Shannon Stark Guss

Foundational thinking for later use of technology, particularly coding, is necessary for an inclusive and sustainable future. Inclusive practices beginning in early childhood recognize children’s innate development of computational thinking—sequencing, repetition and looping, debugging, decomposing and composing, representation, and causality. This qualitative research describes processes of developing and evaluating hypothesized developmental progressions. Inclusive engagement of children with and without disabilities is described in examples for each level of each developmental progression. Implications for teaching and learning with inclusive practices are described for children with and without disabilities.

Early science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning experiences often exclude children with disabilities and intersecting identities. To promote learning in STEM for all children, the Curriculum Research Framework (CRF) was applied to build learning trajectories of STEM for children from birth to age 5. The CRF was extended and enhanced to generate explicitly inclusive learning trajectories for children with and without disabilities. The process of generating a priori foundations, building learning trajectories, and testing the results in inclusive settings led to new resources for early childhood education (ECE) and early childhood special education (ECSE) practitioners and generated implications for creating and evaluating learning trajectories in ways that affirm that all children belong in STEM. Challenges faced and lessons learned in this process are presented to guide future research and development using the revised and enhanced CRF.

The importance and complexity of young children's mathematical thinking and learning warrants high-quality, research-based resources that help teachers and caregivers understand and support children's development from birth through the primary grades. The authors discuss young children's potential to think mathematically, the criticality of early math, and the need for a learning trajectories approach to early math. Describing existing risks to young children's experience of high-quality math, the chapter offers solutions to these risks in systematic research and development of technology-based resources for early math using learning and teaching with learning trajectories ([LT]2, at LearningTrajectories.org) as an example. Further, the authors advocate for a lens of equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the development of these technologies. Finally, a vision is described for increasing access to high-quality math through adaptive technologies that use the learning trajectories of early math for in-person and online activities.

Young children in many US classrooms have limited opportunities to learn mathematics because their teachers are not well prepared. We developed a learning trajectories-based professional development (PD) approach that has shown large significant effects on early childhood teachers' beliefs and practices, as well as these teachers' positive effects on children from low-resource communities. We describe the PD strategies we used, including an online tool that was central to the PD, “Building Blocks Learning Trajectories” (BBLT). We conclude that this approach provided a coherent program of teaching and learning, which promoted significant levels of high-quality practice. Teachers developed pedagogical competence based on specific competencies from the learning trajectories' PD. Finally, we describe our efforts to disseminate these effective PD practices and systems to far greater numbers of teachers through the creation of a new generation of the online tool that leads to successful results in our scale-up project. Building on the content of the BBLT and adding many new research-based features, “Learning and Teaching with Learning Trajectories” (LTLT, or [LT]²) at https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781003172529/249c15e9-9342-453e-9b47-23d83ca51a41/content/www.LearningTrajectories.org">LearningTrajectories.org is a PD tool for teachers and caregivers to support early math instruction from birth to grade 3.

The findings of this empirical research provide new information about the importance of caregiver interactions during care routines, specifically diaper changing, in supporting infant and toddler involvement and well‐being. This correlational study involved observations of 144 separate diapering cycles by 31 caregivers with 74 infants and toddlers in 30 infant and toddler classrooms in a U.S. Midwest city. Based on these observations, caregiver responsiveness was found to be significantly related to both child involvement and child well‐being. Another feature of caregivers’ behavior, caregiver encouragement, was significantly associated with child well‐being, but not child involvement. The study results suggest that caregivers’ behaviors, specifically responsiveness and encouragement, during diapering are vital proximal processes in the moment‐to‐moment interactions between a caregiver and child. Thus, responsiveness and encouragement in care routines should be emphasized in infant care settings and be a focus for caregiver professional development, including pre‐ and in‐service training. Although training related to diapering is often restricted to health concerns, the findings suggest that specific caregiver–child interactions during this care routine may support or hinder children's well‐being and involvement in the moment. Caregiver responsiveness to children's cues in this context may enhance children's opportunities to practice involvement in bidirectional relationships and support children's well‐being.

Background: The “3 Minute Presentation” is a graduate student competition based off the more popular “3 Minute Thesis” competition. The program aims to help graduate students learn to inform others of their research in a quick and accessible manner. Programs to engage graduate students more deeply in their education require evaluation to determine if they are useful and effective at meeting their intended goals. Evaluation literature in graduate educational programs is currently limited, but increasingly needed for both the field and the students served. Purpose: Development and testing of a program-theory evaluation to understand participation, recruitment, preparation, training, skills, and confidence of graduate students engaging in a “3 Minute Presentation” competition at a state university. Setting: Institution of Higher Education Intervention: 3 Minute Presentation competition Research Design: Mixed-method program-theory evaluation Data Collection and Analysis: Direct observations and closed-ended survey analyzed through qualitative coding, descriptive statistics, group comparisons, and correlation analysis. Findings: Overall, the program evaluation found, with a possible lack of diversity in participants, that the program components of recruitment, preparation, and skill development work as expected. Additionally, engagement in preparation was associated with competition scores and the perceived helpfulness of preparation was related to students’ confidence in their presentation skills. This evaluation was deemed useful for program improvement and capacity building in the program’s continuation at the university.

Research Findings: This article summarizes current peer-reviewed research and conceptualizations of collaboration and presents a new conceptual model. Authors found that the existing peer-reviewed literature does not adequately reflect emerging understandings of the nature of early childhood collaborations or the contributions such collaborations make to outcomes. The paper fills a gap in the literature by presenting a broader conceptualization of collaboration in which stakeholders work together and use data to achieve common goals through engaging in shared activities. Authors provide examples of how collaborations take place within a network of early care and education programs. Practice or Policy: Practitioners can use information presented in this to support collaborations at different levels of an early childhood system. More research needs to be conducted to identify and measure collaborative activities and outcomes across levels of collaboration to align with a broader definition of collaboration.

This study explored whether parents’ ability to regulate their behaviour and attention, assessed as components of everyday executive function (EF), was influenced by their past adverse experiences – such as abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction – and in turn, influenced current relationships with their children. The sample included 73 parent–child dyads from children enrolled in three Midwestern early childhood centres serving low-income children and families. Parents reported on their adverse childhood experiences, EF, and rated their relationship with their child. Findings indicate that more parental adverse childhood experiences were associated with higher ratings of parent–child conflict. This association was indirectly linked through parents’ EF. Interventions aimed at parent–child relationships can benefit from addressing parents’ past experiences and associated influences on parents’ EF.