Our team’s research focuses on how to best support early childhood teachers in their work to promote young children’s learning and development. We partner with the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) to implement and evaluate individualized professional development (i.e., coaching and training) for early childhood teachers and leaders in Virginia. We collect data to answer questions related to the implementation of professional development (i.e., what did services look like?), outcomes of professional development (i.e., did teachers gain new knowledge or skills?), and participants’ satisfaction with the professional development (i.e., what was their experience with coaching?).
A student will have the opportunity to contribute to this work by supporting data collection, analysis, and reporting. The student may also develop and work on a research agenda aligned to their own interests as part of the larger project (i.e., develop research question(s) and plan for analysis, conduct analysis, write-up results).
The Virginia Early Childhood Consultation Program (VECC) provides coaching and training to early childhood leaders and teachers identified as having the greatest needs in Virginia’s new quality measurement and improvement system, VQB5. Coaches partner with leaders and teachers to improve the quality of teacher-child interactions and social-emotional environments in their early childhood education (ECE) program.
The VECC evaluation team is responsible for collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data for formative (i.e., continuous quality improvement) and summative (i.e., program evaluation) purposes. We are interested in having an undergraduate student join our evaluation team and contribute to data collection, analysis, and reporting. This project is an excellent opportunity for students interested in gaining skills and experience around implementing and evaluating a real-world professional development support for early childhood programs.
The VECC evaluation team mostly collaborates over Zoom, so engagement in this project will largely occur virtually; however, a few in-person touch-points are possible throughout the year.
- Experience distributing surveys to participants using Qualtrics is a plus but not required.
- Experience using Excel or Stata to summarize quantitative data is a plus but not required.
- Gain familiarity with the research base on coaching in early childhood education programs (e.g., theories of change for coaching interventions, implementation of coaching, outcomes of coaching)
- Gain an understanding of the current landscape of early childhood education in Virginia and how the current project fits into that landscape (e.g., understanding the state’s new quality measurement and improvement system, understanding the goals of our team’s coaching initiative)
- Gain experience collecting survey data through Qualtrics (e.g., familiarity with survey items and scoring, experience with distribution and tracking of survey completion)
- Gain experience with analyzing quantitative and qualitative survey data (e.g., conducting basic descriptive analyses on quantitative data, coding responses to open-ended questions for themes)