Publications

The Primary School: A Decade of Integrated Support for Children and Families

The Primary School began operating in East Palo Alto, California, in 2016, implementing a model that brought together early childhood, K-8 education, dedicated parent support, and coordinated access to health care. As it prepared to close its two sites after a decade, The Primary School partnered with the Stanford Center on Early Childhood's (SCEC) Continuous Improvement Rapid Cycle Learning and Evaluation (CIRCLE) team to capture what the school built, what it tried, and what it learned. This is not a conventional program evaluation, but rather a practice account of what the model set out to do, what the evidence shows, and what it required.

Hidden dynamics of economic hardship: Characterizing economic unpredictability and its role on self-regulation in early childhood

Economic hardship is known to shape children’s self-regulation, yet little is understood about how fluctuations in hardship unfold over time and whether different patterns of unpredictability carry unique developmental consequences. Using a socioeconomically diverse sample, we tracked families’ subjective economic hardship across 15–36 monthly assessments and applied an environmental statistics framework to quantify four indices of unpredictability.

Authors: Meriah L. DeJoseph, Nicole Walasek, Sihong Liu, Ethan S. Young, Abbie Raikes, Marcus Waldman, Willem E. Frankenhuis, Philip Fisher

Nebraska Early Childhood Collaborative & Stanford FIND Foundations Pilot

The collaboration between Stanford Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) and the Nebraska Early Childhood Collaborative (NECC) represents an exciting achievement in professional development for the early childhood workforce in Nebraska.

Key Learnings about Peopleʼs Community Clinicʼs Early Childhood Programs

A review of data at People’s Community Clinic in Austin, Texas shows promise in integrating early relational health into well child visits. People’s offers programs to support parents and caregivers, and providers are intentionally bringing ERH into conversations during screenings. Pediatric well child care, with its frequent preventive visits over the first 3 years of life, offers a tremendous opportunity to support parents/caregivers in setting their children on a trajectory for lifetime health and well-being.

Solving the Early Childhood Program Evaluation Paradox: Re-envisioning Evidence via the CIRCLE Framework

Despite decades of investment in early childhood programs and an evidence base demonstrating their positive impacts, the field continues to face significant challenges in the selection and implementation of evaluation methodology. 

The Continuous Improvement Rapid Cycle Learning and Evaluation (CIRCLE) framework embraces a continuum of evaluation approaches, prioritizes understanding of impact variation, and emphasizes greater precision in theories of change.

Evaluation of the National Expansion of PBS SoCal’s Family Math Initiative

PBS SoCal originally designed Family Math to provide families in the Greater Los Angeles Area and Southern California with bilingual, free, play-based tools to engage in math learning in everyday contexts. After expanding the initiative nationwide, PBS SoCal partnered with the Stanford Center on Early Childhood (SCEC) to evaluate the implementation and impact of Family Math programming in Alabama and Arizona. 

The SFUSD Shoestrings Program

The San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) Shoestrings program is an innovative, community-designed early childhood intervention to address racial disparities in discipline and special education. This analysis can inform efforts by district leaders wrestling with high rates of, and disparities in, exclusionary school discipline and special education, practitioners seeking to design and implement similar programs, and researchers conducting similar evaluation studies of interventions to disrupt the preschool-to-prison pipeline.

Early Childhood x Bridgeport, CT

A trailblazing new program at Gateway Community College in New Haven, Conn., combines prerequisite training for doula certification with instruction toward becoming a community health worker. It's challenging long-standing barriers to maternal health. When people with lived experience acquire professional certification, their perspectives can help shift systems. 

Early Childhood x Oakland, CA

Healing a community involves taking into account the social and historical forces that affect relationships between caregivers and children. Bringing community members together to draft statements of principles may seem like a purely intellectual exercise, but the process of finalizing these documents can say a lot about the community’s values and visions. 

The RAPID Survey: An Innovative Tool for Elevating Parent and Provider Voices in Early Childhood

Born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, RAPID subsequently evolved into a platform that gathers actionable data to advance science and inform data-driven, evidence-based early childhood policy, practice, and systems.

The New Ecology of Early Childhood: Revisiting Bronfenbrenner’s Theory in the Context of Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities

A constellation of conditions currently exists that is impacting the ecosystems of young children in unprecedented ways and leading to new challenges for children and the adults in their lives. We refer to these conditions as the New Ecology of Early Childhood. With a sense of urgency, we outline five recommendations for both public and private action.

Early Childhood x Gering, NE

In western Nebraska, author Mark Swartz and photographer Jeff van Patten discover community efforts engaging business and political leadership to participate in strategies for meeting the demand for high-quality child care.

Early Childhood x Detroit, MI

Swartz’s visit to Detroit’s Cody Rouge neighborhood, photographed by Zak Bratto, reveals a cohesive network of nonprofits partnering with families to come up with and realize plans to build agency and power.

From Program to Place: A Community Systems Approach to Supporting Young Children and Families

A core principle of child development is the strong belief that the developing child is shaped by their family, the surrounding community and the policies that affect them.

by J. Lombardi

Using Wearable Sensors in Practice

A user guide for collecting data on parental inputs and child development using wearable devices.

by N. Tomaselli, L. Dzekedzeke, G. Lichand, and J. Phuka