Children’s participation in various early childhood care and education arrangements

A new NCES report, Early Childhood Program Participation: 2023, examines children’s participation in various early childhood care and education arrangements. Approximately 55 percent of children age 5 and under and not enrolled in kindergarten were in at least one weekly nonparental care arrangement, as reported by their parents. Among children with at least one weekly nonparental care arrangement, 66 percent were reported to attend day care centers, Head Start Programs, preschools, or prekindergartens, and other early childhood programs, 34 percent were cared for by a relative (relative care), and 18 percent were cared for in a private home by someone not related to them (nonrelative care).   Additionally, the average out-of-pocket child care expenses reported for children in relative care in 2023 was about $10.94, $16.16 for nonrelative care, and $21.32 for center-based care. In 2019, the average out-of-pocket child care expenses (adjusted to 2023 dollars) were $7.21 for relative care in 2019, $9.23 for nonrelative care, and $9.80 for center-based care. This report uses data from the Early Childhood Program Participation Survey of the 2023 National Household Education Surveys Program (ECPP-NHES: 2023), the first administration of the NHES since the COVID-19 pandemic. Download, view and print the report summary as a pdf file.  (412KB)

 

Students who feel more university connection may be more likely to binge drink

 

 Students who feel a sense of belonging at their university are more likely to binge drink than those who do not feel the same connection, according to a new study by researchers at Penn State, the University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Oregon.

In the study, published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, scientists — including researchers in the Penn State College of Health and Human Development — found that college students with “good” mental health who felt connected to their university were more likely to binge drink than those who did not feel as connected to their university.

Stephane Lanza, professor of biobehavioral health and Edna P. Bennett Faculty Fellow in Prevention Research, studied the topic with Danny Rahal and Kristin Perry when both were postdoctoral trainees in the Penn State Prevention and Methodology Training Program. The researchers examined the ways that both positive and negative aspects of mental health can contribute to the risk of binge drinking, cannabis use and nicotine use.

“In 2021, students at many universities were returning to campus after the COVID-19 shutdown — and some students were attending in-person college classes for the first time,” said Rahal, lead author of this research and assistant professor of psychology at University of California Santa Cruz. “Data from that time indicated that many students felt disconnected from their school. Universities wanted to foster a sense of connectedness among their students for many good reasons, but we wanted to know if there was something positive — specifically a sense of belonging — that is related to substance use. Our study showed that feeling connected to one’s university is associated with higher rates of substance use.”

The researchers examined data from 4,018 university students collected during the 2022-23 school year. Participants answered questions about substance use, their sense of belonging at their school and their mental health — specifically about anxiety, depressive symptoms, perceived stress, flourishing in life and confidence in their academic success.

A statistical modeling technique called latent profile analysis allowed the researchers to simultaneously account for all these measures by combining them to identify five profiles of student mental health. In this study, a student was considered to have good mental health if they had lower levels of stress, depressive symptoms and anxiety, as well as higher flourishing and academic confidence than their peers.

The researchers found that students with average or good mental health were more likely to have engaged in binge drinking in the past month if they felt connected to their university than if they did not feel that connection.

The researchers said this does not mean that connectedness is bad for students to experience; rather, the results are nuanced.

“We want to cultivate connectedness among students,” said Perry, assistant professor of family and human services at University of Oregon. “Connectedness gets them involved. It can be a really powerful protective factor against negative mental health outcomes and can help keep students in school. But connectedness at school can go hand in hand with binge drinking if there is a culture of drinking at the school.”

Though the researchers said they expected these results about drinking, they were surprised to learn that students with poor mental health who felt connected to their university were more likely to use non-vaped tobacco products than students with poor mental health who did not feel connected to their university. The results around cannabis were less conclusive, but the researchers said the trend was clear.

“Generally, students who felt connected to their university were more likely to use substances than disconnected students with the same level of mental health,” Rahal said.

While a sense of belonging was related to substance use, it could also be part of the solution, according to the researchers.

“Cultivating belonging for all students is an important way that universities can embrace diversity and help all students thrive,” Lanza said.

