Resources

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Community Engagement for Early Childhood Development (ECD) Programs: Perspectives of the Rohingya and Other Stakeholders in Cox’s Bazar 

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).

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EdTech in Low-Resource Settings: Challenges, opportunities, and conditions for success

This report summarizes the results of a survey the Gobee team launched to better understand the experience of stakeholders in the Education in Emergencies (EiE) sector when it comes to EdTech in low-resource settings, with a special focus on digital assessments and what it takes to develop and maintain open-source models (OSS) and data protection regulations.

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Report Karolina Lajch Report Karolina Lajch

Thinking outside the classroom: Theories of change and measures to support the design, monitoring, and evaluation of distance learning programs

This report is intended to be a living framework for thinking and talking about distance education interventions, beginning in low- and middle-income (LMIC) and humanitarian contexts and expanding over time to include distance education interventions designed for high-income contexts.

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Response to Stress Questionnaire (RSQ) - Niger

The original Response to Stress Questionnaire (RSQ: Connor-Smith et al., 2000) was designed to capture the ways that individuals react to and cope with specific sources of stress, including parental depression, family conflict, and academic stressors. In order to assess local and refugee children’s stress experiences and stress responses in Nigerien public school settings, researchers adapted the child self-report version of the RSQ-Academic Problems (RSQ-AP). It includes two subscales intended to assess: (a) academic problems stress and (b) involuntary engagement response to stress.

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Report Karolina Lajch Report Karolina Lajch

Self-Regulation Assessment-Assessor Report (SRA-AR) - Niger

The Self-Regulation Assessment-Assessor Report (SRA-AR) is a measurement tool used to capture assessors’ perceptions of of Nigerian refugee and Nigerien children’s skills at regulating their behavior during an assessment. The SRA-AR was developed based on the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment-Assessor Report (PSRA-AR) (Smith-Donald et al., 2007). The developers tested this measurement tool in Niger.

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Report Southpoint Collective Report Southpoint Collective

Quality and equitable access grounded in local knowledge: Bringing preprimary education to scale

A great deal of evidence demonstrates the significant effects that quality pre-primary education can have on a child’s cognitive, social and emotional development, growth, school readiness and future economic potential. However, only 42 per cent of children in sub-Saharan Africa participate in any organized pre-primary education before the typical enrolment age for grade one. Such education is often only available to wealthier children, and is not of consistent quality, nor does it incorporate the local knowledge of learning processes that pre-school children should be exposed to before commencement of formal schooling.

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Report Karolina Lajch Report Karolina Lajch

Response to Stress Questionnaire (RSQ) - Lebanon

The original Response to Stress Questionnaire (RSQ: Connor-Smith et al., 2000) was designed to capture the ways that individuals react to and cope with specific sources of stress, including parental depression, family conflict, and academic stressors. In order to assess refugee children’s stress experiences and stress responses in Lebanese public school settings, researchers adapted the child self-report version of the RSQ-Academic Problems (RSQ-AP). It includes two subscales intended to assess: (a) academic problems stress and (b) involuntary engagement response to stress.

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Report Karolina Lajch Report Karolina Lajch

Self-Regulation Assessment-Assessor Report (SRA-AR) - Lebanon

The Self-Regulation Assessment-Assessor Report (SRA-AR) is a measurement tool used to capture assessors’ perceptions of children’s skills at regulating their behavior during an assessment. The SRA-AR was developed based on the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment-Assessor Report (PSRA-AR) (Smith-Donald et al., 2007). The developers tested this measurement tool in Lebanon.

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Report Karolina Lajch Report Karolina Lajch

SERAIS: Social Emotional Response and Information Scenarios Evidence on Construct Validity, Measurement Invariance, and Reliability in use with Syrian Refugee Children in Lebanon

Demonstrating that social-emotional learning (SEL) programs lead to improvements in children’s social-emotional skills requires the use of measures that provide accurate data capturing meaningful changes in children’s development over time. In contexts affected by crisis and conflict, few measures have the evidence required to support their use in program evaluations, limiting stakeholders’ ability to determine whether programs are working, how, and for whom. The Social Emotional Response and Information Scenarios (SERAIS) holds promise for addressing this gap. SERAIS (“I would” in French) employs a scenario-based format in which children are asked to report what they would do and feel in a variety of different social situations.

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IRC Healing classrooms remedial tutoring programming improves Nigerien and Nigerian children’s learning

With support from Dubai Cares during the school year 2016-2017, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) delivered Learning in a Healing Classroom remedial tutoring programming to support local and internally displaced Nigerien children and refugee Nigerian children’s learning outcomes and retention in public schools in Niger. We found that, after twenty-two weeks of program implementation, (1) access to Healing Classrooms programming significantly improved students’ reading and math skills, and (2) adding low-cost, targeted Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) interventions to Healing Classrooms improved students’ overall school grades as well.

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Medición de la calidad de la educación inicial en Colombia en la modalidad institucional

La educación inicial de calidad es la base que garantiza el adecuado desarrollo de todos los niños. Los ambientes educativos seguros que ofrecen experiencias positivas a través de prácticas pedagógicas de alta calidad, mejor salud, nutrición e integración de las familias y la comunidad, influyen en el aprendizaje y el bienestar de los niños a lo largo de sus vidas. Por esta razón, el Ministerio de Educación Nacional desarrolló un modelo de medición de la calidad de la educación inicial y preescolar en Colombia. La evidencia que genera este modelo permite hacerle seguimiento a las condiciones humanas, materiales y sociales necesarias en los servicios de educación inicial para promover el desarrollo integral de los niños entre los 0 y los 6 años. Esta Nota de política resume los resultados de la medición nacional de la calidad de la educación inicial en la modalidad institucional, realizada en 2017 por el Ministerio de Educación Nacional (MEN) y la Facultad de Educación de la Universidad de los Andes. Asimismo, esta nota plantea algunas recomendaciones que se derivan de los análisis realizados.

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Children, Youth and Developmental Science in the 2015-2030 Global Sustainable Development Goals

In September 2016, the member states of the United Nations completed the process of adopting and defining indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; United Nations, 2015). Developed through a three-year, worldwide participatory process, these 17 goals and 169 targets represent a global consensus on the part of U.N. member nations towards an inclusive, sustainable world, centered around ensuring equity in all countries at a time of great environmental and humanitarian crises. This Social Policy Report describes the central role of supporting child and youth development in achieving the vision behind the U.N. Sustainable Development Agenda. The report then addresses the importance of developmental science in achieving the aims of the Sustainable Development Agenda through generating knowledge of child and youth development in diverse contexts, monitoring and measurement to reveal patterns of success and inequity, and building capacity for developmental science in all countries. We emphasize the goal that most clearly encompasses development from birth to young adulthood (SDG 4) and also describe the relevance of developmental science to the other goals.

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