Studying the Effects of Youth-Led Participatory Research on Students and Schools: Preliminary Results and Mixed Methods Approaches
Youth-led participatory research is a form of "action research" (Lewin, 1947) that is increasingly being implemented in the youth development, education, public health and community psychology fields. In this approach, students are trained to identify major concerns in their schools and communities, conduct research to understand the nature of the problems, and take leadership in influencing policies and decisions to enhance the conditions in which they and their peers live. While promising, it has been subjected to relatively little systematic study and evaluation regarding its potential impact on young people's development and on their schools as settings that support positive youth development. In this talk, I will present preliminary process and outcome findings from a longitudinal experimental evaluation of a youth-led participatory research program conducted in several SF public high schools for the past 4 years. This project entails the integration of extensive observational and interview data on the quality of implementation of the school-based intervention with self-report and district data regarding youth outcomes. My presentation will highlight the strategies used and challenges encountered in this multi-method study, and invite feedback from participants regarding the analytic decisions involved in the quantitative and qualitative components of this research.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
Feburary 11, 2010: Anne Fernald
Early experience with language really matters: Links between maternal talk, processing efficiency, and vocabulary growth among diverse children.
Research on the early development of cognition and language has focused primarily on infants from middle-class families, excluding less advantaged children. But we know that SES differences are strongly associated with the quantity and quality of early cognitive stimulation available to infants. Longitudinal research on the development of fluency in language reveals relations between processing speed in infancy and longterm outcomes for both high-SES English-learning children and low-SES Spanish-learning children. But by 18 months, we find that low-SES children are already substantially slower in processing speed as well as vocabulary growth. It turns out that differences in early experience with language contribute to variability observed in children's efficiency in real-time processing. Within low-SES families, those children whose mothers talked with them more learned vocabulary more quickly; they also made more rapid gains in processing speed. By examining variability both within and between groups of children who differ in early experience with language, we gain insight into common developmental trajectories of lexical growth in relation to greater processing efficiency, and discover environmental factors that enable some children to progress more rapidly than others.
Research on the early development of cognition and language has focused primarily on infants from middle-class families, excluding less advantaged children. But we know that SES differences are strongly associated with the quantity and quality of early cognitive stimulation available to infants. Longitudinal research on the development of fluency in language reveals relations between processing speed in infancy and longterm outcomes for both high-SES English-learning children and low-SES Spanish-learning children. But by 18 months, we find that low-SES children are already substantially slower in processing speed as well as vocabulary growth. It turns out that differences in early experience with language contribute to variability observed in children's efficiency in real-time processing. Within low-SES families, those children whose mothers talked with them more learned vocabulary more quickly; they also made more rapid gains in processing speed. By examining variability both within and between groups of children who differ in early experience with language, we gain insight into common developmental trajectories of lexical growth in relation to greater processing efficiency, and discover environmental factors that enable some children to progress more rapidly than others.
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