Hirokazu Yoshikawa - US grants

Levels of learning and school performance among children in and near poverty in the United States continue to be of national import at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The public, policy makers, and researchers agree that concerted efforts to improve the educational outcomes of children in low-income families are required to further develop their potential to become productive citizens. Concern is particularly warranted for the achievement levels of racial/ethnic minority children in poverty. National studies show that differences in family income account for over half of the differences among Black and White children in IQ scores. Black and Latino children are exposed to particularly high levels of economic disadvantage, as well as differential treatment in school and other settings.

Issues of race, poverty, income and school performance take on a special urgency due to rapidly changing federal, state and local policy climates for low-income families. Welfare reform policies, following passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-193), have produced profound changes in government incentives to move low -income parents off welfare and into work. The federal Children's Initiative has urged researchers to examine effects of variation in welfare reform policies on children (Office of Science and Technology Policy, 1997).

The current study examines how changes in income and employment might affect children's school performance differently for Black, Latino, and White families. The study aims to explore multiple mediating pathways through which changes in income and employment may affect children's school performance. The samples are drawn from 5 experimental welfare reform and anti-poverty policy programs, which have demonstrated short-term rises in income and employment, and which incorporate follow-up assessments of child school performance. The data will afford a rare opportunity to examine changes in income and employment which have been experimentally manipulated, rather than determined primarily by prior family selection factors.

The objectives of this study are threefold. First, it aims to answer the question: Do changes in income and employment in early childhood affect middle-childhood school performance differently for Black, Latino, and White single-parent families on welfare? Second, the study aims to explore differences among these groups in multiple mediating pathways through which effects of changes in income and employment on school performance may occur. Areas included are informed by psychosocial, lifespan, ecological, and human capital theories of child development, and encompass two principal microsystems, or proximal settings, of development (the home and child care settings). The mediators encompass child care use, including quantity and type; marriage; parenting practices, including authoritative parenting and cognitive stimulation; and parent aspirations for their children's school success. Differences in kind and strength of mediated relationships are hypothesized, depending on racial/ethnic group. Third, the question of how dimensions in current welfare and anti-poverty policy moderate these direct and mediated effects will be explored. Three primary dimensions across which current welfare reform programs differ are chosen for investigation: time limits, generosity of financial incentives (earnings disregards and supplements), and mandated employment-related activities.

The study utilizes data sets from programs which test approaches to encouraging employment and raising family income through anti-poverty and welfare reform policy. The programs differ considerably on the three policy dimensions, and reflect the current range of TANF programs. They cover a wide geographic range, including samples from four state policy contexts (Minnesota, California, Florida, and Connecticut). Moreover, the data sets incorporate subgroups of Black, Latino and White families of large enough size to enable comparisons of mediating pathways. The analyses proposed are distinct from the overall experimental impacts which have been and will be reported in the main evaluation reports for these programs. The study thus presents a unique opportunity to examine race/ethnicity-specific developmental effects of income and employment in the contexts of experimental designs, and variation in welfare and anti-poverty policy.

Abstract

New York University: Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education

Joshua Aronson, Diane Hughes, Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, Niobe Way &
Hiro Yoshikawa

Despite thousands of research studies, hundreds of remedial programs, and decades of being considered a crisis for American society, the chronic academic underachievement of numerous ethnic minority groups continues to perplex educators, social scientists, and policy makers. Three trends add weight to the crisis. First, within the next 50 years, people identified currently as "minority" will comprise half of the U.S. population. Second, particularly in large urban centers like New York, new waves of immigrants are arriving, ensuring fundamental, but unknown changes to the structure and dynamics of schools and other contexts. Third, the U.S. continues to evolve into a "knowledge-driven" economy, making a solid education vital for an increasingly large sector of the workforce. More than ever, a sizable proportion of our nation's children are at risk of academic failure and economic hardship.
Faculty from multiple scientific disciplines at New York University will use NSF funding to support planning activities over a 6- to 9-month period pertaining to research that will be pursued under the proposed Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education. The central aim of the Center will be to examine how homes, schools, peers, work, and the media jointly contribute to the engagement, learning, and school performance of children from diverse cultures.
Three steps are needed to accomplish this mission. First, we propose to describe the experiences of minority children within each of the educationally relevant contexts. Many social scientists focus on determining the predictors of children's academic outcomes without a deep understanding of children's everyday experiences. Such descriptive work is notably absent in research focused on ethnic minorities. We need systematic knowledge regarding how contexts such as home, peers, school, parents' work, and the media differ or are experienced differently by children from different cultures, ethnicities or social classes. Second, we seek to understand how these experiences shape children's engagement, learning and performance in school, and whether and how such connections may vary by culture, ethnicity, and social class. Third, our ultimate goal is to advance an understanding of how home, peer, school, work, and the media work together in explaining children's academic achievement.
The second mission of the Center is educational: to transmit its research findings, through training and dissemination, to three communities: (1) a new generation of scholars of diverse backgrounds who are engaged in research on culture and its role in child learning, engagement, and performance; (2) the broader research community; and (3) policy makers and practitioners in education. This will occur through an intensive and rigorous training program and a variety of dissemination strategies of both research findings and lessons for policy and educational practice.
The proposed Center is situated within a School of Education, in the vibrant, incomparably diverse context of New York City, making it an unparalleled locale for studying culture and schools, and an ideal place to establish a think tank capable of attracting additional scholars and students of the highest quality. Through the work of the Center, we aim to bring about a deeper understanding of the interplay of culture, development and education, and thereby enhance the nation's response to the academic underachievement of ethnic minority children.

