What does it take to build better evidence for education research in diverse contexts?

At NYU Global TIES for Children, we believe it starts with partnerships and practical training that put local scholars in the lead.

Last week, we co-hosted the LEARN Summer Methods Workshop with our partners, Universidad de Los Andes, bringing together early-career scholars and professors from across Colombia for five days of immersive training in psychometrics and measurement development.

Florencia Lopez Boo had the honor of delivering a keynote on “Investing Better in Child Development Policies,”sharing reflections on how we can improve the design and delivery of impactful programs at scale.

We were also proud to present our poster on hybrid modalities of parenting programs from Jamaica, highlighting how flexible, evidence-informed models can better support families. Special thanks to Susan Walker and Fahmida Tofail for the insightful discussions.

Millions of refugees around the world suffer in silence, not because they lack a voice, but because their pain is misunderstood or mismeasured.

On World Refugee Day, we uplift the voices and lived realities of displaced communities and call for deeper, more culturally responsive care.

At TIES, we work hard to partner with local communities and integrate methods that capture participant voices directly. For example, the paper we reshare today highlights some of the qualitative work we have done as part of the iRRRd study, led by Rohingya researchers and collaborators, to explore cultural concepts of distress (CCDs) among Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar. It identifies five locally meaningful expressions of emotional suffering, like tenshon and bishi sinta, that often go unrecognized by standard mental health tools.

As we act in solidarity with refugees, we must design support systems that reflect how communities themselves understand and communicate distress.

The ECPS-CQI instrument was developed in English by Anaga Ramachandranm, Dalia Al Ogaily, Kate Schwartz, Joyce Rafla and Hirokazu Yoshikawa and used to measure the quality of interactions during a phone call with a parent or caregiver. The instrument assesses the domains of relationship with family, responsiveness to family strength, needs, and culture, facilitation of caregiver-child interaction, and active listening. The ECPS-CQI tool has shown promising evidence for reliability and validity, and with caution, it can be used for intended purposes with similar samples/contexts.

Attendees from NYU, multilateral development banks, and early childhood NGOs and foundations discussed parental support initiatives.

Housed at NYU Steinhardt, Global TIES for Children hosted a launch event for the latest edition of the Van Leer Foundation’s flagship Early Childhood Matters journal last month at the Kimmel Center.

Around 60 people attended the launch event, including representatives from around NYU, such as faculty and staff from Steinhardt and NYU Langone. Also in attendance were practitioners from the early childhood community in New York City, including the International Rescue Committee, Sesame Workshop, Save the Children, and Innovations for Poverty Action.

What does it mean to truly support parents and caregivers in shaping the future of children’s development?

From policy and research to insightful conversations and a moving performance by Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project, our recent gathering at NYU brought together powerful voices to explore just that—through the lens of the latest issue of #EarlyChildhoodMatters2025, published by Van Leer Foundation.

When we support those who care for children, we invest in a stronger, more compassionate future.

Read Early Childhood Matters 2025: https://lnkd.in/gAiS87JQ

Despite the immense challenges of economic crises, power outages, and unreliable internet, caregivers in Lebanon’s hard-to-access areas went to extraordinary lengths to ensure their children could participate in remote early childhood education. Their profound commitment to learning and resilience in the face of adversity underscores the critical role of early education, even in crisis settings.

Building on our team at NYU’s Global TIES for Children’s impact findings from a three-arm randomized controlled trial—showing significant impact on child development from a short remote ECE intervention—this newly published qualitative article offers a deeper, behind-the-scenes perspective. Applying Weisner’s ecocultural framework, we explore how caregivers integrated remote early learning into their daily lives, navigating cultural and environmental constraints. While theory suggests that intervention success depends on aligning with participants’ routines, our findings reveal that these programs thrived despite the absence of structured daily rhythms, demonstrating remarkable adaptability.

Our mixed-methods research challenges the common narrative by showing that remote ECE programs can, in fact, provide quality learning opportunities for children facing adversity. The study highlights the resilience of caregivers and teachers, offering valuable insights for designing flexible, impactful educational interventions in crisis-affected and resource-limited settings.

Delivering early-childhood programs at scale is a major policy challenge. One way to do so is by using existing public infrastructure. This paper experimentally assesses the short-term effects of a new government home-visiting program integrated into health-care services in Brazil. The program changed the allocation of time for community health workers by asking them to carry out tasks related to early-childhood development. We find that access to the program has a positive but modest effect on home environment quality and no effect on child development or on children’s health status. Our results point to the importance of workload, supervision, and buy-in from delivery actors to enhance fidelity of interventions.

This paper explores how SEL is perceived and implemented in the primary schools of conflict-affected Diffa, offering a unique lens into the diverse interpretations of SEL by various stakeholders.

Through a meticulous analysis of 58 semi-structured interviews encompassing a broad spectrum of perspectives—from Ministry officials and NGOs to school directors and parents—this study uncovers five distinct conceptualizations of SEL. Each reflects the priorities and concerns rooted in the stakeholders' experiences with conflict, trauma, psychosocial challenges, poverty, and religious beliefs. These findings highlight the varied expectations and objectives for SEL among different groups and show the complexity of integrating such programs in environments where education itself is under siege by myriad challenges.

