In this insightful brief, we delve into the transformative power of the Core Practice approach—a beacon of hope for educators working in challenging environments. The Core Practice framework introduces evidence-based, high-impact teaching techniques that promise not only to enhance student learning outcomes but also to provide a practical, coherent, and adaptable solution for teacher professional development.

NORRAG has brought together 48 authors from academia, humanitarian agencies, and think tanks to produce 27 papers that showcase current evidence and offer policy directions to prioritise and protect the work and well being of refugee teachers everywhere.

We hear from HEA Phase II Grantees, Madrasati, as they share about their innovation, journey to scale and experience within the HEA programme. With thanks to HEA mentors NYU-TIES for their work on this video.

Over the past 7 years, the Humanitarian Education Accelerator (HEA) has supported 21 innovative and impactful education in emergency and protracted crises (EiEPC) solutions to transition to scale. Support has included financing and capacity building, and has focused on producing actionable evidence.

Many lessons have been learnt throughout the 7 years and 3 cohorts, including lessons for innovators, EiEPC practitioners, donors, and accelerators. We have compiled these lessons into a Learning Synthesis so that global audiences can share in the lessons learnt.

Key messages for researchers and practitioners:Key messages for researchers and practitioners:

When studying brief and skill-targeted social-emotional learning activities, consider calculating measures of dosage: how much (quantity), how often (repetition pattern), and for how long (duration) the activities are implemented. Examine these measures as potential predictors of program outcomes or moderators of the program impact; and use the information to determine the “optimal dosage” when scaling up.

Link these measures with teachers’ and enumerators’ reports on implementation to provide better guidance on overall implementation quality. Examine these measures as potential predictors of program outcomes or moderators of the program impact; and use the information to determine the “optimal dosage” when scaling up.

Link these measures with teachers’ and enumerators’ reports on implementation to provide better guidance on overall implementation quality."

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.

diyddiCurator is a graphic user interface to the rddi package. It is a shiny app designed to streamline metadata generation for research data sharing. It allows the user to input project metadata and generate a valid Data Documentation Initiative Codebook (DDI 2.5) to describe the study and data collected.

DDI elements and their attributes are listed in various tabs and described using handsontable (https://handsontable.com/). By right clicking on the table users can add or delete rows. A human readable README, the DDI Codebook and the data is available for export in the Export navigation menu.

An accompanying interactive infographic to the working paper #1 from the Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crisis (ERICC) Research Programme Consortium. This paper outlines the theoretical framework governing the studies to be deployed throughout the Consortium's lifetime.

Why is it that some countries fluoridate their water? In the mid-20th century, fluoride became linked with reduced tooth decay, sparking a scientific revolution in the dentistry world, and causing cities to begin infusing their water supplies with fluoride. Today, countries add fluoride as a protective factor, as a way to promote healthy early childhood development (ECD). But there is still significant debate around the practice.

This brief is prepared to provide recommendations on promising and practical approaches to support education during the acute crises period in Ukraine and to mitigate the impacts of the Russian invasion on children’s learning and wellbeing. It is primarily designed to support multilateral and bilateral organizations, as well as other actors and stakeholders, to identify priorities and approaches to support education for children affected by the Ukraine crisis. In this brief, we provide:

1. An overview of the conditions of education for Ukrainian children thus far

2. Options and priorities for supporting the children affected by the Russian Invasion, both (a) for the children remaining in Ukraine and (b) for the Ukrainian refugee children in neighboring host countries.

3. State of evidence and implications of future responses and research

While many Governments have turned to connected education and tech-driven programmes to support continued learning during school closures, there is little available evidence on the impact of distance learning on learning outcomes, especially for children affected by crisis and conflict and regarding holistic learning outcomes. Understanding the impact of the growing number of digital interventions on learning outcomes for these children (both in and outside of the classroom) is crucial to ensuring that no child is left behind in the wake of COVID-19 disruptions. In order to be able to understand how to better support children’s learning, we first need to be able to understand what children know and are able to do. Armed with this information, teachers and educational programmes can then provide more tailored support. The assessment of learning outcomes is therefore key. In response to a clear gap in this area, a new partnership, brokered by Porticus, brought together War Child Holland, NYU Global TIES for Children, and the HEA to interrogate the need for an effective tool to assess learning outcomes across digital learning interventions.

