Report on Early Childhood Studies

Report on

Early Childhood Studies

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Report on Early Childhood Studies

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Table of Contents

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…the education of a young child is the foundation for all future educational experiences…

Dean’s Message

Early Childhood Education

The Culture of Childhood

Parents and Children

Bibliography

Index

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College of Education Report on Early Childhood Studies

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College of Education Report on Early Childhood Studies

Dean’s Message

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’ve gained a powerful and rejuvenated interest in early childhood as I watch my two grandchildren, one at age five and one approaching age two, grow and develop. As a grandfather, I have the luxury of observing from some distance while my children and their spouses deal with the many day-to-day challenges surrounding the care of young children coupled with the pressures of being at early stages in their respective careers. From my protected perch, I’ve watched both grandchildren as they’ve acquired language, developed points of view (and personality), and have become mobile (they both move quickly!). It all seems to happen at once and, of course, everything is connected to everything else.

To my untutored eye, the rapidity coupled with the comprehensiveness of the development is quite overwhelming.

gaining important insights into how to intervene when there is an impediment of some kind.

Fortunately, there is a lively field of study in early childhood education that is attracting talented researchers. These scholars are making remarkable progress at understanding childhood growth and development in all its complexity, and as a byproduct they are

As the strength of the faculty in this area of the College has increased, we are significantly expanding the portfolio of research and outreach endeavors with an early childhood focus, and it’s a privilege to share a sampling of this work in this

I’m pleased to report that we have been strengthening our capacity in the area of early childhood education in the College of Education at Penn State. We’re combining the talents of faculty members who are interested in how young learners develop knowledge and understanding within specific content areas like mathematics, science, social studies, and language. We are also heavily invested in the study of cognition and development with a focus on early childhood.

We are also working with our colleagues from a number of Penn Sate colleges on the formation of a University Task Force on Child Maltreatment that will incorporate the expertise of many College faculty members.

publication. One of the intellectually exciting aspects of this work is its inherently interdisciplinary nature, and we are finding ways to connect faculty members throughout the University with interests in early childhood (see page 25).

The Pennsylvania Department of Education recently reorganized teacher certification so that our students can now prepare for a preK-4 certificate that takes advantage of the rapidly growing knowledge base about young learners. The Commonwealth has recognized that teachers of young children need preparation that is different from the preparation needed by teachers of older children. The faculty in the College responded by developing a new Childhood and Early Adolescence Education major, which is proving to be very popular with our students (see page 13).

Nationally, we are seeing unprecedented progress toward gathering information that will help us learn even more about what can be done to help young children grow and develop in positive ways. For example, the federal government’s Department of

Education has funded the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which gathers data from three national cohorts of young children to examine child development, school readiness, and early school experiences. Some of the research included in this report is based on information from this remarkable set of data.

Early childhood studies is a vibrant and robust area of research, and I encourage you to read in the following pages how a number of faculty members from nearly all areas in our College are engaged in research that is informing how we educate young children.

Your questions and observations are welcome, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

David H. Monk, Dean

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Early Childhood Education

What is the best way for young children to learn? This question is critical, because the education of a young child is the foundation for all future educational experiences for that individual.

Governments are taking this into account, as seen by Pennsylvania’s new preK-4 education standards and certification band.

Also, the federal government has invested money in developing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which tracks separate cohorts of young children and provides rich data for faculty to study to discover trends in early childhood development and education.

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ames Johnson, professor of early childhood education, studies what is known as the PreK-3rd approach, in which prekindergartens, full-day kindergartens, and primary grades are organized as a coordinated system of education. According to Johnson, the PreK-3rd approach is increasing in public schools, and it is lauded as a way to help solve the problem of the achievement gap.

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Johnson is particularly interested in studying whether teacher education programs are aligned with the PreK-3rd approach. He and his colleagues recently completed an investigation (report in preparation, funded by the Foundation for Child Development) of 42 early childhood education teacher education (ECETE) programs housed in major research universities within 38 states that support publicly funded prekindergarten.

The team found that only about half of the ECETE programs reported impacts of the PreK and the PreK-3rd movements on changes within their programs in the past three years. But when asked how new teachers are being prepared to work in PreK-3rd settings, all programs gave legitimate responses, such as offering courses in teamwork and coordination, attempting to align programs with national K–12 teacher education standards, and placing trainees in diverse settings.

According to Johnson, the ECETE programs generally possessed high levels of teacher and student engagement, collaboration across departments and colleges within the university, and strong PreK or early childhood activity at the state level. Moreover, the ECETE programs demonstrated their abilities to respond dynamically and adaptively to significant challenges.

“We learned that collaboration within universiteacher-child interactions intentionally and ties, as well as between universities and pubmethodically. Therefore, teacher skills relating lic schools and community programs, is very to interaction styles should be a central comimportant in helping ECETE programs do the ponent of teacher preparation programs.” job of preparing teachers for the continuum of early learning from birth to fourth grade,” Hartle and a colleague from the University said Johnson. “Our findings demonstrated the of Central Florida are using the Classroom Research has shown that the quality of many challenges ECETE faculties face as well Assessment Scoring System (CLASSTM) as teacher-child interactions is the best as their dedication to meeting and exceeding a professional development tool to guide measure of classroom quality. national and state standards. Although these and then, as an observational tool, to assess programs are varied, they generally are effecintentional teacher-student interactions that tive in adapting to the new realities of public education. Despite their fall within three domains: emotional support, classroom organization, enthusiasm, for the PreK-3rd approach to succeed, new teachers and and instructional support. teacher educators need support to help lift early education into the primary grades.”

In fall 2008, the team studied the impact of a National Center for Research in Early Childhood Education (NCRECE) literacy course to Part of that preparation of new teachers should focus on the nature prepare students at the University of Central Florida in the multiple and quality of teachers’ instructional and emotional interactions with teacher-student interactions that fall within each of the domains of children in early childhood education, which has been shown to be a CLASSTM. In the course, students viewed videos of successful and stronger predictor of positive child outcomes than teacher qualificanot-so-successful teacher behaviors, analyzed the videos, and practions, class size, and classroom environment. ticed teaching in order to learn how to become effective teachers. In addition to offering a section of this NCRECE course, the university “Research has shown that the quality of teacher-child interactions is offered another section of a course on early reading, writing, and lanthe best measure of classroom quality,” said Lynn Hartle, professor guage arts that was taught as usual. Students were randomly assigned of education at Penn State Brandywine. “Preparing early childhood to each section. teachers who engage in effective teacher-child interaction is imperative for young children’s academic learning and social-emotional Preliminary data show that the teacher-child interactions for all three development, especially for children in high risk and low-income CLASSTM domains improved the students’ professional dialogue about areas. Even more important, teachers need to engage in these effective teaching and learning in multiple ways. p n

We learned that collaboration within universities, as well as between universities and public schools and community programs, is very important in helping ECETE programs do the job of preparing teachers for the continuum of early learning from birth to fourth grade.

