For centuries, families have served up good conversation around the dinner table.
Sharing advice, planning events and recounting the day’s highs and lows are key mealtime ingredients to connecting families and building support systems — all while cooking up valuable learning opportunities for the youngest family members.
For the past 15 years, the Getting Ready research program has helped enhance school readiness for children age 5 and younger by bringing evidence-based parent engagement strategies to early childhood programs throughout Nebraska.
Thanks to additional, recent funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Preschool Development Grant, Nebraska researchers will move those strategies into practice.
As demand increases for employees with expertise in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, representation of Latinos in STEM fields continues to lag.
As of 2011, Latinos represented only 7 percent of the American STEM workforce, despite accounting for more than 16 percent of the U.S. population.
The first NAECR Networking event of the fall semester was Sept. 26 at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. More than 40 attended in person and via Zoom video conferencing to hear a presentation about global child development by Dr. Hiro Yoshikawa.
Many children growing up in disadvantage enter school without the requisite social, emotional and behavioral skills to be successful. When those children start off behind, they have a difficult time catching up to more successful students.
Because a child’s early school experiences are predictive of their long-term educational trajectory, starting school socially and behaviorally ready is crucial. Otherwise, long-term detrimental outcomes and widening gaps in academic and social success may follow.
The Nebraska Academy for Early Childhood Research welcomes Brent McBride, professor of human development and director of the Child Development Laboratory at the University of Illinois, to Lincoln for a March 11 presentation.
The event will be from 1:30 to 3 p.m. at Louise Pound Hall 141, and is open to the public. It is co-hosted by NAECR and the Department of Child, Youth and Family Studies.
What is 72 multiplied by 12? While fourth-graders will focus on arriving at the correct answer, Nebraska researcher Carrie Clark wants to know what happens in the brain as they learn to solve the problem.
Clark, assistant professor of educational psychology, is using functional MRI technology to capture brain activity while children learn mathematics. Funded by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Office of Research and Economic Development and housed at CYFS, she is exploring the relationship between children’s mathematics learning and executive function — the ability to maintain focus and behave in a goal-oriented way.
Henry Bass, a fourth-year doctoral student in school psychology, has a passion for helping youth navigate one of life’s most challenging periods: adolescence.
Bass recently received news that the Society for the Study of School Psychology will award funding for his dissertation project, which focuses on identifying the extent to which family-school partnerships improve long-term outcomes for children as they become adolescents.
