Biography

Kenneth A. Dodge is the President of the Society for Research in Child Development and the William McDougall Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. He is also the founding and emeritus director of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy. Ken studies the development of aggressive behavior in children and families. His work provides a model for understanding how early experiences of trauma and adversity lead some young children to become defensive in processing social information, which leads them to engage in aggressive behavior and catalyzes a life course of costly outcomes. He is now crafting and testing public policies and community interventions such as Family Connects to enhance opportunities and outcomes for populations of families with young children and to eliminate disparities across groups. Ken is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.

J. Lawrence Aber is Willner Professor of Psychology and Public Policy at NYU Steinhardt, and University Professor at New York University, where he also serves as board chair of its Institute of Human Development and Social Change and co-director of the international research center “Global TIES for Children”. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical-Community and Developmental Psychology from Yale University. His basic research examines the influence of poverty and violence at the family and community levels, on the social, emotional, behavioral, cognitive and academic development of children and youth. From 1994-2004, he served as Director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University. Currently, he conducts research on the impact of preschool teacher training quality and children’s learning and development in Ghana (in collaboration with Innovations for Poverty Action) and on school- and community-based interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, Sierra Leone and Lebanon (in collaboration with the International Rescue Committee).

Website: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/appsych/

Hirokazu Yoshikawa is the Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education at NYU Steinhardt and a University Professor at NYU, and Co-Director (with J. Lawrence Aber) of the Global TIES for Children center at NYU. He is a community and developmental psychologist who studies the effects of public policies and programs related to immigration, early childhood, poverty reduction, and gender and sexuality on child and youth development. He conducts research in the United States and in low- and middle-income countries. His current projects include leading the research and evaluation for the MacArthur Foundation 100&Change and Lego Foundation funded partnerships of Sesame Workshop with the International Rescue Committee and BRAC to provide early childhood programming for Syrian refugee families in the Middle East and Rohingya refugee families in Bangladesh. His recent books include Cradle to Kindergarten: A New Plan to Combat Inequality, with Ajay Chaudry, Taryn Morrissey, and Christina Weiland (2021) and Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Young Children (2011). He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Education, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Website: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/people/hirokazu-yoshikawa
Twitter: @HiroYoshikawaNY

Marta Rubio-Codina is a Senior Specialist in Child Development at the Social Protection and Health Division at the IDB. Prior to joining the Bank, she was a senior researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Toulouse. She has significant experience in the design and evaluation of at-scale home visiting interventions in Colombia, India, Peru, and Ecuador; and is currently working on strategies to improve process quality in childcare settings. Marta led a longitudinal study to identify cost-effective and scalable instruments to measure developmental outcomes in very young children; has advised the design of ECD modules in national health and nutrition surveys in Mexico and Ecuador; and is involved in a new effort, led by the WHO, to develop a global ECD indicator for children under 3 years. She has published research in several peer-reviewed economics and medical journals.

Implementing Early and Middle Childhood Interventions for Population Impact Around the Globe

Session Type: Invited Presidential Symposium

Abstract

Prevention scientists have successfully translated scientific knowledge about early and middle child development into interventions that have been tested and proven effective in laboratory settings with small samples. In contrast, achieving population impact through science-based interventions that are implemented at scale has proven a more challenging task. In this symposium, we present four attempts to implement interventions at a population level with diverse populations around the globe (i.e., rural preschool teachers and children in Ghana, Syrian refugee families in the Middle East and Rohingya refugee families in Bangladesh, and parents of young children in Peru).

Lawrence Aber will describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of an in-service training and coaching (TTC) program (Quality Preschool for Ghana, or QP4G) directed toward 27,000 previously-untrained preschool teachers in Ghana. He will report the findings from a field experiment to test the impact of TTC on teacher professional well-being, classroom quality, and young children’s school readiness. Hirokazu Yoshikawa will describe efforts to evaluate the MacArthur Foundation 100 & Change and Lego Foundation-funded partnerships of Sesame Workshop with the International Rescue Committee and BRAC to provide early childhood programming for Syrian refugee families in the Middle East and Rohingya refugee families in Bangladesh (with Alice Wuermli and colleagues at Sesame, IRC and BRAC). Marta Rubio Codina will describe the Cuna Màs Program implemented as part of early childhood policy in Peru to 93,000 children in rural areas. This weekly home-visiting intervention has been evaluated through a randomized controlled trial and is now informing other large-scale parenting programs in Latin America.

Each presenter will describe how child development knowledge guided the design, goals, and essential components of an intervention; challenges in implementation at a large scale; evaluation of implementation and impact; and future directions for continued intervention and evaluation. The presentations will demonstrate both the promise and the challenges of bringing early child development science to bear on global early childhood policy and practice.

Sub Unit

• Invited Program

Chair

• Kenneth A Dodge, Duke University

Individual Presentations

• Training Ghana’s Preschool Teachers to Improve Classroom Quality and Children’s Learning Outcomes - Presenting Author: J. Lawrence Aber, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania; Non-Presenting Author: Jere Behrman, University of Pennsylvania; Non-Presenting Author: Edward Tsinigo, Innovations for Poverty Action

• Taking into Account COVID-19 and Culture to Support Early Childhood Development in Humanitarian Contexts - Presenting Author: Hirokazu Yoshikawa, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Alice Wuermli, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Anaga Ramachandran, Centre for Learning Resources; Non-Presenting Author: Joyce Rafla, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Yeshim Iqbal, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Sakila Yesmin, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh; Non-Presenting Author: Phoebe Sloane, International Rescue Committee; Non-Presenting Author: Kimberly Foulds, Sesame Workshop

• Home Visiting at Scale and Child Development - Non-Presenting Author: M. Caridad Araujo, Inter-American Development Bank; Non-Presenting Author: Marta Dormal, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Sally Grantham-McGregor, University College London; Non-Presenting Author: Fabiola Lazarte, Instituto de Investigación Nutricional, Perú; Presenting Author: Marta Rubio-Codina, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB); Non-Presenting Author: Norbert Schady, Inter-American Development Bank