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Early Childhood Education

Specific Interventions Many Penn State faculty are focusing on early childhood education practices within their specific subject area, and they are finding a number of interesting trends and best practices.

Science Education 10

Young children are famous for asking “why” and this eagerness to learn is something that Barbara Hong, associate professor of special education at Penn State Altoona, believes is underappreciated.

“Children as young as two years old are capable of complex learning and developing critical thinking,” said Hong. “It is an injustice to think that two- or four- or eight-year-olds are not mature enough to understand certain mathematical, spatial, economic, or scientific concepts and, hence, to avoid teaching those concepts altogether.”

Hong’s research examines the discoveries provided by cognitive science on how the brain seeks to identify developmentally appropriate practices for children. “We now know that even the youngest child can understand fractions, gravity, and photosynthesis if the teacher knows the concepts well enough to dissect them into simpler pieces of knowledge that children can digest,” said Hong. “No concept is too complicated to teach.”

According to Hong, teachers who are weak in the concepts they are teaching cannot deliver an effective lesson because they know only how to ask superficial questions of their students. As a result, they merely instill a superficial understanding of that concept. On the other hand, if teachers have a strong knowledge base, they will know how to ask deeper questions so as to arouse deeper thinking and help students process the new information longer (Hong et al. 2009; HongFoster and Ehrensberger 2005).

“Cognitive psychologists have discovered that the longer children process the information while being taught for the first time, the more likely they are to retain that information in their secondary memory and the easier it is to recall when needed,” said Hong.

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If teachers know how to ask the right questions and provoke the right kind of thought processing, then critical thinking is taking place.

She added, “The key to learning and retaining knowledge lies in the craft of asking the right questions at the right time. If teachers know how to ask the right questions and provoke the right kind of thought processing, then critical thinking is taking place. Hence, even the youngest child can start to develop critical thinking skills while learning the simplest concepts.”

Assistant Professor of Science Education Deborah C. Smith has reached a similar conclusion. Smith worked with Jessica Cowan ’02 E K Ed, an elementary school teacher, and Alicia Culp ’08 E K Ed, who at the time was an undergraduate intern in the Penn State teacher education program.

Smith, Cowan, and Culp (2009) taught and observed the students in Cowan’s kindergarten class, exploring a framework introduced in a 2007 National Research Council report headed by Richard A. Duschl—who now is Waterbury Chaired Professor in Secondary Education at Penn State. Duschl and his colleagues had proposed that four strands of scientific learning be woven throughout lessons. The strands would enable students to: 1. know, use, and interpret scientific explanations of the natural world; 2. generate and evaluate scientific evidence and explanations; 3. understand the nature and development of scientific knowledge; and 4. participate productively in scientific practices and discourse.

Cowan’s kindergarten students were studying how plants grow from seeds. They shared their predictions and ideas with classmates, conducted investigations, varied growing conditions, and created data charts and graphs of findings.

“The classroom activities engaged the students in the ways that scientists use talk, writing, drawing, design, investigations, tools, representations, and explanations to make knowledge,” said Smith.

The class project was grounded in the four strands of scientific learning. For example, the students learned that scientists often attend professional conferences to share ideas. In their own “scientists” conference, the children shared their individual ideas about seeds and plant growth to contribute to the class’s ongoing knowledge refinement—a reflection of strands three and four.

At the same time, Smith and her colleagues were encouraging and observing the children’s ability to think and talk like scientists. They heard comments such as “I think the mold grew because those seeds got more water.” When there were anomalies in their data, the students proposed possible reasons, designed new investigations to test their ideas, used representations to chart the results, and capably reflected on and explained their findings. These activities engaged them in the four strands while building their own scientific knowledge.

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Smith and her colleagues found that when the children acted in a community of peers, they attained not only a deep understanding of the science, but also an appreciation for how they could make scientific knowledge themselves.

“We encourage other teachers and researchers to explore the four strands in other grade levels and domains of science,” said Smith.

“Our work provides a good example of how teachers and researchers can work together to investigate important questions and produce needed knowledge for teaching and learning science.”

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Other faculty are investigating how new technologies can assist the teaching and learning of science. Heather Toomey Zimmerman, assistant professor of instructional systems, is exploring ways of including iPods and iPads into educational programming related to informal science education (Zimmerman et al. in press, Zimmerman et al. 2010c). To this end, she and Associate Professor of Education

Susan Land helped develop a project called Tree Investigators, in which fourth graders use mobile learning devices to identify trees.

“The Tree Investigators project is an example of a research methodology called design-based research,” said Zimmerman. “Design-based research involves applying theory to the design of an educational intervention— such as a curriculum, a technology, or a museum exhibit—and then studying the impacts of the intervention on learners. The methodology is novel because it is an iterative research method, meaning you develop the intervention, study it, redesign the intervention, study the new intervention, and repeat. The result is improved educational theory that has been tested with real learners in real learning environments.”

Zimmerman applies design-based research to her other projects as well. In another study, she works with colleagues from the University of Washington to understand parent-child conversations about science (Zimmerman et al. 2010a, 2010b). According to Zimmerman, parents are often the earliest teachers for youth and by studying how families and their young children learn science in their homes and informal spaces, such as museums, nature centers, and arboretums, she and her colleagues can better design science learning environments and new technologies can be used to support early childhood learning.

“We are interested in how young children and families learn and use technologies to perceive the space around them; to become scientific observers; to develop identities congruent with science, nature, and technology; to integrate science with their everyday experiences; and to progressively and collaboratively build knowledge,” she said.

“My work with colleagues at Penn State is helping to create new learning environments to support the development of these science competencies.”

New Undergraduate Major in Childhood and Early Adolescent Education

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new major, Childhood and Early Adolescent Education (CEAED), has been added to Penn State’s teacherpreparation options. The major aligns with new requirements recently set forth by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE).

“The former Pennsylvania administration had a keen interest in early childhood education, and key advisers to the governor believed that these changes in certification would strengthen early childhood education in the Commonwealth,” said Jacqueline Edmondson, associate dean for undergraduate and graduate studies.

PDE has reconfigured the grade bands for certification. Effective September 1, 2013, certification in grade bands N–3 and K–6 (nursery through grade 3 and kindergarten through grade 6) will no longer be an option for new teachers in Pennsylvania. After that date, PDE will issue certification only in the new bands: preK–4 and 4–8. Penn State will also be offering degrees in 4–8 social studies, 4–8 English language arts, and 4–8 mathematics (the latter at Penn State Harrisburg).

