Onsite, individualized support for early care and education providers has emerged as an effective strategy for supporting quality improvement. We explored how Technical Assistants (TAs) working with family child care (FCC) educators in a voluntary Quality Rating and Improvement System perceive FCC quality and the challenges they face in supporting…

FNS Research Corner provides a continuing series to summarize recently completed and current research conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in the area of Child Nutrition Programs (CNPs). Summaries of recently completed research projects and in-progress research are provided in this article.

Early care and education (ECE) environments influence children's lifelong health behaviors, growth, and development. Although the number of interventions to improve health in ECE environments is increasing, few have been designed for and tested in family child care homes (FCCHs). This study reports the process evaluation of two interventions to…

There are nearly 1.7 million single-mother students who make up a substantial portion of the undergraduate student population. Only 8% of single-mother students graduate with a degree or certificate within 6 years of enrollment. There are multiple factors identified in the literature that contribute to low success and persistence rates. Factors…

A recently launched professional development initiative in Arkansas, called Array, is designed to proactively identify early care and education (ECE) programs that could benefit from social-emotional-focused (SE-focused) professional development and support, and to offer assistance tailored to a program's particular needs. Because Array is…

The Singapore government has laid out a regulation for daily minimum time spent outdoors and the Outdoor Learning Guide (OLG) to support children's outdoor experiences in full-day childcare programmes. However, there is scarce research on young children's outdoor learning experiences from children's and teachers' perspectives. This study aims to…

Mounting evidence supports several naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBI) for toddlers and preschoolers within inclusive childcare centers and preschools. However, these interventions pose many barriers to community implementation. As part of a larger project to create an adapted NDBI for early educators in childcare centers,…

This qualitative case study examined one community college's attempt to better meet the needs of the single mother student population and create a better understanding of the barriers encountered by single mothers in their access to and completion of a short-term certificate program at a community college. Through a qualitative case study of…

In March 2022, Child Trends contracted with the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) to conduct an independent evaluation of Parent Aware, Minnesota's quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) for early care and education (ECE) programs. The evaluation was passed by the Minnesota Legislature in 2021 and includes several…

Waste created by modern lifestyles is of key concern to sustainable development globally. Early childhood centres engage in sustainable practices, and waste management is one of these practices. Past research has indicated that early childhood staff are challenged to implement sustainable practices. However, the National Quality Standard requires…

Australia has made tremendous progress in building a better early childhood education and care (ECEC) system to serve all Australian children and families. Substantial data already exists about ECEC services in Australia, including access, participation and quality. Large-scale data sets are held by governments (state and federal), research…

Research Findings: Family child care providers widely participate in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), yet their participation experiences have not been studied. To fill this gap, we used a mixed methods approach that combined survey data collected from a random sample of 224 CACFP-participating licensed family child care providers…

Based on a government document review, 25 stakeholder interviews, and 7 site visits, we examined how and why outdoor play became a focus of Scottish policy for early learning and care programs; we also documented opportunities and barriers to policy implementation. The outdoor play emphasis began as a bottom-up initiative, with a few early…

In spite of what is known about the impact of effective leadership on program quality, leadership development systems are fragmented and there is a lack of sustained, systematic oversight to guide the early childhood education (ECE) program leadership profession (New Venture Fund, 2018). Goffin (2013) notes that a clear consensus about the role,…

Teacher research has been promoted as a context-relevant approach to improving children's learning experiences in early childhood settings. In this article, we focus on social-emotional learning (SEL), a crucial domain of the early childhood curriculum, to illustrate the role of teacher research in changing early childhood teachers' everyday…