The academic underachievement of certain ethnic minority groups in America continues to perplex educators, scientists, and policy makers, despite thousands of studies, hundreds of remedial programs, and decades of being considered a crisis. Several recent trends add weight to the crisis. First, within the next 50 years, people identified as ethnic "minority" will comprise half the U.S. population. Second, new waves of immigrants continue to arrive, ensuring fundamental but unknown changes in the intercultural dynamics of schools and other contexts. Third, the United States has evolved into a "knowledge-driven" economy, making a solid education, particularly in math and science, vital for an increasingly large sector of the workforce. Finally, recent federal legislation calls for annual standardized assessments of school children, a prospect that may disadvantage certain minorities who typically underperform on these tests. More than ever, a sizable proportion of our nation's children are at risk of academic failure, posing a serious threat to the current Administration's goal of "leaving no child behind." In line with this national goal, the Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education (CRCDE), housed at New York University (NYU) will conduct research designed to identify pathways to academic success for all children. Prior research has focused narrowly on a single context (e.g., the family, peer relationships, school quality, etc.) in predicting academic outcomes, or has investigated the roles of ethnicity, race, immigrant status, gender, or socioeconomic status separately. Neither approach, however, has adequately addressed the ways in which multiple contexts contribute to educational success and/or disparities, nor how pathways vary by developmental period and culture. Furthermore, an over-emphasis on group differences has resulted in the neglect of patterns of academic outcomes within ethnic, socioeconomic, or cultural groups. Finally, studies across all of these areas have tended to utilize single methodologies, rarely integrating survey, ethnographic, experimental, and observational methods. To address these gaps, the CRCDE will gather and disseminate data about the pathways that lead to successful academic engagement and performance among culturally diverse children and adolescents. The scientific mission of the CRCDE is to use an integrative conceptual framework, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and multiple methods to (1) identify the nature of relationships that link children's experiences in five educationally relevant contexts, home, school, peers, caregivers' work, and media, to their academic engagement and performance; (2) examine whether and how these processes vary within and across cultural groups and across developmental periods; and (3) advance an understanding of how home, peers, school, caregivers' work, and media affect one another and jointly influence children's and adolescents' academic engagement and performance. The educational mission of the CRCDE is to (1) train a new generation of scholars, especially those from underrepresented minority groups, to engage in research that advances the scientific mission; (2) produce instruments and methods that will strengthen the scientific capacity of the research community to conduct culturally sensitive research on academic engagement and performance; and (3) transmit findings to policy makers, practitioners in education, and researchers, through dissemination of findings and lessons for educational policy and practice. The Center's location in the diverse context of New York City (NYC) is ideal for a center devoted to research at the confluence of culture, development, and education.

While conducting a large-scale birth cohort study of low-income immigrant families as part of the NSF-funded Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education, Drs. Yoshikawa and Tamis-LeMonda found that Chinese immigrant parents are sending their infants back to China during the first year of life at very high rates. This pattern has been observed in other samples of Chinese immigrants in other parts of the country, but the current research, funded by NSF Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER), is the first study to explore the predictors and consequences of these parent-child separations for very young children's development. Attachment theory predicts that these children may suffer emotional difficulties due to very early separation from their parents. On the other hand, more extended social networks in their Chinese family environments may mean a richer language environment. This study will examine the circumstances surrounding infants being sent back to China -- including reasons for the sending, learning and caregiving environments while they are in China, communication of the parents with their children's caregivers while they are there, and potential consequences post-separation.