Current students who are enrolled in the N–3 and K–6 bands must complete their certification requirements by August 31, 2013.

would be eligible for the new certifications beginning in September 2013,” stated Edmondson.

The College’s proposal was reviewed by PDE to ensure that the major met the guidelines in the certification statute. Edmondson noted that, “PDE approved the preK–4 option with a special designation of ‘promising model/ innovative practice’ in relation to our field experiences and student teaching.”

The new CEAED major combines some elements of the former Elementary and Kindergarten Education major (N–3 and K–6 options). It also incorporates some new courses and field experiences.

The PreK–4 teaching option was created using guidelines recommended by the National Association for Education of Young Children (NAEYC) as well as standards established by PDE to support growth and content understanding—beginning with the youngest learners and continuing into the fourth grade.

“Faculty from across the Penn State system met to discuss and plan the CEAED major so that students graduating from our programs

The preK–4 option also was nationally recognized recently by NAEYC as part of the College’s approval process through the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.

“The preK–4 option of the CEAED major is being extended from the College of Education to Penn State’s campuses at Abington, Altoona, Brandywine, Berks, and Lehigh Valley,” said Edmondson. “Faculty from across these campuses are collaborating closely to deliver the same program to students across these locations.”

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Literacy Education Kathleen M. Collins, assistant professor of language and literacy education, studies how teachers can draw on multiple literacies to design educational contexts that support children’s learning.

A multiple literacies perspective considers meaning-making or “literacy” as situated in particular contexts. From this perspective, schooling privileges certain forms of literacy over others, often at the expense of students whose home language and literacies are quite different from those valued in traditional classroom settings.

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Collins’ work emphasizes both the disciplinary nature of a multiple literacies perspective (for example, the ways that scientists use writing to create an argument) and the multimodal aspects of representation within those literacies (that is, the use of different forms of expression such as speech, models, drawings, and even dance).

Collins’ research projects include an investigation conducted in the classroom of first-grade teacher Kris Carithers. Carithers drew on a multiple literacies framework to teach science content about the rainforest by means of a classroom-sized board game. Working together for about a month, with support from artist Danielle MichaelisCastillo, the students invented their game, Rainforestland, which they modeled after some familiar children’s board games. Rainforestland encompassed all available physical classroom space. The students acted as the game pieces, advancing by correctly answering questions related to the lessons.

The exercise allowed the children to develop their communication and social skills as well as their knowledge of the rainforest (Collins and Griess 2011). While creating the game, negotiating the rules, and advancing around the board, the children expressed their thoughts in various forms or modes of representation. For instance, they created

masks of rainforest animals for playing pieces to wear; they built models of different forms of rainforest life; and they wrote questions (and answers) to be used to quiz classmates who landed in a “trap” when traveling around the board.

For Collins, the key to designing a learning context that positions students for success is drawn from a sociocultural perspective on ability and disability. This means that teachers begin by looking at how learning environment intersects with children’s individual strengths, interests, and preferences. Rather than identifying deficits within children who appear less engaged, consider how different forms of representation and disciplinary literacies may be used to facilitate their engagement.

“Start with the children,” Collins suggests. “Know their interests, their strengths, and how they prefer to communicate.”

Collins asserts that changing the forms of literacy available in schooling contexts is a social justice imperative that is central to addressing the overrepresentation of children of color, children from low-income families, and English language learners in deficit educational categories.

“Just as we had to learn to design physical contexts that support access and participation of all individuals, we need to design instruction that bridges the gap between students’ preferred modes of expression and those normally privileged in schools,” said Collins. “Multiple literacies gives us a frame for doing that. When you change the forms of literacy available in a given context, you change the possibilities for participation in that context. In doing so, you are able to change who people are able to be and how they are responded to, or socially positioned, by other participants.”

David McNaughton, professor of special education, is also interested in expanding access and participation of individuals normally excluded from traditional literacy instruction. He works with individuals with complex communication needs.

When he was three years old, Michael, who has autism, rarely used speech to communicate. He used a few signs to make basic requests, but was often frustrated that he couldn’t express himself more fully.

A year later, though, he could read. He was also beginning to write and was frequently using his speech to communicate with others, all thanks to a literacy curriculum created by Janice Light, distinguished professor of communication science and disorders in the College of Health and Human Development at Penn State, and McNaughton.

The team’s instructional program was specially developed for individuals with complex communication needs, such as those with autism, cerebral palsy, and Down syndrome, who experience difficulty in learning to speak.

“Reading and writing are important skills because they enhance cognitive development, facilitate participation at school, increase employment opportunities, and help to build social relationships,” said McNaughton. “For individuals with complex communication needs, learning to read and write also provides a means to communicate more effectively and has a profound impact on self-esteem.”

So far, McNaughton and Light have seen the benefits of their program in children with a range of disabilities, including Michael and other young children, as well as older individuals who never had an opportunity for literacy instruction (Light et al. 2008). Information on the program is available on a Web site (aacliteracy.psu.edu) that provides guidelines to parents and teachers for teaching their specialneeds children and students language skills, phonological awareness skills, letter-sound correspondences, decoding skills, recognition of sight words, and skills for reading and understanding simple texts.

The Web site includes samples of instructional materials as well as videos demonstrating students’ success.

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For individuals with complex communication needs, learning to read and write also provides a means to communicate more effectively and has a profound impact on self-esteem.

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The researchers evaluated the effectiveness of the instructional program by examining the progression of learning among the participants (Light and McNaughton 2009). They found that all of the participants made substantial gains as a result of the literacy instruction; all participants learned to read and to understand simple sentences and stories, and many are now participating in general education classrooms alongside their nondisabled peers.

“This project has helped us realize that these children are capable of much more than many of us would have predicted,” said McNaughton. “The combination of effective instruction, interesting reading materials, and a belief that everyone can learn has really made a difference for these children.”

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Social Studies Education Stephanie Serriere, assistant professor of social studies education, focuses her research on early civic education and children’s experiences of democracy. She believes it’s important to carve out space and time in the classroom so students can practice civic situations and have experiences with the ideal of democracy.

“I believe that ‘social studies’ in the early years is learning those initial skills of deliberation and dialogue—learning to communicate as a part of a community,” she said.

Serriere often uses digital photography to encourage young children to discuss and re-envision their own social dilemmas. “Researching young children’s experiences and giving them a voice in ways that

are comfortable and natural may happen more easily for many children through a photograph,” she said.

