First 5 LA Presents at Head Start's National Research ConferenceJuly 14, 2008 |
Printer-friendly version |
 First 5 LA and LA Universal Preschool (LAUP) research staff, joined by a team of researchers from Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., American Institutes for Research and the National Center for Latino Child & Family Research, recently participated in a poster symposium at Head Start's Ninth National Research Conference held in Washington, D.C. Poster symposiums involve group or individual presentations which are placed on large boards so that attendees have the opportunity to review and discuss the project as they come through the conference area. More than 2,000 early childhood professionals gathered for this three-day conference to share information about the challenges and outcomes of providing early childhood education to the nation's youngest and neediest population. First 5 LA's poster symposium was entitled Evaluation and Measurement Challenges of Research for a New Universal Preschool Initiative in a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Community and focused on the challenges of assessing English language learners, the limitations of current assessment approaches and the potential of new approaches being developed in the context of First 5 LA's Universal Preschool Child Outcomes Study (UPCOS). As Head Start and other preschool programs across the country grapple with how to evaluate programs serving an increasingly diverse population of children and families, First 5 LA's presentation was viewed as an innovative model by many at the conference for their own evaluation efforts. "Our measurement tools are too often taken for granted," said William Gormley, public policy professor at Georgetown University and guest on the symposium panel. "First 5 LA has provided a valuable service to all researchers and to the L.A. community by developing some innovative techniques for understanding and improving how we evaluate early childhood education programs. Thanks to these efforts, our evaluations will be more accurate and more sensitive to the unique circumstances of culturally diverse populations." Drawing from the initial work of UPCOS, initiated in 2006, posters covered such topics as the ethnic and linguistic diversity of LAUP providers and children served; what parents mean when they rate their children's behavior; and the development of a new "Respect for Differences" measure. Each of the nine posters explained different aspects of the UPCOS study, including how measurement tools were developed to be sensitive to the cultural and linguistic diversity of the children sampled from LAUP programs. The session was organized by John M. Love, senior fellow at Mathematica and lead researcher on the UPCOS study, and co-chaired by First 5 LA Research and Evaluation Director Armando Jimenez and First 5 LA research consultant Michael L. López, executive director for the National Center for Latino Child & Family Research. To learn more about the poster session click here. |
|