Though drinking is common on university campuses, many students believe that it is far more common than it is, the researchers explained. In this dataset, slightly fewer than one-third of students reported binge drinking in the last month. Despite the fact that two-thirds of students had not engaged in binge drinking, the researchers also found that students believed a typical student consumed three to five drinks multiple times each week. The researchers said this disconnect between perception and reality points to an opportunity to change the culture — by creating ample opportunities for all students to socially engage and participate in alcohol-free environments — so that alcohol feels less central to student life.

Minoritized college students, in particular, often face messages that make them feel unwelcome based on their race, gender, socioeconomic status or other factors, according to the researchers.

“We cannot expect students to stay enrolled unless they are engaged with the campus community,” Lanza continued. “If universities lose students from a specific group, the campus becomes less diverse, and the entire university community becomes less rich. Additionally, when members of those groups leave school, they miss educational opportunities and the earning potential that comes with a college degree. By providing all students with diverse opportunities to build a real sense of belonging at their universities, we can improve campus life while putting people on the path to a healthier life.”

The National Institute on Drug Abuse and Penn State funded this research.

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Journal

Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs

DOI

10.15288/jsad.23-00382 

Rise in English learner students in “new destination” states helps academic outcomes for existing students

English learner (EL) students represent the fastest growing student group in the United States over the past two decades, with numbers of EL students in public schools soaring in “new destination” states across the South and Midwest. Some commentators have expressed concerns about the possible adverse effect of immigrant students on current students if they require additional resources that are diverted from their peers.

However, a new study finds significant positive spillover effects of new EL students in these states on existing students’ test scores, especially in reading. The study was published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. It was conducted by Sy Doan, Samuel Enrique Morales, Umut Ozek, and Heather Schwartz, all from RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy and research institute.

Looking at the impact of new EL students on the academic achievement of their peers in their first year in a new destination state, the authors found that the benefits are mainly concentrated among former or current ELs. They found no adverse effects on non-ELs.

“Our findings contradict the narrative that the arrival of EL students lowers student performance overall,” said study co-author Umut Ozek, a senior economist at RAND. “While new ELs may require additional educational resources initially, they do not harm the academic achievement of existing students.”

“In fact, our research suggests that incoming ELs could even improve the academic achievement of the existing current and former ELs in the first year, which might help close the gaps between ELs and non-ELs,” Ozek said.

The study is the first to examine the spillover effects of the large influx of EL students in new destination states over the past two decades. States that were below the national average in 2000 in the percentage of enrolled EL students account for 90 percent of the increase in EL students across the U.S. since then.

The authors analyzed student-level administrative data from Delaware covering all students in grades 4 through 8 enrolled in the state’s public schools between the 2015–16 and 2018–19 school years. The number of EL students in Delaware has increased seven-fold over the past 20 years.

Ozek noted that traditional destination states, such as California and New York, benefit from pre-existing infrastructure to accommodate newly arriving students that is unavailable or newly built in new destination states. EL policies and practices also vary greatly across states and school districts, and the composition of immigrants and refugees examined in prior research is likely different from that of the newly arriving EL students in new destination states.

“To be certain, a large influx of any population into a school system places strain on districts, as they have to grow to accommodate incoming students,” Ozek said. “And the specific needs of incoming students can trigger a host of necessary social and academic supports. But our study should assuage concerns by state and federal policy makers that large inflows of recent immigrants may be overwhelming school districts and harming classroom achievement.”

Study citation: Doan, S., Morales, S. E., Ozek, U., & Schwartz, H. (2024). Educational spillover effects of new English learners in a new destination state. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Prepublished October 9, 2024. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737241282412

Parenting programs help kids, but provide insufficient support for parents

Parenting programs that address both mental health and parenting skills can improve children’s development, but often fall short when it comes to offering effective mental-health support for parents, new research suggests.

“It’s a surprising contradiction,” said the study’s lead author, Marilyn Ahun, Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at McGill University. “Our findings show the potential of multi-component programs, while revealing gaps that need to be addressed.”

The research team reviewed and analysed 25 studies from around the world, in collaboration with colleagues from Harvard, Kuwait and Emory universities.

The researchers, who published their study in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, found that children under three whose parents joined integrated programs developed better emotional and cognitive skills, compared to those who received no supports. However, mothers saw little to no relief from their depression symptoms. The authors noted that there are not enough studies assessing depression in fathers to know how programs impact their symptoms.