Serriere observed a class of preK children as they practiced what she calls “carpet-time democracy.” With parental permission, she photographed the preschoolers each day as they acted out classroom tasks.

Later each morning, she and the children convened for a “photo-talk.”

The children examined the photos and offered genuine discussions about details in the images.

Serriere came to recognize that the children’s bubbly discussions could serve as a springboard for articulating and modifying their social reality. “At this point it was an individual method—me talking to children about photos of themselves in play. Then, as children gathered around my laptop, the teachers and I realized the potential for group explorations with the photos,” she said.

“So often we sit the children on the floor to listen to a story, maybe to teach them a lesson about life,” continued Serriere. “But we found that digital photographs projected on the wall were more immediate, and they can be interesting conversation starters about the way things are and how they could be as envisioned by the children themselves.”

Serriere recaps her project in a published article (Serriere 2010) that serves as a detailed guide for teachers wishing to promote civic action, social understanding, and justice in their classrooms, as well as for researchers interested in visual methodologies.

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I believe that ‘social studies’ in the early years is learning those initial skills of deliberation and dialogue— learning to communicate as a part of a community

Through her research, Rutkowski has learned that giving children opportunities to sing in small groups, or individually, consistently helps them learn to sing better than if they always sing in a large group (Rutkowski and Miller 2003a, 2003b; Rutkowski 1996). She currently is examining strategies that would allow children to do this—and to do it in ways that would not intimidate them—within the traditional large-group setting.

Rutkowski also studies early childhood settings in which a less formal approach to teaching is most appropriate. She is analyzing data from a study she conducted with kindergarten children in which she is attempting to determine whether the children’s use of their singing voices improves after a year of informal musical guidance rather than the typical, formal musical guidance.

Music Education Children can learn to sing, even if they don’t appear to have a natural “musical ear.” That is what Professor of Music Education Joanne Rutkowski has found in her research on the nature of children’s singing voices and strategies for helping all children become successful singers.

Rutkowski created the Singing Voice Development Measure, a rubric/measurement tool to assess children’s use of their singing voices (Rutkowski 2010). The measure—which has been used by many researchers and practitioners and is consistently highly reliable—is based on the notion that children first need to learn to use all registers of their voice before they will sing in tune. “Often children will sound like they can’t sing just because they don’t know how to use their voices; it’s not that they aren’t musical. Using the measure, I have found very low correlations between children’s use of their singing voices and their musical aptitudes,” said Rutkowski.

In addition to studying kindergartners, Rutkowski also teaches them.

She recently brought along a male, undergraduate music-education major to her kindergarten music classes to observe how the children respond to his voice, which is an octave lower than Rutkowski’s voice.

“The easiest vocal model for children is another child, or a female adult voice,” said Rutkowski. “Children seem to have difficulty singing well with an adult male voice, which is lower, as a model.

My hypothesis is that once children become comfortable using their singing voices they will not have difficulty with an adult male model.”

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The Culture of Childhood Children do not grow up in a vacuum.

Children do not grow up in a vacuum.

From the earliest days of their lives, they are exposed to familial and societal cultures. A number of media influences begin reaching them at a very early age.

Some Penn State faculty are looking at the culture of childhood, as well as how children learn and develop a cultural knowledge of their family, community, and larger society.

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hristine Marmé Thompson, professor of visual arts, studies various aspects of drawing in young children when they are working in the social settings of early childhood art classrooms.

“My initial interest was in discovering what children choose to draw to please themselves,” she said. “But that interest has shifted over time to include the influence of children’s interests on the style and strategies they choose in drawing, and the influence of peers and teachers, as well as conversations and gestures, in the process of learning to draw in a public space.”

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Thompson’s most recent research has focused on bilingual and bicultural children attending a Head Start program in the predominately Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago (Thompson 2009). She is finding that the preschool children in this urban neighborhood—most of whom are poor, second- or third-generation immigrants to the United States—draw many of the same things that more “suburban” children do, but that their drawings, even at ages 3 and 4, reflect a very different range of experience. For example, Thompson said, they often draw pictures related to media—possibly because they are unable to play outdoors and, instead, spend more time watching videos.

Their sketches are also sometimes related to challenging life experiences and pictures that attempt to understand injury and death.

Thompson also examines the differences between what children say as they are making drawings—which are often in the form of rich narratives with lots of sound effects and gestures—and what they say about their drawings at the end of the process when a teacher is there to write down titles and captions. “The latter is often abbreviated and

kind of perfunctory in comparison with everything they say while they are drawing,” said Thompson.

According to Thompson, her research is grounded in an interest in children’s culture, especially in their acceptance or rejection of the images and objects produced for children by adults, and in the intimate peer cultures they create in their classrooms and communities. She said, “My interest is in the role of language in the making and sharing of images, and the role of teachers and peers in helping children to begin to use drawing as a flexible symbolic language and vehicle for telling stories about their lives.”

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Even though very young children can develop detailed narratives about their lives through art and pictures, when it comes to books, the stories are typically selected and told by adults.

Even though very young children can develop detailed narratives about their lives through art and pictures, when it comes to books, the stories are typically selected and told by adults.

“Children don’t write children’s literature, adults do,” said Daniel Hade, associate professor of education. “Adults also edit, market, select, read aloud, recommend, and teach children’s books. This means that children’s literature is produced according to the notions adults hold about children and about what literature is appropriate for children.”

…children’s books ought to challenge the status quo in order to offer other ways of thinking about human life and human societies.

Hade calls children’s literature “an artistically and culturally mediated conversation that a society holds with its children,” and his research focuses on the ways in which these “conversations” impact kids.

For example, he has studied the culture of a classroom and how it shapes the way children read and respond to literature. “I’ve looked at how those conversations have talked about certain cultural and economic markers such as race, class, and gender,” he said.

Hade also has studied the business of children’s books. For example, he has examined how markets shape the kinds of books available to children—especially books that are highly commercialized, such as the American Girl books (Hade 2000, 2001, 2003). “Virtually no girl over the age of seven in the United States does not know about American Girls, their stories, and, of course, the dolls and other paraphernalia associated with the books,” said Hade. “It is possible that reading has become just another means of consumption, given the large quantity of spin-off merchandise that many books generate.”

Hade’s most recent work focuses on how masculinity is constructed in certain works of fiction—such as the popular book Stone Fox, which is about a boy who enters a dog sled race to win money to pay the back taxes on his grandfather’s farm. He also is examining how some authors use the poor as art objects to tell middle- and upper-class morality tales, and how war is used metaphorically as a tool for solving problems.

“A large portion of children’s books reflect what the middle and upper classes want children to know and believe,” said Hade. “But I believe that children’s books ought to challenge the status quo in order to offer other ways of thinking about human life and human societies.”

