These data were collected as part of an ongoing practice, policy, and research partnership, Ahlan Simsim. Ahlan Simsim, which means “Welcome Sesame” in Arabic, is the groundbreaking program from Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) that delivers early learning and nurturing care to children and caregivers affected by conflict and displacement across the Middle East. Through a brand-new, localized version of Sesame Street and in-person direct services across Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, Ahlan Simsim reaches families wherever they are—from classrooms and health clinics to TV and mobile devices—with the vital educational resources that they need to thrive. This program, generously funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the LEGO Foundation, not only addresses immediate needs and builds a strong foundation for future wellbeing, but also has the potential to transform how the humanitarian system responds to crises around the world.

Now in its fourth year, the E-Cubed Research Fund has funded 12 studies and is beginning to see the outputs of this research. This panel will provide an opportunity for a selection of E-Cubed grantees to share their emerging research findings. In addition, this panel will open up discussion on key questions such as who drives the production of knowledge in EiE, how and for whom. In the push for evidence-based policy and programming, this panel will provide a space to ask whether we are tending more towards policy-based evidence. Finally, this panel will give panelists and the audience a space to reflect on what evidence is needed for EiE. Beyond, “what works” what types of evidence and along what lines of inquiry should be prioritized.

Refugee children face significant adversities that can threaten critical developmental processes and hamper learning outcomes. This study examines how post-migration risk factors at the community, household, and individual level experienced by primary school-aged Syrian refugee children in Lebanon (N = 448, Age M = 9.08, SD = 1.90) are associated with cognitive, emotional, and behavioral developmental processes as well as literacy and numeracy performance. We identified several risk factors, including attending a lower grade than their age-expected grade level, that uniquely predict Syrian refugee children's developmental processes and academic outcomes. Children's executive function and behavioral regulation, but not internalizing symptoms, partially mediated the relations between risk factors and academic outcomes.

In just a matter of weeks, the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to huge societal public health and economic challenges worldwide. The clinical effects of COVID-19 on young children are uncertain when compared with older age groups, with lower morbidity and mortality rates and no conclusive evidence supporting transmission during pregnancy; however, there is emerging evidence of increasing rates of child hyperinflammatory shock.1-3 Research on the effects of prior pandemics and disasters clearly indicates that there will be both immediate and long-term adverse consequences for many children, with particular risks faced during early childhood, when brain architecture is still rapidly developing and highly sensitive to environmental adversity.

War, disasters, trafficking and immigration are tearing millions of children from their parents all around the world. A psychologist explores how to help them recover.

Parent–child separation occurs for many reasons, both involuntary and voluntary. We review the effects on children and youth of parent–child separation due to several of the most common reasons that are responsible for the growth in this family circumstance worldwide. These include early institutionalization; war, persecution, and conflict; separation during asylum; trafficking; conscription into armed conflict; and being left behind when parents migrate for economic or other reasons. Overall, the effects of parent–child separation are consistently negative on children's social-emotional development, well-being, and mental health. They are more severe when the separation is prolonged or accompanied by other forms of deprivation or victimization. Mitigating and protective factors include earlier stable family placement in the case of early institutionalization, parent–child communication and parenting quality, and community support in the host community. We conclude with an evaluation of group, school-based, and community-based interventions for children and youth affected by parent–child separation.

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.

During school year 2016-2017, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) delivered Learning in a Healing Classroom after-school programming to support Syrian refugee children’s learning outcomes and retention in Lebanese public schools. We found that access to Healing Classrooms programming significantly improved students’ reading and math skills, as well as reduced the likelihood of interpreting interactions with peers as hostile in intent, after the first four months of program implementation.

Little is known about parents' book-sharing styles in indigenous communities undergoing social and cultural change. This study investigated Guatemalan Mayan parents' book-sharing styles and their relation to parents' schooling experience and children's narrative contributions. Thirty parents and their first-grade children (ages 7–9) were audiotaped sharing a worded picture book. Most parents either adopted the role of the sole narrator (40%) or shared the role of the narrator with their children (40%); other parents focused on teaching literacy skills (20%). Guatemalan Mayan parents with greater schooling experience were more likely to adopt the sole-narrator style than other styles. Children whose parents adopted the sole-narrator style contributed significantly less to the story (both in amount and type of new information provided) than children whose parents adopted other styles. Implications for family literacy programs working with Guatemalan Mayan and other indigenous communities are discussed.

