Getting Ready for School

Partner(s): Helena Duch and Kimberly Noble Mailman School of Public Health

Research shows that young children who are better prepared for school tend to have better results in school and better health outcomes. Socioeconomically disadvantaged children frequently lack access to early childhood education programs, and so they tend to have a poorer grasp of skills necessary for success in school. Getting Ready for School seeks to address this problem by working with Head Start, a federally funded, family-centered child development program for low-income children ages 3-5, to help parents and teachers of socioeconomically disadvantaged communities better prepare children for school. The project is led by Helena Dutch and Kimberly Noble, faculty at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

Project partners from Mailman will work with approximately 25 parent and teacher facilitators at Head Start centers in New York and North Carolina. Parents will attend group sessions, where facilitators will use a series of video examples to train them to do literacy and math activities with their children.

For the project, CCNMTL will film and edit approximately 100 short videos with voiceover in English and Spanish that will reside in a simple online library where the videos can be accessed by the facilitators. Faculty and students at Mailman will also use the videos for research and course instruction.

Getting Ready for School is funded by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education

Related project categories:
Education | Medicine and Health | Repositories and Reference Tools