“Like many in the field of early childhood, I am deeply concerned about the pushdown of academic curriculum and the loss of time for play and exploration,” said Gail Boldt, associate professor of language and literacy education and women’s studies. Boldt believes this pushdown is driven by the pressures of accountability and early reading achievement.

A recent op-ed piece by Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times suggests that 65% of today’s grade school children will end up working in jobs that do not even exist yet. Said Boldt, “At a time when we need to be encouraging flexibility, creativity, and self-efficacy in our children, our nation’s fears over our changing place in the world economy is driving education into increasing rigidity of curriculum, standardization, and demands for accountability in early childhood education.”

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In her research, Boldt seeks to gain a better understanding of young children’s experiences related to the interactions between their bodies, their environments, and the materials in their environments. She collaborated with Kevin Leander of Vanderbilt University in two recent studies to explore the idea of potential manifestations of childhood in relation to material objects of play. “We’re trying to determine how young children exist in relationships with the material world, blurring the boundaries between humans and technologies,” explained Boldt.

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Boldt and Leander observed one young child’s play with LEGO® bricks, and in a separate study they examined the actions of two young boys who were reading and playing with materials from popular texts. The researchers found in both instances that the specific materials and environment in which the boys were playing provided the materials that allowed for shared social play.

However, what the boys were most interested in was the possibility of creating novelty and excitement in the play.

“The focus on play as driven by the desire to produce energy through novelty is in contrast to many understandings of children’s social interactions, in which play is understood as reproductions of already-existing social scripts or as a form of cognitive development,” said Boldt.

In another project, Boldt and Joseph Valente, assistant professor of early childhood education, are analyzing representations of young deaf children and cochlear implant. “We’re offering a philosophical and practical criticism of the fantasies of sameness or normalcy that are used in the hard sell of cochlear implantation in children as young as six months old,” explained Boldt, “arguing instead that we need to adopt a perspective on disabilities as highlighting the diverse ways of being that exist for all humans.”

Most children learn to be members of their culture from their families. But for the 90 percent of deaf children around the world who live with hearing parents and siblings, assimilation into Deaf culture is more likely to begin in early childhood programs in schools for the deaf.

Valente is studying this assimilation process. In a research project funded by the Spencer Foundation, he and his colleagues collected video ethnographic data in deaf kindergarten classrooms in Japan, France, and the United States with a goal of understanding how deaf children become members of both Deaf culture and of their national culture.

“The ultimate goal of our study is to open up space for dialogue among the stakeholders in deaf education,” said Valente.

The team videotaped a typical day in signing kindergarten classrooms in Maryland, France, and Japan. “The tapes are intended to provoke discussion of key issues in deaf education, to give a sense of the kids’ daily routines, and to capture revealing or gripping moments, like a child making an intellectual breakthrough or a child experiencing frustration or new successes in attempts to communicate,” said Valente.

According to Valente, the availability of cochlear implants and other technologies is beginning to change Deaf culture and deaf education. For example, the percentage of deaf infants and toddlers given cochlear implants has grown exponentially over the last decade, and an increasing percentage of parents are opting for speech-only programs for their deaf children, rather than signing schools.

“Some proponents of technological interventions believe advances in digital hearing aids and cochlear implants will soon eradicate deafness and, therefore, the need for signing and deaf schools altogether,” said Valente. “Cochlear implants can never eradicate deafness—that is a myth. What this perspective overlooks is that to be Deaf is to be part of a culture with its own unique language and history. We aim to provide a platform for the Deaf community, deaf children, and their parents and teachers to express their positions about schooling, language, disability, and cultural identity.”

In a similar way to Deaf culture, some scholars fear that old African folklore is in danger of disappearing. Storytelling, which at one time was passed on to young children strictly by oral communication, now is related through books and other media.

Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, associate professor of language and literacy education, conducts research on African children’s literature. She has examined innovative ways in which children’s books and electronic media may or may not be able to preserve the appeal of folklore and culture.

“Retaining the oral integrity of the original tales can be challenging depending on the specific medium and/or format,” says Yenika-Agbaw in a recent article in the journal Bookbird (Yenika-Agbaw 2011).

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The Culture of Childhood

Yenika-Agbaw looked at four storytelling formats used by authors who write about Africa. Each of these formats—bilingual picture storybooks, picture books, graphic novels, and YouTube videos— presents its content in a unique way.

• Bilingual picture storybooks—As an example of this

format, Yenika-Agbaw used Jane Kurtz’s 2009 folktale Trouble. The book’s bilingual format allows children to read the text in their preferred language. “Storytelling in print and in indigenous languages is a new phenomenon in the West,” states Yenika-Agbaw.

• Picture books—Because of their abundance of illustrations,

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picture books are a good medium for holding children’s attention.

Yenika-Agbaw used Sally Mallam’s book Dende Maro: The Golden Prince as her example. The verse form evokes an image of a griot at a village town square narrating a story of the origin of human civilization.

• Graphic novels—These books present their story by means

of a sequence of narrative illustrations and dialogue in speech bubbles. Sunjata, Warrior King of Mali, written by Justine and Ron Fontes, appeared to Yenika-Agbaw to be the most innovative of the three book formats. “The graphic novel conveys the story in a much more dramatic manner, making visible distinct aspects of the Mande culture as was practiced in the thirteenth century,” she notes.

“Furthermore, it integrates a call and response strategy that invites readers to participate in the storytelling.”

• YouTube videos—African tales on YouTube do not appear

to be as effective as books in preserving the oral integrity of the original tales, says Yenika-Agbaw. “The tales on Youtube vary in quality, depending on the creator’s ability to manipulate the new medium,” she explains.

Yenika-Agbaw adds, “The transformation of these tales into new media demonstrates that the stories are dynamic and can be relevant to contemporary audiences in a global context.”

Similar to the transformation of the telling of African tales through changing media, the media of girlhood culture is constantly evolving. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, associate professor of language and literacy education and women’s studies, is looking at girlhood culture and the historical progression of dolls, books, and other influences that symbolize girls’ values and eventual role in society.

Reid-Walsh, along with Claudia Mitchell of McGill University in Canada, is co-editor of Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia (2007). ReidWalsh and Mitchell note that the teenage years no longer begin at age 13; nowadays, girls in the early childhood sector think like teens.

Young girls have assumed the interests of the traditional teenager— for example, they enjoy playing with Barbie dolls. With this type of play, young girls may be envisioning their future persona as adult women as well as playing with femininity through modifying the doll.