Preschool programs have expanded rapidly in low- and middle-income countries, but there are widespread concerns about whether they are of sufficient quality to promote children's learning and development. We conducted a large school-randomized control trial (‘Quality Preschool for Ghana’ – QP4G) of a one-year teacher training and coaching program, with and without parental-awareness meetings, designed to improve preschool quality and child development. We followed 3,435 children in 240 schools in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana, a country with universal pre-primary education. A previous study reported positive impacts of teacher training (but not teacher training plus parental-awareness meetings) at the end of the implementation year on some dimensions of classroom quality, teacher well-being, and children's school readiness (Wolf et al., [2019] Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 12, 10–37). The present study analyzed a new round of data collected 1 year after the end of implementation to assess (a) the extent of persistence in impacts on child development and (b) whether such impacts vary by select child, household, and school characteristics. We found impacts of the teacher training intervention on children's overall school readiness were sustained (d = 0.13), but were only marginally statistically significant. When broken down by domain, impacts on social–emotional skills specifically persisted. Persistent negative effects of teacher training plus parental-awareness meetings varied by the literacy status of the male parent such that negative impacts were concentrated in children in households with non-literate male heads.

We used a cluster-randomized, wait-list controlled trial to examine impacts of a school-based social-emotional learning intervention on Congolese students and teachers. Seventy-six school clusters in two groups (A and B) were randomized to treatment or control. The groups differed in geographic location, accessibility, exposure to violence, and external donor investment. We estimated causal impacts in Group A, tested whether those impacts were replicated in Group B, and conducted sensitivity analyses on the pooled sample. Pooled analyses had higher statistical power and were therefore more likely to represent the true average impacts of the program. Improvements in students’ perceptions of school predictability and in addition and subtraction, geometry, and reading performance were specific to Group B. Only the effect on addition and subtraction remained significant in the pooled analysis. Improvements in teachers’ sense of accomplishment were found in Group A and remained significant in the pooled analysis. We detected no impacts on other outcomes. School-based interventions embedding social-emotional learning principles into the academic curricula are a promising but not yet proven approach to improving children’s outcomes in low-income countries affected by war.

Exposure to community violence is thought to create risk for the social and emotional development of children, including those children living in low-income, conflict-affected countries. In the absence of other types of community resources, schools may be one of the few community resources that can help buffer children from the negative effects of community violence exposure. We sampled 8,300 students ranging in age from 6–18 years in 123 schools from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to examine whether and how two distinct dimensions of positive school climate can protect two key features of children's social-emotional development in the presence of community violence. Multi-level models tested the hypothesis that students’ perceptions of a positive school climate moderated the relation between community violence and self-reported mental health problems and peer victimization. Findings support the hypothesis. Specifically, a positive school climate protected against mental health problems and peer victimization in the presence of high community violence. Students who experienced high community violence and a negative school climate generally demonstrated the worst development. We find complex interactions between the dimensions of school climate and exposure to violence on student social-emotional development that highlight the salience of children's contexts for developmental studies in low-income countries. We use dynamic developmental systems theory and differential impact to discuss the dual potential of schools as a buffer against the effects of violence or as a source of compounded risk.

This study explores the personal, professional, and contextual conditions faced by early childhood education (ECE) teachers in under-resourced settings and how these relate to teacher responsiveness to professional development (PD): namely, teacher attrition (a sign of PD failure when occurring shortly after PD), take-up of offered PD, adherence to PD training/materials, and quality of implementation. We use data from six disadvantaged districts in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana and PD focused on implementation of a national, play-based curriculum. Descriptive statistics indicate that ECE teachers (n = 302) face a multitude of barriers to high quality teaching across the bioecological model. Multilevel mixed effects models find that teachers with low job satisfaction are more likely to leave the school within the academic year. Teachers with moderate to severe depression are less likely to attend PD trainings. Senior teachers and those with poverty risks are less likely to adhere to PD material. Teachers with many time demand barriers are more likely to adhere to material. They also implement the content at higher observed quality as do teachers with bachelor's degrees and early childhood development (ECD) training. Take-up of PD also predicts quality of implementation. Practice and research implications are discussed.

