The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Postdoctoral Research Training Program in the Early Childhood Education Sciences provided five fellows experience in the design and evaluation of interventions for young children, as well as methods including clinical trial studies and quasi-experimental evaluations. Through this program, fellows worked with faculty on one or more early childhood studies investigating topics including developing and evaluating programs designed to improve outcomes for young children in language and literacy, math, and social skills, as well as programs to better educate parents; developing and evaluating professional development programs to improve home-based and center-based programs; and exploring the natural history of child care in low and middle income children in rural and suburban settings. Across these projects, fellows developed research protocols, trained data collectors, coded and analyzed data, presented and published papers, and wrote additional grant proposals.

Related IES Projects: This university received a previous award for a postdoctoral research training program.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Darrow, Catherine
Soliday Hong, Sandra (ORCID)
Mincic, Melissa
Mokrova, Irina (ORCID)
Renn, Jennifer (ORCID)

Dr. Darrow was a senior associate at Abt Associates, Dr. Hong was a research scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, Dr. Mincic was a senior policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures, Dr. Mokrova was the director of research development in the Department of Medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine, and Dr. Renn was an associate research scientist in the College of Education at Purdue University.

Products and Publications

Book chapter

Burchinal, M., Magnuson, K., Powell, D., and Soliday Hong, S.L. (2015). Early Child Care and Education. In R.M. Lerner, M.H. Bornstein, and T. Leventhal (Eds.), Handbook of Child Psychology, Volume 4 (7th ed., pp. 223–267). New York: Wiley.

Dickinson, D.K., and Darrow, C. (2013). Methodological and Practical Challenges of Curriculum-Based Language Interventions. In T. Shanahan, and C. Lonigan (Eds.), Early Childhood Literacy: The National Early Literacy Panel and Beyond (pp. 195–217). Baltimore: Brookes.

McFarland, D., Diehl, D., and Rawlings, C.M. (2010). Methodological Transactionalism and the Sociology of Education. In M.T. Hallinan (Ed.), Frontiers of the Sociology of Education (pp. 87–110). New York: Springer Publishing.

Soliday Hong, S.L., and Udommana, P. (2018). Early Childhood Teacher-Child Relationships in the United States: Theory, Practices, and Regulation. In M. Fleer, B. Van Oers, A. Goncu, and C. Howes (Eds.), International Handbook on Early Childhood Education. New York: Garland Science.

Vernon-Feagans, L., Burchinal, M., and Mokrova, I.L. (2014). Diverging Destinies in Rural America. In P. Amato, A. Booth, S. McHale, and J. Van Hook (Eds.), Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality: Diverging Destinies (pp. 35–49). New York: Springer.

Journal article, monograph, or newsletter

Bratsch-Hines, M., Mokrova, I.L., Vernon-Feagans., L., and The Family Life Project Key Investigators (2017). Rural Families' Use of Multiple Child Care Arrangements From 6 to 58 Months and Children's Kindergarten Behavioral and Academic Outcomes. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 41, 161–173.

Mokrova, I. L., O'Brien, M., Calkins, S. D., Leerkes, E. M., & Marcovitch, S. (2012). Links Between Family Social Status snd Preschoolers' Persistence: The Role of Maternal Values and Quality of Parenting. Infant and child development, 21(6), 617–633.

Nelson, M.C., Cordray, D.S., Hulleman, C.S., Darrow, C.L., and Sommer, E.C. (2012). A Procedure for Assessing Intervention Fidelity in Experiments Testing Educational and Behavioral Interventions. Journal of Behavioral Health Services and Research, 39(4): 374–396.

Sabol, T.J., Soliday Hong, S.L., Pianta, R., and Burchinal, M. (2013). Can Rating Pre-K Programs Predict Children's Learning?. Science, 341: 845–846.

Soliday Hong, S.L., Howes, C., Marcella, J., Zucker, E., and Huang, Y. (2015). Quality Rating and Improvement Systems: Validation of a Local Implementation and Children's School-Readiness. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 30: 227–240. doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2014.05.001

Proceeding

Wolfram, W., Kohn, M., Renn, J., and Van Hofwegen, J. (2010). Trajectories of Development in AAE: The First 17 Years. In Proceedings of the Conference on African American Language in Popular Culture: Intersections Among Language, Education, Music, Media, and Sports. San Antonio.