Authors: Sarah Kabay, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Lindsay Brown. 

KEYWORDS: Primary Education, Sub-Saharan Africa, Emotional Learning, Social Development, Conflict Resolution

This study explores patterns of self-regulation and emotional well-being among Syrian refugee children in Lebanon, employing a person-centered approach, responding to theoretical challenges articulated by Dante Cicchetti and other psychologists. Using latent profile analysis with data from 2,132 children, we identified seven distinct profiles across cognitive regulation, emotional-behavioral regulation, interpersonal regulation, and emotional well-being. These profiles showed significant heterogeneity in patterns of self-regulation across domains and emotional well-being among Syrian children. Some profiles consistently exhibited either positive (“Well-regulated and Adjusted”) or negative (“Moody and Frustrated”) functioning across all domains, while others revealed domain-specific challenges, e.g., particularly sensitive to interpersonal conflict. This heterogeneity in the organization of self-regulatory skill and emotional well-being challenges the traditional homogeneous view of child development in conflict settings. The study also underscores the profiles’ differential associations with demographic characteristics and experiences, with school-related experiences being particularly salient. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research in developmental psychopathology on self-regulation and emotional well-being in conflict-affected contexts. In addition, we advocate for tailored interventions to meet the diverse needs of children affected by conflict.

Building on the evidence from the first paper in this Series highlighting the fundamental importance of healthy and nurturing environments for children's growth and development in the next 1000 days (ages 2–5 years), this paper summarises the benefits and costs of key strategies to support children's development in this age range. The next 1000 days build on the family-based and health-sector based interventions provided in the first 1000 days and require broader multisectoral programming. Interventions that have been shown to be particularly effective in this age range are the provision of early childhood care and education (ECCE), parenting interventions, and cash transfers. We show that a minimum package of 1 year of ECCE for all children would cost on average less than 0·15% of low-income and middle-income countries' current gross domestic product. The societal cost of not implementing this package at a national and global level (ie, the cost of inaction) is large, with an estimated forgone benefit of 8–19 times the cost of investing in ECCE. We discuss implications of the overall evidence presented in this Series for policy and practice, highlighting the potential of ECCE programming in the next 1000 days as an intervention itself, as well as a platform to deliver developmental screening, growth monitoring, and additional locally required interventions. Providing nurturing care during this period is crucial for maintaining and further boosting children's progress in the first 1000 days, and to allow children to reach optimal developmental trajectories from a socioecological life-course perspective.

🔗 Read more here: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01390-4

As part of the Play to Learn initiative, with funding from the LEGO foundation, BRAC and Sesame Workshop designed a 6-month fathers’ engagement component to be added to an existing parenting intervention for mothers. The program was developed for fathers of children aged 0-3 in the Rohingya camps and surrounding host communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and focuses on mental health, responsive caregiving, and engagement with family. As part of an impact evaluation of the intervention1, we at Global TIES, New York University, developed an instrument to measure the quality of the intervention delivery.

This brief discusses the importance of measuring quality, the process of developing and implementing this quality instrument, and the preliminary analysis of data collected using it. In addition to informing the impact evaluation, a broader goal of this work is to contribute to the emerging knowledge on measuring program quality and fidelity, particularly in low and middle income countries (LMIC) and emergency contexts, and better understand “how” and “why” parenting programs in these contexts do or do not work.

Since its inception, partners of the LEGO Foundation-funded Play to Learn project have prioritized co-construction and community engagement1, 2 in designing and running programs that target children and caregivers in Bangladesh affected by the Rohingya displacement crisis. This includes the Humanitarian Play Labs (HPLs), a flagship program of BRAC, one of the main humanitarian partners implementing early childhood development (ECD) activities under Play to Learn. Given the emphasis and importance placed on community engagement in the HPL set-up and operations, Global TIES for Children at NYU, as the main research partner of the project, conducted a specific study to better understand the myriad ways in which community engagement happened around the HPLs and was perceived by the community. The study team, which included project partners and our data collection partner, Arced Foundation, was particularly interested in how participating community members experienced and understood these programs and how they would like to be engaged to sustain them beyond the lifetime of the six-year Play to Learn project.

In conducting this research, the study team deliberately employed participatory research approaches that themselves relied on community engagement as a key strategy for generating specific research questions (related to the study’s focus areas), collecting data, and interpreting community input. This brief discusses the importance of participatory research, the process of running a participatory workshop, and reflections on how the data generated is of particular value to humanitarian implementers. In addition to informing program delivery, a broader goal of this work is to contribute to understanding both the “how” of participatory research methods (what goes into them, how they can be organized) and the “why” behind them (the benefits of multi-method approaches and community engagement as key research strategies).

This article is among the first to quantify the actual impact of pandemic-related closures on early child development, in this case, for a sample of young children in Chile, where school and childcare closures lasted for about a year. We use a unique data set collected face-to-face in December 2020, which includes child development indicators for general development, language development, socioemotional development, and executive function. We find adverse impacts on children in 2020 compared to children interviewed in 2017 in most development areas. In particular, 9 months after the start of the pandemic, we found a loss in language development of 0.25 SD.

🔗 Read more here: https://doi.org/10.1086/731588