|
The department supports research on issues critical to the field of education, particularly those involving knowledge of the learner, the teaching/learning process, instructional settings, and the role of cultural and religious diversity within the educational enterprise. Additionally, the department provides a variety of services to local, national and church organizations. In response to its environment, the department has a special goal of offering services to the primarily minority public and Catholic schools in the surrounding community. The department expects its faculty to serve as a professional resource for this community.
Current Department Projects
EARLY HEAD START (BIRTH to THREE) RESEARCH PROJECTS
Early Head Start programs come at a time of increasing awareness of the "quiet crisis" facing families with infants and toddlers in the United States. Health and Human Services Secretary, Donna Shalala's Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers, set forth a vision and blueprint for Early Head Start programs to address the fragmentation of community services and expand programs to serve more families with infants and toddlers. This comprehensive, two generation program includes intensified services that begin before the child is born and concentrates on supporting the child's development during the critical first three years of the child's life through direct services to the infants and toddlers and by supporting the development of the family.
Early Head Start programs are designed to produce outcomes in four domains:
1. child development
2. family development
3. staff development, and
4. community development.
Seventeen of the funded sites are participating in a national evaluation. Fifteen of these sites are also carrying out local research studies. Catholic University was awarded a cooperative agreement to carry out a local research project as well as a subcontract to collect national evaluation data at our program partner's site.
THE NATIONAL RESEARCH PROJECT
In 1996 the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation project launched a five year study of the new Early Head Start program and simultaneously began a study of infants and toddlers in low income families. The research follows families through the three year time span during which they would either be eligible for Early Head Start services or assigned to a comparison group that participated in the research study, but did not receive services. The Early Head Start study includes over 3,000 families living in 17 diverse communities that reflect the socioeconomic and political context of low income families in the United States from 1996 through 2001. The findings from this national evaluation and longitudinal study have the potential to influence policies affecting the lives of millions of American families with young children.
THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA RESEARCH PROJECT: INCLUSION OF INFANTS AND TODDLERS WITH DISABILITIES IN EARLY HEAD START PROGRAMS
Early Head Start programs must ensure that at least 10% of their placements are for infants and toddlers with disabilities. This has presented an unprecedented opportunity to study the impact of Early Head Start on infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families in an inclusion program.
Catholic University is the local research partner of United Cerebral Palsy of Washington and Northern Virginia, Inc. (UCP). UCP operates an Early Head Start program for low income families in the "Route 1" corridor in Northern Virginia. The UCP Early Head Start program is new and serves a population that includes the families of infants and toddlers with disabilities as well as the families of non-disabled infants and toddlers.
The Catholic University Early Head Start Research Project focuses principally on the ways in which, and the extent to which, participation in Early Head Start assists parents of infants and toddlers with disabilities to obtain other support services and mobilize informal resources to meet their needs and the related impact on their children's development.
One hundred fifty families were randomly assigned to treatment and comparison groups at the UCP site. These racially and ethnically diverse families including, low income military families from nearby Fort Belvoir, are among the 39% of southern Fairfax County families who live in poverty in the midst of affluence. All families participate in interviews and assessments for both the national and local research project.
THE LONGITUDINAL CROSS-SITE TRACKING AND PRE-KINDERGARTEN ASSESSMENT PROJECT
Catholic University is also participating in a longitudinal, cross-site project which will continue to tell the stories of the families and children through the years subsequent to their participation in the Early Head Start program, or for the comparison group families, solely in the research and up to the enrollment of the focus children in kindergarten. In addition to the developmental assessment of the children there will be observations of the pre-school and child care environments in which the children are involved and the tracking of the families' use of social services and other supports.
| 
