Rachel Gordon

The purpose of this project is to create linked forms of the student self-report Social-Emotional Competency Assessment (SECA) across five school districts (located in the east, south, and west), grade levels (3rd through 12th), and subpopulations (gender, race-ethnicity, SES). Doing so tailors forms to align with local practice/standards (including by grade level), to be culturally sustaining for student subpopulations, and to be of manageable length while precise. The proposed strategy bui...

Many researchers, teachers, and parents would agree that children's social-emotional learning (SEL) skills are important to develop. However, the role that teachers play in promoting children's emotional competencies is not well understood. Emotion-focused teaching constitutes adults' modeling of, responding to, and instructing about emotions that supports children's learning about emotions and the emotional bases of social interactions. The purpose of this project was to develop an observat...

The ability to measure the quality of preschool settings is of central importance in supporting a number of policy initiatives, such as state Quality Rating and Information systems, Head Start recompetition regulations, and the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge. This project will study aspects of validity of two widely used measures of preschool classroom quality: the Early Childhood Environment System Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R) and the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS)....

This research study will examine the association between aspects of preschool quality and child health, behavioral and cognitive outcomes in community-based and school-based early care and education programs. The purpose of the study is to identify, construct, and examine measures of preschool quality that can be used to inform the development of specific preschool-based interventions and policies that may support school readiness outcomes.