“There is a lot of criticism about Barbie play promoting unrealistic body shape, but like all fashion dolls the shape is a mannequin for a specific period and culture,” explained Reid-Walsh. “This unrealistic representation may not bother young girls who play with an assortment of unrealistic representations of different creatures.”

Flap books, a relic of simpler times, featured movable components that encouraged interaction between reader and content. These books were popular with children between the 17th and 19th centuries in Europe and America.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Early Childhood Studies

I

t doesn’t take a parent to know that young children are highly complex beings.

They are noteworthy for being happy one minute and throwing a tantrum the next.

They also are known for their rapid learning abilities—spouting out new words every day, for example. Indeed, young children are complex beings, and that is why researchers from across the University are collaborating to study them.

Formed in 2008, the Early Childhood Studies Cross-Cutting Initiative, hosted by the College of Education, brings together researchers from diverse disciplines and a number of colleges at Penn State to conduct research and scholarship on early childhood language and literacy, science education, social studies education, math education, immigration, gender, and parenting, among other topics.

“In today’s complex world, teachers in basic education, and those of us in higher education who are preparing the next generation of teachers, profit a great deal from practical insights culled from recent research and theory in such fields as the politics of childhood, sociology of childhood, anthropology, and childhood folklore,” said James Johnson, professor of early childhood education and a member of the Early Childhood Studies

Cross-Cutting Initiative. “In my work I seek balance between a developmental/clinical orientation and a social/political one, and childhood studies, as an interdisciplinary endeavor, helps me work on trying to achieve this.”

Members of the cross-cutting initiative, which include professors and their graduate students, meet several times a semester to present and discuss their work, host outside scholars who give formal presentations, read and critique cutting-edge research and training in the field, and share potential classroom resources.

Maryellen Schaub, assistant professor of education theory and policy, is another member of the initiative. “Academia can be an isolating profession,” she said. “Groups like the Early Childhood Studies Cross-Cutting Initiative help us connect with others and inform us about what our colleagues are interested in and working on. They also keep us up to date on new methods and interdisciplinary scholarship. But most importantly, they help us form relationships that might lead to collaborative projects.”

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The Culture of Childhood

Now, hundreds of years later, video gaming is the technology of choice for interacting with content. Reid-Walsh has examined how girls interact with the popular life-simulation video game The SimsTM (Reid-Walsh 2008).

“One aim is to show the historical trajectory of interactive narrative media for children, regarding girls spanning 19th-century paper dolls to contemporary doll Web sites and elaborate simulation games,” stated Reid-Walsh. “In each case, girls or children create visual and mobile stories through play that can suit many purposes, such as imitation of daily life to fantasy play or dealing with problems in their life.“

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Reid-Walsh, Mitchell, and the late Jacqueline Kirk co-founded Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Reid-Walsh and Mitchell continue as co-editors. Says Reid-Walsh, “Here our mandate is to extend the new field beyond turning girls into passive objects of study, but to include girls as meaning-makers. Accordingly, in addition to girl-centered academic research from across the world from a variety of disciplines, the journal’s issues include texts by girls as well.”

Boyhood culture is also evolving—and in some alarming ways.

Statistics show that boys are not doing so well in schools today.

About 335 boys are expelled for every 100 girls, according to the Boys Project recently conducted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Boys are four times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And, in recent international testing given by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), girls outperformed boys internationally in nearly every country on every measure.

Alison A. Carr-Chellman, professor of instructional systems, said boys are turned off in the early elementary years because “Boy culture and school culture do not mix. We need to meet the boys where they are and change the culture in the schools.”

Innovative instructional approaches, suggests Carr-Chellman, would re-engage boys in their learning experiences. She sees some promise in educational video gaming. “Video games and sports are not the cause of poor school performance; they’re a symptom,” she stated.

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Boy culture and school culture do not mix. We need to meet the boys where they are and change the culture in the schools.

Carr-Chellman discussed video gaming as an educational tool in a video presentation at Penn State’s fall 2010 TEDxPSU Conference (Carr-Chellman 2010). In her talk, she called out three primary reasons for boys’ disinterest: • Zero-Tolerence School Policies

Carr-Chellman noted that schools have been led to reject many concepts that could be construed as violent—from Halloween costumes to tiny toy guns to writing about disasters or video games.

“These topics are too often banned, and zero-tolerance policies that are enforced in nonsensical fashion can lead to making boys feel unwelcome in schools,” said Carr-Chellman. “I am adamantly opposed to bullying or violent outbursts in classrooms, but I fear the zero-tolerance policies may have gone too far.”

• Scarcity of Male Teachers About 93 percent of elementary school teachers are women.

The absence of male teachers—who might better serve as role models for boys—has an effect on overall school culture.

• Hurry-Up Learning Curricula are more compressed and expectations are greater

than in the past. “Kindergarten is the old second grade,” said Carr-Chellman. “With more testing, larger classes, higher expectations, and less tolerance for active children, school becomes a place that boys simply feel they don’t fit.”

She believes that part of the answer may lie in designing better games that are appropriate for school use. “Too many educational games are glorified flash cards; educational games should engage kids in rich narratives, competitive and cooperative play, fantasy, and learning,” she said.

Carr-Chellman’s video presentation received the honor of being the first Penn State talk to be posted to TED’s global Web site (www.ted.com/). TED (technology, entertainment, and design) is a major global media platform for indexing online video content.

Its free vlogcasts include lectures from distinguished individuals— among them Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, Jane Goodall, and Stephen Hawking.

Videos posted to the global TED site receive high visibility— Carr-Chellman’s TED talk led to subsequent television, radio (notably on NPR), and print reports on her ongoing work.

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College of Education Report on Early Childhood Studies

28

Parents and Children

Parents by far are the strongest influence on a young child’s life, and so often early childhood research focuses on the parent-child relationship.

Research by College faculty has taken advantage of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data, which document both birth and kindergarten cohorts of young children. These data make it possible to measure the development of children over time. Other research has measured how the engagement of parents in cognitive activities with their young children has changed over time.

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Parents and Children

M

aryellen Schaub, assistant professor of education theory and policy, studies how social institutions intertwine and overlap in modern society, with particular focus on family and schooling. In one project, she is examining the changes that have occurred over time regarding parents’ involvement in their children’s formal and informal educations.

“Ideas about childhood have changed dramatically since 1950,” said Schaub. “Part of this change includes the increased importance society places on schooling because education is now the main vehicle to gaining access to adult opportunities.”

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Schaub’s research in this area has shown that, since the middle of the 20th century, parents are increasingly spending more time engaged with their young children in activities related to cognitive development, such as reading to them and teaching them letters, words, and numbers as well as exposing them to music, arts and crafts, and storytelling (Schaub 2010).