During school year 2016-2017, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) delivered Healing Classrooms remedial tutoring programming and additional low-cost, targeted Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) (SEL) interventions to children in Diffa, a region in Niger affected by recurrent Boko Haram attacks. We found that, after twenty-two weeks of program implementation, access to Healing Classrooms tutoring significantly improved students’ reading and math skills, and adding targeted SEL interventions to Healing Classrooms tutoring improved children’s overall school grades. However, we found little evidence of direct impacts of the additional targeted SEL strategies on children’s social-emotional outcomes.

The development of competencies known as 21st-century skills are garnering increasing attention as a means of improving teacher instructional quality. However, a key challenge in bringing about desired improvements lies in the lack of context-specific understanding of teaching practices and meaningful ways of supporting teacher professional development. This paper focuses on the need to measure the social quality of teaching processes in a contextualized manner. We do so by highlighting the efforts made to develop and measure teacher practices and classroom processes using the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System© (TIPPS) in three different contexts: Uganda (secondary), India (primary), and Ghana (pre-school). By examining how such a tool can be used for teacher feedback, reflective practice, and continuous improvement, the hope is to pave the way toward enhanced 21st-century teacher skills and, in turn, 21st-century learners.

The Rapid Assessment of Cognitive and Emotional Regulation (RACER) is a tablet-based assessment tool for children that measures executive function (EF) skills. Instructions that are brief and visually presented; game-like tasks are designed to easily engage children regardless of literacy level and variable test administration settings. RACER measures inhibitory control and working memory. This study presents the theoretical rationale and empirical evidence for tablet-based assessments of EF, the process of administering the RACER assessments. The current sample consists of students in Lebanon (N=1900) and Niger (N=850). The results indicate that individual differences in EF can be assessed by the RACER tablet tasks. Specifically, we demonstrate that EF scores are associated in expected ways with age and that tasks function similarly to what has been observed in high-income countries. The feasibility and utility for researchers, practitioners, and clinicians, of this cognitive assessment tool is discussed.

This study uses the bioecological framework and methodology to select items for and to test a multidimensional structure of a measure of children’s economic well-being in a multi-community sample of children (7–11 years) and their households (N = 1958) from KwaZulu-Natal, a poor and under-served region of South Africa. Economic well-being was assessed using questionnaires completed by children’s caregivers and household heads. Exploratory factor analysis of four random split halves identified three dimensions of economic well-being: Fiscal Appraisal (subjective experiences of access to/allocation of resources), Material Assets (durable goods and living environment), and Fiscal Capacity (traditional measures of poverty: income, expenditures, employment). Confirmatory factor analysis verified the higher order model of economic well-being with the three dimensions. Invariance testing using multiple group factor analysis indicated confidence for use of this measure with varying types of communities in South Africa. The results reflect the multidimensional nature of economic well-being. Thus, the often-used money metric measures of poverty likely paint an incomplete picture of children’s actual economic well-being. Because our sample consists of impoverished households, our measure of economic well-being is sensitive to variation at the deep end of poverty. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.

We are honored to partner with the Lego Foundation, Sesame Workshop, BRAC and the IRC on this historic initiative to understand how play-based learning and support can build a future of hope, creativity, and engagement for a generation of children in some of the most challenging contexts in the world

An unprecedented half of the world’s 57 million out of school children live in conflict-affected countries, and 50% of children of primary-school-age are not attending school. In addition, the unauthorized status of many refugees and migrants worldwide is associated with experiences of social exclusion as access to employment and social services are often unavailable or constrained by host-country governments. Children and youth affected by unauthorized or refugee status are also often excluded from services to support healthy development and learning. This chapter presents a process-oriented developmental framework to guide the development and evaluation of interventions that can buffer the effects of social and political upheaval, displacement, and refugee and unauthorized status on children and youth's development. Rigorous evaluations, showing how programs mitigate the risks of displacement or refugee or unauthorized status, could yield great benefits for the fields of humanitarian aid and refugee and migration policy, making the relative dearth of such evidence even more stunning. This chapter reviews the existing literature from rigorous evaluations of interventions to address these issues, discusses the challenge of measurement of risk and protective factors in these contexts with particular sensitivity to cultural variation, as well as how to address cultural factors in the development and evaluation of interventions. The chapter concludes with specific methodological recommendations for a sound research agenda to further improve our understanding of risk and resilience in development of children and youth affected by war, displacement, and refugee or unauthorized status.