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.

While the past decade has seen increased global efforts to develop reliable and valid measures of developmental phenomena for use in diverse populations within and across countries, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and in particular the education goal (SDG4) have revealed a dearth of meaningful and valid measures and indicators to monitor countries’ progress toward achieving the 10 SDG4 targets. Developmental science can a) inform the choice of outcomes, processes, and mechanisms that yield the greatest promise in advancing countries ability to formulate solutions; and b) provide guidance on how to measure educational phenomena to ensure maximum policy relevance. Moving forward, developmental science will need to provide rigorous evidence on measures that incorporate the principles of bioecological frameworks on human development and learning to capture the complexity of the multi-level, multi-dimensional, dynamic processes of development and learning that are relevant to achieving SDG4. The chapter concludes with specific recommendations for how developmental scientists can ensure that their research is directly relevant to and can best support the SDG process.

This chapter discusses the roles of transnational multiple stakeholder partnerships in addressing development and implementation challenges affecting youth and children in both rich as well as low- and middle-income countries. We first discuss each of five major sets of stakeholders –national governments; community members; civil society organizations; the private sector; and researchers – in terms of their stakes in working towards SDG progress. Then we present how networks across these groups (e.g. at national, regional and global levels, or Multiple Stakeholder Partnerships (MSPs), can help achieve progress, with several current examples. Throughout we balance discussion of challenges, strengths and opportunities in both individual stakeholder approaches and MSPs. We also place special emphasis on the role of research in general and developmental science in particular, in the work of MSPs on the Sustainable Development Goals.

We assessed the impacts of a teacher professional development program for public and private kindergartens in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. We examined impacts on teacher professional well-being, classroom quality, and children’s readiness during one school year. This cluster-randomized trial included 240 schools (teachers N = 444; children N = 3,345, Mage = 5.2) randomly assigned to one of three conditions: teacher training (TT), teacher training plus parental-awareness meetings (TTPA), and controls. The programs incorporated workshops and in-classroom coaching for teachers and video-based discussion groups for parents. Moderate impacts were found on some dimensions of professional well-being (reduced burnout in the TT and TTPA conditions, reduced turnover in the TT condition), classroom quality (increased emotional support/behavior management in the TT and TTPA conditions, support for student expression in the TT condition), and small impacts on multiple domains of children’s school readiness (in the TT condition). The parental-awareness meetings had counteracting effects on child school readiness outcomes. Implications for policy and practice are discussed for Ghana and for early childhood education in low- and middle-income countries.

The EQUAL (Education Quality and Learning for All) Network for Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims to identify and develop research networks, provide seed grants and increase research-practice partnerships in two regions of the world affected by the learning crisis – the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). EQUAL is capacity building of networks of scholars so that the evidence bases in measurement and evaluation relevant to the lifelong learning goal of the SDGs is advanced at the country level and across countries within the two regions.

"Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, es psicóloga y educadora prenatal, quien fundó el primer Centro de Educación Prenstal e Inicial a nivel Nacional.

Esta mañana, Gabriela de Bukele, participó del evento de UNICEF en el que pudo compartir parte de su experiencia con los ponentes, entre ellos, Nadine Perrault titular de Unicef en El Salvador, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, codirector del centro global TIES for Children de la Universidad de New York y Ajay Chaudhry, profesor de la Universidad de New York y exsecretario adjunto del Departamento de Salud y Servicios Humanos del Gobierno de Estados Unidos."

In recent years, there has been an increase in the demand for and supply of early childhood education (ECE) in low- and middle-income countries. There is also growing awareness that unless ECE is of high quality, children may attend school but not learn. There is a large literature on the conceptualization and measurement of ECE quality in the United States that focuses on the nature of teacher-child interactions. Efforts to expand access to high quality ECE in low- and middle-income countries will require similar measurement efforts that are theoretically-grounded and culturally-adapted. This paper assesses the factor structure and concurrent validity of an observational classroom quality tool to assess teacher-child interactions—the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System© (TIPPS; Seidman et al., 2013)—in Ghanaian pre-primary classrooms. We find evidence of three conceptually distinct but empirically correlated domains of quality: Facilitating Deeper Learning (FDL), Supporting Student Expression (SSE), and Emotional Support and Behavior Management (ESBM). Teachers’ schooling level, training in early childhood development, and professional well-being positively predict the three quality domains in different ways. SSE and ESBM predict classroom end-of-the-school-year academic outcomes, and SSE predicts classroom end-of-the-school-year social-emotional outcomes. Implications for the field of international education and global ECE policy and research are discussed.

