News

Interested in supporting collaboration with the Crane Center by facilitating educational and scholarly activities about children’s well-being? Learn more and apply to become a Crane Center Faculty Associate. Applications will be accepted to Kelly Boone (Boone.208@osu.edu) until 5:00 p.m. April 12th. Successful applicants will be notified by May 15th, 2019. See our impressive list of current Faculty Associates. Read More

(By Janelle Williamson, March 11, 209) The March Crane Research Forum hosted Crane’s Executive Director, Dr. Laura Justice. Crane Research Forums are hosted monthly throughout the academic year and highlight Ohio State faculty and their research on children's well-being. Dr. Laura Justice has spent much of the past 20 years studying print knowledge in young children.  Research shows that print knowledge is a prerequisite for reading. For young children with disabilities or low-resource homes, the acquisition of print knowledge can be difficult, which leads to long-term risks in reading achievement. Along with many colleagues, Dr. Justice created the Sit Together... Read More

Yesterday, the Bipartisan Policy Center released their Spotlighting Early Successes Across America report highlighting the success of 12 Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships (EHS-CCP) across the country. EHS-CCP was created by Congress in 2014 to address the lack of high-quality, affordable child care in the U.S., and assist in building capacity for quality child care options especially for low-income families. Early Head Start grantees partner with local child care providers who then receive funding and resources to improve the quality of services offered. The children they serve receive access to higher-quality early care and education, as well as comprehensive services... Read More

By Janelle Williamson (December 11, 2018) Last week at Crane’s monthly research forum, we heard from Dr. Noelle Arnold (Associate Dean, Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Community/Associate Professor, Department of Educational Studies). Crane Center Research Forums are held monthly throughout the university calendar year, and feature researchers from across the university to showcase their research and its impact on children. Dr. Arnold (left) spoke on her investigation of Louisiana’s School Community-Based Health Centers (SCBHC). In the late 1990’s/early 2000’s, the state of Louisiana began an initiative to put School-Based Health Centers (SCBHCs) in its public schools (read more here). Dr.... Read More

By Janelle Williamson (November 9, 2018) This week at Crane’s monthly research forum, we heard from Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dr. Kevin Passino and PhD candidate, Hugo Gonzalez Villasanti. Crane Center Research Forums are held monthly throughout the university-calendar year, and feature researchers from across the university who share their research and its impact on children. Passino leads the Technology 4 Mental Health group that collaborates across Ohio State to address mental health issues. The latest project that includes Hugo Gonzalez Villasanti and SFC staff Kelly Boone, Anneliese Johnson, Abel Koury, and Oliva Diaz Melgarejo plans to test... Read More

Our fifth annual 2018 Symposium on Children held on Oct. 4th was a daylong event filled with commitment and passion with a goal of bringing together experts from the research and policy worlds as well as practitioners. We heard from speakers, panelists, and community leaders about the impact of stress and trauma on children, the growing opioid crisis in Ohio, and ideas for building resilience and identifying community solutions  statewide, nationally, and globally. Understanding what factors build resilience is key in reducing trauma’s impact on children’s development. It is our hope these continued conversations help all of us—as researchers, practitioners,... Read More

A new series by WOSU Public Media features the A. Sophie Rogers School for Early Learning, along with two other early care programs in Columbus. The Right Start video series highlights two particular aspects of the school’s early learning program as worth replicating—diversity and high-quality teaching. View the first video, Fostering Diversity and Inclusion, to see A. Sophie Rogers classrooms in action and hear from Dr. Laura Justice, Executive Director of the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy and the Schoenbaum Family Center. [iframe width="1120" height="630" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0cnQP2ffn2U" ] Dr. Justice describes the value of mixed age grouping in... Read More

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has awarded a $3.3 million 5-year grant to Ohio State’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy to examine the impacts of the Kindergarten-Transition Intervention (KTI), a program focused on 24 specific practices designed to build connections between families and schools. Crane researchers will use a cluster randomized trial to examine KTI’s effects on children over several years, beginning with their academic and social-behavioral development during preschool. Later, they will examine the children’s adjustments to kindergarten and their trajectories through the end of first grade. “We are eager to learn more about how well... Read More

Researchers have found a surprising way to help boost the skills of children with language impairment: Pay their parents to read to them. A new study tested four techniques to get parents or other caregivers to complete a 15-week literacy intervention for their children with language impairment. Only one of those techniques – paying parents 50 cents for each reading session – led to children showing significant gains in reading test scores, findings showed. “We were somewhat stunned to find that paying parents had this strong effect. We didn’t anticipate this,” said Laura Justice, lead author of the study, and professor... Read More

The new Weinland Park Collaborative Report summarizes the vital role that programs in early childhood education, quality child care and kindergarten readiness are playing in preparing young children for educational success within the context of a revitalized neighborhood. The report also recommends important public policy changes needed to sustain this progress for young children in Weinland Park and other neighborhoods with high levels of poverty. Read: The Role of Early Education in Neighborhood Revitalization Read More