This study will shed new light on an increasingly common transnational pattern among the largest Asian immigrant group to the United States, one that has never been studied in research to date. The data will contribute to knowledge about developmental and learning processes in an understudied group, and will ultimately help inform how learning in young children from immigrant families can best be facilitated, given their increasingly complex transnational movements.

By 2040, people identified as ?ethnic minority? will comprise half the U.S. population. In urban cities, the vast majority of children entering preschool/elementary school and high school are Latino, Asian or African American, and how well these children and their families adjust to these high-stake school transitions will have long term implications for children's developmental outcomes as well as the future of the U.S. In the context of growing diversity among the nation's children, systematic inquiry into the experiences and developmental pathways of children from different cultural communities during periods of major transitions is urgently needed.

In response, the NYU IRADS builds on 5 years of research under NYU's Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education (CRCDE), and seeks to advance scientific theory and knowledge on children's social, emotional and cognitive development in ethnically diverse populations. Plans are to follow a group of 900 urban, predominantly low-income and working class families of Mexican, Dominican, Chinese, European and African American decent with young children (4-7 years) and adolescents (13-17 years) as children enter preschool/elementary school and high school. The majority of these families have participated in the research of the CRCDE over the past several years, and have already provided rich information on the background experiences of these children and families beginning at children's birth (in the early childhood group) and entry into middle school (in the adolescent group). The five ethnic groups were selected for study, as they comprise the majority of children in New York City. In addition, they enable contrasts among groups with different immigration statuses, histories of discrimination related to race and skin color, citizenship status, and language and cultural backgrounds.

The planned activities involve continued gathering of original data on aspects of children's cognitive, social, and emotional development and experiences in home and school settings that would be most sensitive to children's experiences across critical transitions. Within the area of social development, focus will be on social competence and social identity. For cognitive development, focus will be on language/literacy, math concepts and performance, classification skills, attention abilities, and academic performance and engagement. For emotional development, focus will be on children's emotion regulation. Together, these skills form the building blocks for healthy developmental outcomes. In home and school settings, focus will be on the beliefs and practices of parents, teachers and children; the quality of relationships (e.g., parent-child, teacher child); and financial resources.

The Intellectual Merit of this research includes the generation of new, culturally grounded theory and knowledge on the development and experiences of children from diverse ethnic backgrounds across multiple developmental areas, social settings, and significant developmental transitions. The Broader Impacts are framed by a set of integrated plans to advance research and education on ethnically diverse populations through the: (1) training of a new generation of scholars (especially underrepresented minorities) to engage in research that advances the scientific mission; (2) sharing of instruments, methods, and findings so as to strengthen the scientific capacity of researchers to engage in culturally sensitive studies of children's development; (3) dissemination of findings to researchers, educators and policy makers through publications, trainings, briefings and community outreach; and (4) strengthening of local, national, and international partnerships.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant) Early childhood programs - interventions for children and their families occurring between the prenatal period and age 5 -- have expanded rapidly in the past several decades and represent substantial public investments in children's healthy development. Despite the hundreds of evaluation studies that have been conducted, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of different types of programs for improving children's wellbeing, and how program intensity matters within and across program types. Meta-analysis provides a systematic method for quantitative synthesis of the entire population of early childhood program evaluations and for the full range of children served by these programs. Yet to date, no meta-analysis has integrated multiple program types and programmatic components. As a result, policymakers and program administrators are unable to make evidence-based decisions about which types of programs or program components would be most effective for meeting their goals. We propose to: 1) complete the coding of a database of all rigorous early childhood program evaluations conducted between 1960 and 2007 in the United States; 2) perform a database-wide descriptive analysis of impacts on children's wellbeing by program type (early childhood education; parenting support; parent socioeconomic support; support of child nutrition) and key program characteristics; 3) understand how programmatic components and combinations of programmatic components predict the magnitude of effects in particular child domains; and 4) prepare and release the meta-analytic database for public use. One key innovation of our proposed project is that the database will be the first to encompass both parent- and child-focused programs. A second is that our inclusion criteria for evaluation studies are both broader (including, for example, econometric studies) and more rigorous than have been employed in prior meta-analyses in this area. Finally, ours will be the first meta- analytic database in early childhood to be prepared and released for public use.