The insights could help inform the design of programs that better support parents and their young children during a period when children’s brains are most sensitive to experiences, said the researchers. They noted that even if children still benefitted when their parents received support on child-rearing, parental mental health has a strong influence on parenting practices and the outcomes for children.

Gap in mental health support for parents

Programs for parents of young children often address either child-rearing skills or mental health support. In integrated programs that cover both, the primary emphasis is on child-rearing skills, said the authors.

“Many of these programs only dedicate one or two sessions to mental health, which isn’t enough to help parents who are struggling,” said Ahun, who is also a Junior Scientist at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre.

“This is particularly concerning, as about one-in-four mothers and one-in-10 fathers experience depression during the perinatal period, making it difficult for them to provide the nurturing support their children need,” she added.

With more than 250 million children worldwide falling short of their developmental potential, the researchers say their findings offer insights into how best to improve family support during a critical phase of early-childhood development. 

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Journal

The Lancet

DOI

10.1016/S2352-4642(24)00134-2 

English-language textbooks: persistent pattern of stereotypical gender roles

 

Review of over 1200 English-language textbooks from 34 countries reveals persistent pattern of stereotypical gender roles and under-representation of female characters across countries

 

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Gender biases around male and female roles and under-representation of female characters appeared in textbooks from around the world.

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Credit: Jessica Ruscello, Unsplash, CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

Gender biases around male and female roles and under-representation of female characters appeared in textbooks from around the world, with male-coded words appearing twice as often as female-coded words on average, according to a study published October 9, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lee Crawfurd from the Center for Global Development, United Kingdom, and colleagues.

School textbooks play an important role in shaping norms and attitudes in students—one reason why controversy over textbook content is high in many countries today. In this study, Crawfurd and colleagues investigated how gender norms are depicted in textbooks around the world.

The authors used a particularly large corpus of textbooks to conduct their analysis: 1,255 publicly available online English-language school textbooks spanning subjects and grade levels from grades 4-13 from 34 countries downloaded over 2020-2022. They compared textbook content with predefined lists of gendered nouns and pronouns (e.g. “Auntie/she/her/woman”) and investigated how often these gendered words were associated with key words used in previous studies relating to achievement, appearance, family, home, and work (e.g. “powerful/gorgeous/household/executive”) within the textbook. Finally, the authors compared their text analysis results with other measures of gender equality at the country level.

They found that on average across the full sample of textbooks, there were more than twice as many occurrences of male words (178,142) as female words (82,113), though there was considerable variation between countries. After adjusting for book length, grade, and subject, the countries with the lowest representation of women and girls were Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and South Sudan, where fewer than 1 in 3 gendered words were female.

Across all countries, the adjectives most likely to describe only female and not male characters included “married”, “beautiful”, “aged”, and “quiet”. Verbs for only female characters included “bake”, “cook,” and “sang”. The adjectives most likely to describe male and not female characters included “powerful”, “rich”, “wise”, “certain”, and “unable”. Verbs for only male characters included “rule”, “guide”, “sign”, and “order”. Almost all of the individual achievement- and work-themed words showed a stronger association with male words than female words, and the individual appearance- and home-themed words showed a stronger association with female words than male words. The authors note that countries with textbooks containing a greater number of female characters also had stronger GDPs and more legal rights for women compared to countries with less female representation, though this is only correlation and cannot speak to causation.

The authors also note there are several limitations to this work—their tool was not able to assess non-text items (such as images) and was not always correct at parsing names (though the authors used manual validation where possible), and the analysis reflects a binary view of gender illustrated in the textbooks. Furthermore, this analysis is restricted to English language literature and therefore may not be generalizable to languages beyond English. However, the results suggest that combating gender biases in textbooks could potentially lead to real-world effects.

The authors add: “Our findings reveal a troubling reality: school books are perpetuating outdated gender stereotypes. Schools should broaden horizons not limit children's potential. It's crucial for policymakers and educators to address these disparities.”

The freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0310366

Citation: Crawfurd L, Saintis-Miller C, Todd R (2024) Sexist textbooks: Automated analysis of gender bias in 1,255 books from 34 countries. PLoS ONE 19(10): e0310366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310366

Grading system can harm students' motivation, mental health and success

America’s obsession with grades is failing students and jeopardizing the future of education, a University of Mississippi professor argues in his new book.  

