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.

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.

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.

This first brief in the NYU Global TIES for Children (NYU-TIES) series presents preliminary findings collected as part of the pre-pilot and pilot phases of one of their Play to Learn impact evaluations and a longitudinal study. The impact evaluation, led by NYU-TIES, investigates BRAC's flexible, hybrid home-visiting program in Cox’s Bazar which seeks to engage fathers as well as mothers and the longitudinal study features three-cohorts from prenatal and birth which follow young Rohingya children through their first years of life. The data in this brief looks specifically at Rohingya fathers’ perceptions of play.

Global TIES for Children is excited to share some initial results from preliminary research concerning fathers’ involvement in children’s development in Rohingya refugee communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. The research was conducted as part of the LEGO foundation-funded Play to Learn project, a partnership between Sesame Workshop, BRAC, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and TIES to provide and understand a range of early child development services for these communities. NYU’s research unearths.


Image credit: Ante Hamersmit (@ante_kante on Unsplash)

In 2019, Dr. Lindsay Brown at New York University’s Global TIES for Children (NYU-TIES) co-developed and implemented the Building Expert Teachers Through Evidence-based Research (BETTER) program with Laura Killips. BETTER is designed to support intentional and sustained teacher learning across contexts. It utilizes practice-based strategies to develop teachers’ foundational skills and knowledge and to sustain them with the support of teacher coaches and other resources within education systems. The program builds upon decades of scientific research that demonstrates that effective professional development: demands active and applied learning from its participants; provides sustained and repeated learning opportunities; showcases models of effective practice; provides expert support; and fits within a coherent framework of practice.

Teachers are expected to do it all: to attend to students’ academic, social, and emotional, skills while finding time to plan, grade, and develop professionally. In the wake of COVID-19 school closures, they are expected to remediate for loss of learning, target instruction to multiple skill levels, and ensure a safe learning environment. But they are currently provided with only a “patchwork of opportunities” to build such skills, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and humanitarian contexts, where teachers are especially crucial. This approach to professional development does not provide an opportunity to build expertise in the teaching practices that are required to fulfill such wide-ranging expectations.

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

In response to the influx of some 488,000 Syrian refugee children since 2011, international and local NGOs working in Lebanon have provided formal and non-formal education services designed to promote both children’s academic skills and their social and emotional learning (SEL) skills. However, the majority of SEL-related frameworks and materials used are typically grounded in theory and research from western, educated, industrialized, rich, democracies (WEIRD), which are not always coherent or aligned with Lebanese societal cultures and norms. Towards the goal of generating contextually meaningful evidence to guide program and policy decision-making in Lebanon, our research-practice-policy partnership has engaged in a rigorous, multi-method, iterative process to develop and contextualize an SEL framework for children in Lebanese primary schools. In this paper, we will describe the process of engaging experts in education, psycho-social support, and SEL from the Government of Lebanon, World Learning, Harvard’s EASEL Lab, and NYU Global TIES to empirically code existing frameworks and identify priority SEL constructs. We will reflect on the development of systemic and transformative relationships across partners as a means toward contextualization, and conclude by sharing a first version of a National SEL Framework for Lebanon.

In Colombia, the national law De Cero a Siempre (DCAS) provides a framework for holistic and integrated early childhood development and education for all children. Against the backdrop of the United Nations’Sustainable Development Goals and the DCAS policy objectives, Colombia set out to apply a comprehensive measure to track the quality of early childhood education programs that would inform pedagogical, programmatic, and policy strategies. Our study describes the process whereby key stakeholders selected, adapted, validated, and applied the Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO) framework to characterize the quality of early childhood education at scale in the country. We describe the phases that led to the application of the different instrument modules, and the key enablers and challenges to the process. The paper includes implications for policy, practice, and research in Colombia and discusses lessons learned with relevance to the Latin American and global contexts.

The COVID-19 outbreak ignited a monumental education emergency, disrupting in-person learning and relying on technological schooling solutions that exacerbated many pre-existing education inequities. Lack of child care options, inconsistent access to technology, and variable quality of remote learning experiences all contributed to some students’ infrequent or complete lack of attendance to virtual schooling. As kids go back to in-person learning, schools and educators face a critical question: How do we handle students who have missed most or all of remote learning?

Image credit: IRC

Refugee children face a constellation of risks in their home country, when they're on the move, and after they arrive in host countries. Our research with Syrian refugee children in Lebanon adds to a growing body of evidence that such experiences of adversity can impact the foundational cognitive and behavioral skills that forecast later learning. The most consistent risk for later learning challenges we identified among Syrian refugee children enrolled in Lebanese public school was being older than expected for the grade in which they were placed, what we call "age for grade." Syrian refugee children who were older than expected for their grade level had poorer executive functioning, behavioral regulation, literacy, and numeracy skills than children who were a typical age for their grade.

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.

In many countries, the outbreak of COVID-19 compounded crises vulnerable populations are facing. Children are among the most vulnerable, due to the potential for adverse impacts on emerging neurobiological, cognitive, social, emotional, and physiological developmental systems. That is why now more than ever, coherent, timely, and cost-effective policy responses are needed to support children’s remarkable capacities for resilience. But the ability to develop meaningful policy responses is predicated upon education systems’ own capacities for rapidly generating and using evidence on how children, caregivers, teachers, and principals are doing and what they are experiencing. In this brief, we share efforts NYU-TIES has taken in collaboration with government agencies in Lebanon and Peru and with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Lebanon to strengthen education systems’ capacity for assessing social and emotional skills and well-being among host-country and refugee populations.

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.

To generate the evidence needed to understand, improve and share what works to help refugee children learn and succeed in school, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and NYU Global TIES for Children (TIES/NYU) established a strategic partnership, the Evidence for Action: Education in Emergencies (3EA) initiative. In Lebanon, this program was designed and delivered to complement the Lebanese public education system and enhance learning and retention of Syrian refugee children through remedial tutoring programs infused with climate-targeted social-emotional learning (SEL) principles and practices (Tutoring in a Healing Classrooms - HCT) and skill-targeted SEL interventions (Mindfulness activities, Brain Games, 5-Component SEL Curriculum).

To generate the evidence needed to understand, improve and share what works to help refugee children learn and succeed in school, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and NYU Global TIES for Children (TIES/NYU) established a strategic partnership, the Evidence for Action: Education in Emergencies (3EA) initiative. 3EA in Niger was designed and delivered to help strengthen the public education system in Niger and to serve refugee, IDP and host community children in the hard-hit Diffa region. It strove to achieve this through a remedial tutoring program infused with climate-targeted social-emotional learning (SEL) principles and practices (Tutoring in a Healing Classrooms), and adding skill-targeted SEL interventions (Mindfulness activities, Brain Games).

To generate the evidence needed to understand, improve and share what works to help refugee children learn and succeed in school, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and NYU Global TIES for Children (TIES/NYU) established a strategic partnership, the Evidence for Action: Education in Emergencies (3EA) initiative. 3EA in Niger was designed and delivered to help strengthen the public education system in Niger and to serve refugee, IDP and host community children in the hard-hit Diffa region. It strove to achieve this through a remedial tutoring program infused with climate-targeted social-emotional learning (SEL) principles and practices (Tutoring in a Healing Classrooms), and adding skill-targeted SEL interventions (Mindfulness activities, Brain Games).

Lebanon Year 1 Deidentified Days

IHDSC met with NYU Global TIES for Children (TIES) researchers Lindsay Brown and Ha Yeon Kim to discuss their research with students in Niger and the insights and challenges that come with doing research in conflict-affected areas. This conversation was edited for clarity and length.