Schaub also is investigating cultural differences related to schooling.

One of her projects shows that schooling is not a primary institution in all cultures. For example, she found that, for the Old Order Amish, family and community remain primary institutions and schooling is a secondary institution (Schaub and Baker, forthcoming). Her in-depth interviews with Amish families have revealed that the emphasis in Amish schooling is on supporting a strong family and community rather than highlighting individual success or status.

“Amish children are taught basic academic skills as well as how to be Amish, but family involvement in schooling is limited to an as-needed basis,” she said. Schaub is engaged in a similar project with Quechan parents in Peru.

In her latest research, she is examining the expansion of schooling for young children. “Parents are increasingly seeing early childhood education as an essential experience for young children,” she said, noting that the proportion of children attending both kindergarten and preschool has steadily risen since the middle of the 20th century.

“But what prompts this expansion of education? And with the current budget cuts, will state sponsorship of early childhood education be restricted?” she asks.

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Parents are increasingly seeing early childhood education as an essential experience for young children.

Katerina Bodovski, assistant professor of educational theory and policy, examines the effects of family emotional climate on students’ success in school (Bodovski and Youn 2010).

“So far, the most important finding is that parental use of physical discipline when a child is in kindergarten has a long-lasting negative effect on achievement; specifically, it is associated with lower 5th-grade math achievement,” she said.

Low-income and minority students will benefit the most from boosting their school readiness.

Bodovski also has found that low-income, African American, and single parents are more likely to report depressive symptoms and that parental depression is associated with lower reading and math achievement among children. African American parents also are more likely to report the use of physical discipline; however, they report greater parental warmth as well. In contrast, Asian parents report being less likely to use physical discipline, but they also are less likely to express parental warmth.

In other work, Bodovski studies the effects of school readiness and family emotional climate on later educational outcomes. To conduct her work, she uses data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort, a large nationally representative dataset for elementary-school students.

In research on school readiness, Bodovski and her colleague analyzed the math and reading scores of kindergarten students as well as the students’ approaches to learning—such as eagerness to learn, attentiveness, and organization—in relation to their mathematics learning during their elementary and middle school years (Bodovski and Youn 2011).

The results suggest that school readiness is strongly related to later math scores. For example, the researchers found that higher school readiness is strongly and positively associated with the likelihood that a student will take Algebra I or above in the 8th grade.

The findings also suggest that, for minority students and low-income students, improved school readiness can increase the growth rate of math achievement.

“These findings are crucially important because they show that socioeconomic disparities at the beginning of children’s school careers stay mostly the same over the course of the next nine years,” said Bodovski. “However, the findings also show that low-income and minority students will benefit the most from boosting their school readiness.”

Susan Woodhouse, assistant professor of counselor education, notes that when very young children are secure with their parents, they tend to be better able to handle their emotions and have fewer mental health problems. Problems in a parent-infant relationship can adversely affect childhood security, which in turn puts the child at risk for low school readiness.

The risk is even higher for children who face multiple risk factors such as low socioeconomic status (low-SES), said Woodhouse.

Woodhouse notes that, based on their own experiences growing up along with advice they get along the way, parents typically develop skills to meet their children’s needs. The degree to which parents meet these needs is known as sensitivity. Researchers use measures of sensitivity as a means to predict attachment security.

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Parents and Children

But traditional measures tend to miss some of the positive practices of low-SES mothers that can contribute to secure infant attachment.

Woodhouse and colleagues developed a measure of mothers’ responsiveness known as secure base provision, or SBP (Cassidy et al. 2005). SBP captures ways that diverse, low-income parents provide a secure base for their babies in the context of what might be called a “no-nonsense” parenting style. Woodhouse headed a later study showing that SBP appears to work better than traditional measures (Woodhouse and Cassidy 2009).

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“We have found that mothers can be quite insensitive and their children will still be securely attached, as long as the mothers do certain things—for example, physically soothing a crying baby chest-to-chest—and if they avoid other behaviors, such as frightening a distressed child,” said Woodhouse.

Woodhouse’s work gives researchers an understanding of how best to intervene with at-risk young children so as to promote attachment security. “This research suggests that we need to shift how we design interventions for low-income families with young children,” said Woodhouse. “Most interventions aim to improve sensitivity, but results have shown that sometimes intervention enhances sensitivity without improving attachment security.”

Woodhouse and her colleagues tested the theory of differential susceptibility, which suggests that some young children are more temperamentally disposed than others to be influenced—either for better or for worse—by environmental factors. Quality of parenting is just one of these many environmental factors (Cassidy et al. 2011).

Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy

A

nn’s rocky journey with school started in the early grades when she “just didn’t get it,” and ended when she dropped out of the 8th grade at the age of 16. Over the years, she took the GED® Tests several times, but always failed. Eventually, she and her three young children were referred to a family literacy program. With help from the program, she became an active participant in her children’s learning and demonstrated the importance of education by passing the GED® Tests.

Ann’s situation is one that the researchers in the College of Education’s Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy aim to better understand. Specifically, faculty members associated with the institute conduct research related to family literacy and learning, focusing on families living in poverty and families with parents or other adults who have limited literacy or English-language skills.

“A general assumption is that parents and other adults intuitively know how to support their young children’s development and educational success,” said Barbara Van Horn, co-director of the Goodling Institute. “But how can they support children’s language and literacy development when their own skills and knowledge are limited? When parents successfully engage in education for themselves and learn ways in which they

can help their children, their children are more likely to enter school ready to learn and succeed.”

According to Van Horn, the work of the Goodling Institute is important because it explores literacy within a family context, focusing on the impact that primary caregivers—whether they are parents, grandparents, other family members, or guardians—have on young children’s development of language and literacy skills as well as their perceptions about the value of education.

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“We know what educated parents do to support their children’s learning, but we don’t know much about helping adults with limited literacy or different cultural beliefs about education support their children’s learning outside of school,” she said.

In addition to conducting research, Goodling Institute faculty and staff provide leadership in family literacy by communicating and collaborating with professional organizations, state and federal agencies, policymakers, and family literacy educators. They also develop research briefs and other documents related to family learning and participant outcomes, thus advocating for family literacy on behalf of program providers and the families they serve. In addition, the institute supports professional development through its online

post-baccalaureate certificate in family literacy offered through Penn State’s World Campus, through courses taught in the Adult Education program, through published articles, and through participation in education conferences, such as the National Conference on Family Literacy.

Parents and Children

“Some children are like dandelions and thrive in any environment,” said Woodhouse, “whereas other children are like orchids and require an optimal environment to do well. Our intervention aimed to improve the quality of parenting—create an optimal environment—by helping parents be more comfortable and relaxed with their children’s emotions and learn how to better soothe their babies.”