NYU News recently sat down with Aber and Ha Yeon Kim, a senior researcher for ERICC and senior research scientist at Global TIES for Children, for a conversation on mitigating the disruptions to children’s education in crisis-affected countries and possible interventions for children unable to attend school.

image: A tent school established by the International Rescue Committee to provide Syrian refugee children in Lebanon with remedial programming / Courtesy of Global TIES

What does a successful early childhood care program look like? How has a child’s brain developed at the age of 3? How does nutrition impact the future well-being of a child into adulthood? Learn the answers to these questions and more in "The Best Start in Life: Early Childhood Development for Sustainable Development". With leading experts in the field – hailing from Harvard University, New York University and UNICEF, among other institutions – we’ll explore how neuroscience, sociology, anthropology and other studies have influenced our understanding of early childhood development.

While nearly 1 billion children were out of school worldwide in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the lack of access to education was most pronounced among children in low- and middle-income countries. A new research-practice partnership is working to develop a tool to measure holistic learning outcomes across distance education and digital learning interventions in humanitarian settings.

Despite a recent call for an expanded research agenda that is more likely to produce tangible societal reductions in inequality, efforts to articulate how social scientists can actually pursue this agenda remain few and far between. The central question this article addresses is, What can social scientists do to deliver the forms of knowledge that may lead to a reduction of social inequalities in youth outcomes and opportunities at large scale? Drawing on conceptualizations of inequality that pay attention to mechanisms of distributional and relational inequality, and examples of initiatives from a diverse array of the social sciences, the authors delineate six pathways for the kind of research that may generate reductions in youth inequality at scale. The authors conclude with a set of proposals for what academic institutions can do to train and support researchers to carry out this research agenda.

Multi-year, International research programme to focus on building the global evidence base for education in emergencies.

image credit: Towfiqu barbhuiya (@towfiqu999999 on Unsplash)

An estimated 12 million girls aged 15–19 years, and 777,000 girls younger than 15 give birth globally each year. Contexts of war and displacement increase the likelihood of early marriage and childbearing. Given the developmentally sensitive periods of early childhood and adolescence, adolescent motherhood in conflict-affected contexts may put a family at risk intergenerationally. We propose that the specifics of normative neuroendocrine development during adolescence, including increased sensitivity to stress, pose additional risks to adolescent girls and their young children in the face of war and displacement, with potential lifelong consequences for health and development. This paper proposes a developmental, dual-generational framework for research and policies to better understand and address the needs of adolescent mothers and their small children. We draw from the literature on developmental stress physiology, adolescent parenthood in contexts of war and displacement internationally, and developmental cultural neurobiology. We also identify culturally meaningful sources of resilience and provide a review of the existing literature on interventions supporting adolescent mothers and their offspring. We aim to honor Edward Zigler's groundbreaking life and career by integrating basic developmental science with applied intervention and policy.

To provide effective aid to children who live in areas of conflict it is necessary to understand precisely how they have been impacted by the crises around them. One area of importance is the effect of conflict and trauma on a child’s development and education.

In a new paper, Global TIES for Children researchers J. Lawrence Aber, Carly Tubbs Dolan, Ha Yeon Kim, and Lindsay Brown, present a review of opportunities and challenges they have encountered in designing and conducting rigorous research that advances our understanding of this effect.

This paper critically reviews the opportunities and challenges in designing and conducting actionable research on the learning and development of children in conflict- and crisis-affected countries.

This paper critically reviews the opportunities and challenges in designing and conducting actionable research on the learning and development of children in conflict- and crisis-affected countries. We approached our review through two perspectives championed by Edward Zigler: (a) child development and social policy and (b) developmental psychopathology in context. The aim of the work was to answer the following questions: What works to enhance children's learning and development in such contexts? By what mechanisms? For whom? Under what conditions? How do experiences and conditions of crisis affect the basic processes of children's typical development? The review is based on a research–practice partnership started in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2010 and expanded to research in Niger and Lebanon in 2016. The focus of the research is on the impact of Healing Classrooms (a set of classroom practices) and Healing Classrooms Plus (an additional set of targeted social and emotional learning activities), developed by the International Rescue Committee, on children's academic outcomes and social and emotional learning. We sought to extract lessons from this decade of research for building a global developmental science for action. Special attention is paid to the importance of research–practice partnerships, conceptual frameworks, measurement and methodology. We conclude by highlighting several essential features of a global developmental science for action.