Crane and Schoenbaum teams receive $14.3 million in federal funds to support work

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The OSU Early Head Start (OSU-EHS) Partnership Program was founded within the Schoenbaum Family Center in 2015 and has been recognized as a top program offering high-quality early education for eligible children and families. The program serves 160 children from low-income households in both center and home-based programs. OSU-EHS also has a unique network of 19 community partners that work together to offer holistic support and a “two-generation” approach to poverty alleviation. This year, the OSU-EHS program received additional federal funding through relief funds made available due to the pandemic that directly supported early child care and educator providers within the program.

Additionally, the OSU-EHS was recently awarded an additional five-year, $10 million federal expansion grant to build upon and expand vital services that support the health, learning, and well-being of young children and families in central Ohio. The grant reaffirms the importance of collaborative partnerships like the ones embedded within OSU-EHS that make it possible to more fully meet the range of needs facing families experiencing poverty and its hardships. This award will enable the program to expand services to more than 100 additional children and to begin offering prenatal support to 25 soon-to-be mothers, thereby strengthening the prenatal to early childhood support spectrum.

The OSU-EHS program along with OSU’s College of Optometry were awarded an Eye Can See grant which gives pediatric optometrists the opportunity to provide comprehensive eye exams, glasses, and overall education on the importance of eye health to children and families in the program. While nearly 20 percent of children in the EHS program have vision impairments, this age group is often overlooked when it comes to vision assessments. This grant alleviates barriers for families experiencing poverty by offering these health services conveniently at their childcare provider location and supporting children’s healthy development.

The coronavirus pandemic caused an unprecedented interruption to children’s learning and development without a roadmap to know if or how this disruption could impact children now and into the future. Just before the pandemic, a Crane Center project called Early Learning Ohio (ELO) was wrapping up a multi-year study that followed children from kindergarten through third grade to examine classroom ecology and what factors impact learning, achievement, and social development over time. Uniquely positioned with consecutive years of pre-pandemic data, this new grant will allow the ELO team to rapidly extend their research and capture data aimed at understanding how the pandemic affected children in Ohio, specifically in the areas examined through the ELO study.

This new research project will use data from the Early Learning Network, of which the Crane Center was a partner. The longitudinal study tracked data on 3,200 children from preschool through third grade from over 2,300 classrooms across five states (Massachusetts, Ohio, North Carolina, Nebraska, and Virginia). This new award will allow researchers to use this data to examine more closely the associations between school characteristics, classroom processes, and students’ language, academic, executive function, and social skills between pre-kindergarten and first grade.

The project aims are twofold. First, researchers will assess the extent to which different school characteristics are related to children’s gains in academic and social skills between preschool and first grade. Second, they will evaluate the degree to which school characteristics are associated with children’s classroom experiences and the extent to which classroom experiences account for the relations between school characteristics and children’s early learning.

A current Crane Center project called Small Talk examines how poverty and its associated stress affects the home environment and children’s early development. The research is interdisciplinary to include educational psychology, sociology, engineering, anthropology, and nursing.

While cross-discipline diversity is important to tackling complex issues, equally important is the need to diversify and grow the number of underrepresented researchers in the national scientific workforce. This grant will allow the SMALL Talk team to do both through the addition of co-investigator Dr. Nancy Mendoza. Dr. Mendoza brings expertise on caregivers and caregiver-focused interventions with specific interest these dynamics among Latinx families and also in grandparents who parent young children. Her lens of social work and gerontology will add another layer of understanding to this study.

Early language and social skills are important for a child’s future academic success, and for young children, time spent talking with friends and classmates offers unique opportunities to develop these skills. Yet because these interactions naturally happen in spontaneous and complex ways, it is difficult to know the extent to which these peer networks influence children’s language and social development. In this study, Crane researchers will use state-of-the-art technology, including voice-activated recording devices and location trackers placed on the shoulders of vests worn by children, to capture all of the children’s interactions. They will then analyze the data on these peer networks to understand their role in language development.

The project team spans three universities and multiple disciplines. They will research 500 children from 30 preschool classrooms throughout an academic year, and what the researchers expect to uncover are deeper insights into the individual differences in peer networks and how each affects language development over time. In turn, the findings could inform teacher practice on how to better leverage these social networks to help preschoolers further gain in their language skills.

Developmental language disorder (DLD) affects up to as many as 10% of children. Through a previous grant award, more than 800 language therapy sessions of 73 speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and 293 children across kindergarten, first, and second grades were recorded at public schools in two different states. With this latest award, Crane researchers will use new technology to transcribe, code, and analyze these sessions with a specific focus on examining determining how the features of SLPs’ talk during therapy affects language development of children with DLD.

During the final year of this grant, Crane researchers will also partner with SLPs working in urban pediatric hospital branches to test the practicality of a real-time automated coaching system meant to improve SLP practice. The Crane Center also plans to disseminate the open-science technology tools and database of information gathered through this study to the larger research community.