The research supported the theory of differential susceptibility.

Specifically, the most highly irritable infants, thought to be more sensitive to the environment, fared the worst without the intervention.

But, interestingly, they fared the best with intervention.

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“But our results also suggested that we need to think carefully about the interaction between maternal attachment and infant temperament when we try to determine what might be an optimal environment,” noted Woodhouse. “We found that some mother attachment-child temperament matches were more optimal than others.”

For example, among those without the intervention, highly irritable infants whose mothers were insecure and highly preoccupied with closeness did better than less irritable infants with similar mothers.

“We think these insecure mothers did better with a highly irritable than a less irritable baby because the infant crying helped her feel needed,” noted Woodhouse. “If anything, these mothers benefited from intervention more when they had less irritable infants.”

Paul Morgan, associate professor of special education, notes that young children with cognitive or behavioral delays by school entry are also at high risk for a range of negative long-term educational and social outcomes.

Early risk factors for cognitive delays in preschool-aged children were the focus of a $400,000 research project funded by the National Institutes of Health. Morgan, along with Marianne Hillemeier (of Penn State’s Department of Health Policy and Administration) and George Farkas (University of California, Irvine), examined the role played by sociodemographic (e.g., poverty) and gestational or birth factors (e.g., low birth weight) in contributing to the early and repeated incidence of cognitive delays. To date, findings from their analyses have been reported in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (Morgan et al. 2009), Maternal and Child Health Journal (Hillemeier et al. 2011), and Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology (Hillemeier et al. 2009), with additional studies currently under review.

“This project capitalized on the availability of a nationally representative dataset to illuminate the multiple pathways that lead to cognitive delays during young childhood and so may help identify promising avenues for early screening and intervention,” said Morgan. That longitudinal dataset, known as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study– Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), tracks the cognitive, behavioral, and physical functioning of 14,000 children born in the United States in 2001 at the ages of 9 months, 24 months, 48 months, and 60 months.

The research of Morgan, Hillemeier, and Farkas helps identify which groups of children are at greater risk for repeatedly displaying cognitive delays. “We’ve learned that poverty, low maternal education, and other sociodemographic factors really begin to act as strong predictors of very low cognitive functioning in children even by 24 and 48 months,” Morgan said.

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Our intervention aimed to improve the quality of parenting—create an optimal environment—by helping parents be more comfortable and relaxed with their children’s emotions and learn how to better soothe their babies.

Morgan added, “Surprisingly we found that children who were racial/ ethnic minorities were at elevated risk of displaying cognitive delays at 48 months, but not 24 months—even when statistically controlling for low maternal education, family income, and very low birth weight. This again suggests the need for improved screening.”

Morgan, Hillemeier, and Farkas have extended their analyses to examining risk factors for inattention, non-cooperation, and other learning-related behavior problems. “These analyses again indicate that low maternal education and the quality of children’s home environments is associated with or predicts their engagement in learning-related behavior problems, even when the children are only 24 months old,” stated Morgan.

Risk factors include being raised in an impoverished home by a mother with less than high school education. “For example,” said Morgan, “we estimated that children who displayed cognitive delays at 24 months and who were being raised by a mother with less than a 9thgrade education were about 30 times more likely to display cognitive delays at 48 months than children with cognitive delays at 24 months who were being raised by a mother with at least a college degree.”

Poverty, low maternal education, and other sociodemographic factors outweighed prematurity, low birth weight, and other types of gestational and birth factors that are typically screened for by pediatricians and early intervention professionals.

The researchers also found that cognitive delay is dynamic during very early childhood. “In one of our studies, only about 25% of those children who displayed very low levels of cognitive functioning at 24 months were still doing so at 48 months,” noted Morgan. “Repeated screening may be required to accurately identify cognitive delays in young children.”

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College of Education Report on Early Childhood Studies

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Index aacliteracy.psu.edu 15 Bodovski, Katerina 31 Boldt, Gail 21 Carithers, Iris 14 Carr-Chellman, Alison A. 26 Childhood and Early Adolescent Education (CEAED) 13 Collins, Kathleen M. 14 Cowan, Jessica (Alumna) 11 Culp, Alicia (Alumna) 11 Duschl, Richard A. 11 Early Childhood Studies Cross-Cutting Initiative 25 Edmondson, Jacqueline 13 Foundation for Child Development 8 Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia 24 Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26 Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy 33

Hade, Daniel 21 Hartle, Lynn 9 Hillemeier, Marianne 34 Hong, Barbara 10 Johnson, James 8, 25 Land, Susan 12 Light, Janice 15 McNaughton, David 15 Michaelis-Castillo, Danielle 14 Morgan, Paul 34 Multiple literacies 14 National Association for Education of Young Children (NAEYC) 13 National Center for Research in Early Childhood Education 9 National Institutes of Health 34 National Research Council 11 Reid-Walsh, Jacqueline 24 Rutkowski, Joanne 17

Schaub, Maryellen 25, 30 Secure Base Provision (SBP) 32 Serriere, Stephanie 16 Singing Voice Development Measure 17 Smith, Deborah C. 11 Spencer Foundation 23 TED 27 Theory of differential susceptibility 32 Thompson, Christine MarmĂŠ 20 Tree Investigators 12 Valente, Joseph 22 Van Horn, Barbara 33 Woodhouse, Susan 31 Yenika-Agbaw, Vivian 23 Zimmerman, Heather Toomey 12

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David H. Monk, Dean College of Education The Pennsylvania State University 274 Chambers Building University Park, PA 16802 (814) 865-2526 EdRelations@psu.edu

Editor: Suzanne Wayne Writers: Sara LaJeunesse, Joseph Savrock Photographers: Mark Houser, Rusty Myers,

Randy Persing, Steve Tressler Read this document online:

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The Pennsylvania State University is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to programs, facilities, admission, and employment without regard to personal characteristics not related to ability, performance, or qualifications as determined by University policy or by state or federal authorities. It is the policy of the University to maintain an academic and work environment free of discrimination, including harassment. The Pennsylvania State University prohibits discrimination and harassment against any person because of age, ancestry, color, disability or handicap, genetic information, national origin, race, religious creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or veteran status and retaliation due to the reporting of discrimination or harassment. Discrimination, harassment, or retaliation against faculty, staff, or students will not be tolerated at The Pennsylvania State University. Direct all inquiries regarding the nondiscrimination policy to the Affirmative Action Director, The Pennsylvania State University, 328 Boucke Building, University Park, PA 16802-5901; Tel 814-865-4700/V, 814-863-0471/TTY. U.Ed. EDU 12-42

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