to young children’s development, learning, and pre-academic outcomes. We conduct most of this work through the Partnership for Early Education Research (PEER), a researcher-practitioner partnership we established in 2014. In the area of psychosocial wellbeing, the focus is on social and emotional learning (SEL), or the learning process of acquiring intrapersonal and interpersonal life skills such as self-control and interpersonal conflict. Projects we have conducted in this area have consisted of evaluations of SEL programs, the development of measures of SEL implementation, and synthesizing research on SEL effectiveness. In the sociopolitics area, we aim to understand the role sociopolitics plays in shaping the delivery of healthcare and education and how sociopolitics benefits and hinders positive outcomes for patients and students. Accordingly, some of this work involves testing sociopolitical claims or hypotheses in healthcare and education. We’re especially interested in how doing this work can help find ways to reduce political polarization through finding common values while respecting diverse viewpoints.
Areas of interest and study that cut across these two areas include:

• Researcher-practitioner partnership
• Program evaluation and continuous quality improvement
• Psychosocial contributors to achievement gaps
• Academic engagement (behavioral and psychological)
• Parenting
• School and home interventions/programs intended to benefit children and youth