About the ECE LAB:
Led by Dr. Kristy Timmons, the Early Childhood Education Lab studies how the adults in young children's lives shape what those children learn.
We start there because of what the early years are. The first 2000 days of life are the most critical period for social, emotional, and physical development, and they establish trajectories that hold across a lifetime. We approach early childhood education and care from the perspective of social determinants of health and learning, which stresses the importance of "early experiences in lifelong health and well-being for individuals and for populations" (SECD, 2023). What happens in a preschool room or a kindergarten classroom is not preparation for education. It is the point at which differences in opportunity begin to compound.
Those differences are not the result of anything a child does. They are produced in part by what the adults around them expect, notice, measure, and know how to teach. A child whose educator holds lower expectations receives fewer opportunities to learn. A skill that is never assessed is easily overlooked. An educator who was never taught how to foster phonological awareness cannot be expected to foster it. Each of these is shaped by adults, and each can be changed through PD. That is why our research concentrates there, and why we measure children's outcomes alongside educators' knowledge and practice.
Our commitment is to equity, with particular attention to children who are historically and continuously marginalized. The early years are when educational inequity is most visible and least entrenched, and strengthening the policies and programs that operate at this stage is among the most effective ways to change what follows.
We work in partnership with the people this research concerns. Early childhood educators, teachers, children, and families are collaborators in our studies rather than subjects of them, and our projects are carried out alongside community partners, not-for-profit organizations, and public and private education contexts. This reflects a conviction that research developed apart from practice tends to stay apart from it.
Training the next generation of early childhood researchers is central to this work. Graduate students in the ECE LAB are involved at every stage of a project, from design and data collection through analysis, publication, and the work of putting findings into the hands of people who can use them.