CHILD: The Streetlight Project

Dr. Sabol and Dr. Dana McCoy (Associate Professor, Harvard University) are leading The Streetlight Project, which seeks to expand the measurement of child outcomes in early childhood education evaluations.

Developmental theory has long emphasized a range of foundational skills that young children need for healthy development across the life course. But evaluations of early childhood programs and policies have largely focused on outcome measures that do not reflect these competencies.

This project seeks to combat the so-called “streetlight effect” in early childhood research and shine a light on the often-missed developmental skills that underlie success in the early childhood period (ages 3-5 and beyond) for the broadest range of children possible, ultimately expanding the set of developmental skills and behaviors taught to and measured in young children.

To address this goal, our project has three phases:

  • A systematic review of developmental research to (McCoy & Sabol, under review) to define the foundations of learning and development (FOLD) skills, explore the extent to which FOLD skills are currently used as intervention targets, and understand their potential utility as part of evaluation efforts.
    • Using this review, we created a comprehensive construct map of the skills and competencies of the early childhood period that are foundational to children’s well-being over time.
  • An exploration of the relevance of the FOLD skills to diverse early childhood experts (parents, clinicians, educators, policymakers, etc.) through in-depth interviews (Ahun et al., under review)
  • The development and validation of a set of measurement tools of our FOLD skills that is child-centered, interactive, and play-based, leveraging classical assessment approaches with emerging insights from the learning, developmental, educational, and computer sciences.

The Streetlight Project is supported by a grant from Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. In addition, the project was supported through the Harvard Radcliffe Institute Accelerator Workshop.

Example FOLD assessment: The Childhood Assessment Tool- Electronic (CHAT-E)

One key FOLD skill is children’s internal representations of self, which can be defined as children’s meaning making of themselves as related to their own characteristics, competencies, and/or broad social categories such as race and social status. Historically, researchers theorized that true “identity development” did not occur until middle childhood or adolescence. Recently, however, researchers have pushed against this assumption and focused on young children’s internal representations of self across a number of sub-domains – including self-awareness, meaning making, and perceived competence – that are theorized to be the stepping stones to later identity formation. Drawing from well-established theories on academic competence, motivation and growth mindset (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Eccles et al., 1993), and identity based motivation (Oyserman & Destin, 2010), ECE contexts are linked to how children make meaning of the self, which contributes to their learning and healthy development.

Dr. Sabol and Dr. Andrea Busby (Assistant Professor, Brigham Young University) developed The Childhood Assessment Tool- Electronic (CHAT-E) to assess children’s internal representations of self. The CHAT-E draws on the assessment paradigm from the Berkeley Puppet Interview (BPI; Measelle et al., 1998). In the BPI, a data collector presents two identical puppets who each tell the child opposing statements (one positive, one negative) in a dialogue format, intending to make it more comfortable for the child to respond to which puppet’s statement is more “like them” (Epstein et al., 2008).  The CHAT-E modernizes the BPI by replacing the live puppets with virtual avatars shown to children on a tablet. In doing so, the CHAT-E maintains the core advantages of the BPI (e.g., its playful, child-friendly approach) while improving standardization and greatly reducing administrative burden (e.g., eliminating the need for live or video coding of children’s responses). The original CHAT-E included items probing children’s college-going identity (e.g., I will go to college/I will not go to college). This original CHAT-E was programmed by Synergetx and piloted with kindergarten students in Oakland Public Schools (Sabol, Busby, & Hernandez, 2021). It has been used around the world.

The CHAT-E is currently open access and is publicly available by UNICEF.  The most recent adaptation, led by Dr. Nikhit D’Sa  (Assistant Professor and Senior Associate Director, University of Notre Dame), allows researchers to upload their own items in any language and select characters based on the interests and context. More information on the CHAT-E can be found here.