Josh Eyler, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, recently released “Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It” (Johns Hopkins University Press), in which he argues that the traditional system of grading is harmful to students.  

“This book looks at the issues with grades in learning, the kinds of Issues grades cause with parents and children, and how grades magnify inequities and how they are a contributing factor to the mental health crisis,” said Eyler, a clinical assistant professor of teacher education at Ole Miss.  

"The second part (of the book) looks at what parents, teachers, schools and universities can do to help mitigate the damage.”  

More than 70% of American high school students report anxiety and depression as being a "major” concern for their peer group, and suicide is the third-leading cause of death in people aged 14-18. The student mental health crisis may have been magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic, but its roots go much deeper. 

“We've also known for a long time that mental health among students is bad and getting worse,” said Emily Pitts Donahoe, the center's associate director of instructional support. “We think a lot about ways to help students deal with academic stress, but we don't always think about how to get to the root of those problems and actually mitigate some of the practices that are causing that stress.  

“One of the things that I think is so great about Josh's book is that it helps us see that.” 

Traditional grading also reinforces inequity, Eyler said.  

Students whose schools have received more funding often have more tutoring, more teachers and more resources for students. Students from those schools often receive higher grades, are more prepared for college and are often selected for more opportunities.  

“There have been inequities that have been baked into the fabric of American education from its founding,” Eyler said. “States and local governments have historically diverted more funding to wealthy white communities and less funding to communities that historically marginalized groups have lived in. 

“What does that mean in the long term for the schools with fewer resources? Fewer textbooks, higher teacher turnover and fewer educational opportunities for students.”  

This inequity makes grades more a reflection of the opportunities a student has been given, not how intelligent or capable a student is, he said.  

“The grades are reflections of their past inequitable educational experience, rather than their potential for what they could do in the field, right?” he said. “The issue is those low grades shut doors when those students could potentially have succeeded in any number of ways.” 

Besides being a source of anxiety and inequity among students, the grading system is also set up to reduce students’ intrinsic motivation and curiosity for learning, he said. 

“Intrinsic motivation is what is necessary for deep learning to happen,” he said. “People need to want to learn for their own sake. They need to be interested, curious about all those things in order to learn in a meaningful way.  

“Grades, however, are classic extrinsic motivators – straight out of the school of behaviorism. They are prizes and rewards for certain behaviors that communities – in this case, schools and colleges – are prioritizing.” 

Instead of teaching students to be curious, the traditional grading system forces students to memorize information long enough to pass a test or quiz. Instead of encouraging students to take risks and innovate, grading teaches them to be compliant, he said. 

But alternatives exist. Many colleges, high schools and even middle schools – including professors such as Donahoe and Eyler –practice alternative methods of grading.  

The first step towards a newer, better education system is understanding the problem, Donahoe said.  

“As an individual, I can make a lot of changes to my grading and I have a lot of freedom, especially in the higher ed space, to experiment,” she said. "But systemic change, it requires the cooperation of parents, administrators, K-12 teachers, higher ed teachers, even employers and graduate schools. It requires a lot of people.  

 “That's why Josh's book is important, because it puts all of those different pieces in conversation with each other.” 

Parents' Earnings and the Returns to Universal Pre-Kindergarten

 This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) raises parents' earnings and how much these earnings effects matter for evaluating the economic returns to UPK programs. Using a randomized lottery design, we estimate the effects of enrolling in a full-day UPK program in New Haven, Connecticut on parents' labor market outcomes as well as educational expenditures and children's academic performance. 

During children's pre-kindergarten years, UPK enrollment increases weekly childcare coverage by 11 hours. Enrollment has limited impacts on children's academic outcomes between kindergarten and 8th grade, likely due to a combination of rapid effect fadeout and substitution away from other programs of similar quality but with shorter days. 

In contrast, parents work more hours, and their earnings increase by 21.7%. Parents' earnings gains persist for at least six years after the end of pre-kindergarten. Excluding impacts on children, each dollar of net government expenditure yields $5.51 in after-tax benefits for families, almost entirely from parents' earnings gains. This return is large compared to other labor market policies. Conversely, excluding earnings gains for parents, each dollar of net government expenditure yields only $0.46 to $1.32 in benefits, lower than many other education and children's health interventions.