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.

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.

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.

Young children living in conditions of war, disaster, and displacement are at high risk for developmental difficulties that can follow them throughout their lives. While there is robust evidence supporting the need for early childhood development (ECD) in humanitarian settings, implementation of ECD programming remains sparse, largely due to the lack of evidence of how and why these programs can improve outcomes in humanitarian settings. In order to build the evidence base for ECD in humanitarian settings, we review the current state of implementation research for ECD programming (targeting children 0–8) in humanitarian settings, through a literature review and a series of key informant interviews. Drawing from existing frameworks of implementation research and the findings from our analysis, we present a framework for ECD implementation research in humanitarian settings and propose an agenda for future research.

With Sustainable Development Goal 4, the global education community promises to improve equitable access to quality education for all children. This promise can only be upheld through investments by multiple stakeholders in the most educationally marginalized children: the 75 million children who are currently out of school—and the millions more who are in school but not learning—in crisis contexts. For researchers working in partnership with practitioners and governments, investments are needed to develop and adapt measurement tools that provide accurate and timely data about critical dimensions of program implementation (PI) and children’s holistic learning and development (CHILD) in crisis contexts. Such tools can be used in both research efforts and embedded in practitioner monitoring and evaluation systems, resulting in data that can: a) improve the ability of researchers to detect impacts and interpret results of randomized trials of education programs; and b) guide practitioners in data-driven quality improvement efforts. In Paper 1 of this dissertation, I apply theories and evidence from the prevention and intervention, developmental, and implementation sciences to outline how research-practice-policy partnerships can make strategic and coordinated progress towards developing and adapting CHILD and PI measurement tools. In Papers 2 and 3, I provide empirical evidence on the psychometric properties of two such measurement tools: one developed in Western countries and used widely in humanitarian contexts to assess a key dimension of CHILD (social-emotional well-being) and one developed in a crisis context to assess a key dimension of PI (classroom implementation quality). Specifically, in Paper 2 I provide some of the first evidence of the reliability, validity, and cross-contextual comparability of the teacher-report version of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (Goodman, 1997) within and across three humanitarian contexts. In Paper 3, I provide initial evidence of the content and predictive validity of an observation tool developed by staff at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to assess the quality of classroom implementation of Learning in a Healing Classroom, the IRC’s teacher professional development and curricular program. Implications of the findings of each of the studies for research-practice-policy partnerships are discussed within each paper and cumulatively.

Recent international development efforts have emphasized the importance of supporting early childhood development, yet little is known about the availability of early learning opportunities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The present study uses nationally representative data from >163,000 three- and four-year-olds living in 63 countries to estimate the availability of in- and out-of-home early learning opportunities in LMICs. Results suggest that 71.9% of preschool-aged children experience high levels of at-home stimulation (e.g., reading, counting, drawing), 33.6% attend center-based early childhood care and education (ECCE) programming, 29.1% experience both, and 22.9% experience neither. Large geographical and socioeconomic disparities in learning opportunities were found both across and within countries, particularly for ECCE.

Existing Western literature about childcare reveals parents hire nannies to play the role of surrogate mother, reflecting Western-held assumptions that a mother caring for her child is the optimal arrangement, with nannies hired to fill this void in their absence. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with 10 urban Chinese families, our study reveals a departure from these assumptions when it comes to middle-class Chinese, who do not hire nannies as proxies for mothers or due to lack of alternative options. Rather, they seek out nanny care to supplement or enhance childcare provided by grandparents or stay-at-home mothers by building multi-caregiver coalitions in which resources and advantages are pooled to improve care quality. This study uses nanny care as a lens to explore these culturally divergent patterns and reveals that, unlike their Western counterparts, Chinese parents do not see exclusive maternal care for children as ideal or sufficient.

Countries must also invest in urban infrastructure, environmental sustainability, transportation and governance.

Today, Syrians represent the largest refugee group in the world. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2012, more than 5.2 million Syrians have fled the country as refugees, and about half of these are children. Most of the Syrian refugees are currently living in neighboring countries, with Turkey hosting the largest group with numbers above 3.2 million as of November 2017. Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq combined host about 2 million Syrian refugees. While the Syrian crisis, deservedly, has been covered in the news and debated in terms of its effects internationally, we lack empirical evidence of how this crisis is affecting children and families. This special issue is designed to begin to address this important gap in the literature with five new empirical studies on Syrian refugee children, focusing on their psychological and educational needs.