Our Research

Cathy Main Principal Investigator
Education Psychology

Dr. Kate Zinsser Co-PI and Evaluation Director
Community & Applied Developmental Psychology in the Department of Psychology.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education Teacher Quality Partnerships Grant

In addition to running high-quality programming to support the Illinois early childhood workforce, UIC is a leader in developing robust evaluation frameworks that get under the hood of whether, how, and for whom such professional development works. Drs. Kate Zinsser and Timothy Curby (George Mason University) are evaluating the iterative development of and impact of the UIC Alternative Licensure Program. This 5-year evaluation uses rich multi-method data to examine how the ALP program is benefiting teachers, children, and communities.

Example Publications & Reports

Patching the Pathway and Widening the Pipeline: Models for Developing a Diverse Early Childhood Workforce in Chicago

Cathy Main Principal Investigator
Education Psychology

Karen Yarbrough Senior Researcher
Education Psychology

Funded by the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS)

In collaboration with IDHS, the Illinois Network of Child Care Resource and Referral Agency (INCCRRA), and participating community-based organizations, UIC is piloting an Apprenticeship Program for early childhood educators. This two-year pilot program will result in recommendations to the state for expansion and sustainability.

Dr. Sarai Coba- Rodriguez
Human Development and Learning in the Department of Educational Psychology 

Dr. Kate Zinsser
Community & Applied Developmental Psychology in the Department of Psychology.

Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Each day, approximately 250 children are expelled from U.S. preschools and child care programs. Expelled children, who are disproportionately children of color, are denied the opportunity to acquire the pre-academic and social-emotional skills they’ll need for successful school entry. In 2018, Illinois passed expansive and progressive legislation (IL PA 100-0105) barring the use of expulsion in nearly all types of early childhood education settings, but evaluations of the law’s implementation show variability in its impact. To better understand whether and how the legislation is influencing children’s experiences in Illinois, this mixed-method study seeks to elevate the voices of parents whose children have been excluded from child care following the law’s implementation. Read more about the crisis of expulsion and suspension practices in early childhood settings in Dr. Zinsser’s book No Longer Welcome: The Epidemic of Expulsion from Early Childhood Education.

Example Reports & Publications

Evaluating the implementation of the Illinois expulsion law 2017-2020: Findings & recommendations three years later

Evaluation Report of the Implementation of Illinois Public Act 100-0105: Early Childhood Programs Knowledge and Responses to the 2018 Expulsion Legislation

Dr. Kate Zinsser
Community & Applied Developmental Psychology in the Department of Psychology

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education Institute for Education Sciences

In collaboration with the Development in Schools Context Lab (https://disc.gmu.edu/)  at George Mason University, Dr. Kate Zinsser’s UIC research team has developed a new way of observing and understanding teachers’ contributions to children’s emotional competence. The EMOtion TEaching Rating Scale (EMOTERS) is an open access observational measure designed for use by researchers and professional development coaches. It captures teachers’ modeling of emotional expressions, validating responses to children’s emotions, and didactic instruction about the nature of emotions. Children in classrooms with teachers who score highly on the EMOTERS demonstrate greater social-emotional competence and greater persistence, motivation, and positive attitudes towards learning over time. Visit www.emoters.org to access the tool and read more about the research behind it.

Example Reports & Publications

A unidimensional model of emotion-focused teaching in early childhood

Promoting preschoolers’ social and emotional competencies through emotion-focused teaching

Dr. Kathy Sheridan
Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology

Funded by the CME Group Foundation and the Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood

Kathy Sheridan’s research team has investigated effective professional development in promoting powerful early stem teaching. Two open access online professional development (PD) sites were developed to engage early childhood (EC) teachers in PD on math and science: Early Math Counts, funded by the CME Group Foundation and Early Science Matters, funded by The Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood and a gift from philanthropist Marjorie Pelino. Thus far, thousands of EC professionals across the country have completed one or more PD courses and many more thousands have accessed the online resources. The following papers and chapters have been published on the effectiveness of the site and the use of the online resources:

Example Reports & Publications

Evaluation of an Online Early Mathematics Professional Development Program for Early Childhood Teachers

Early Math Professional Development: Meeting the Challenge Through Online Learning

Contemporary Challenges in Teaching Young Children: Meeting the Needs of All Students

Other recent research includes:

Child care arrangements and gender: A national portrait of preschool-aged children

Other early childhood resource websites include:

The Ready Child provides a shared definition of kindergarten readiness, as well as a website full of resources to give users the knowledge and skills needed to help children succeed in kindergarten. The site provides families and teachers the resources to work together to identify each child’s unique strengths, and to build on those strengths.

Dr. Victoria Trinder
Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction

Dr. Michael K. Thomas
Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology

Funded by Marjorie Pelino

The E-Portfolio Project is a response to the need to assess pre-service teachers in meaningful ways that support their teacher identity development. Dr.Trinder and Dr. Thomas (Educational Psychology at UIC) direct the project, which is intended to support pre-service teachers in early childhood education programs.

The project leans on expertise in ePortfolios as pedagogical instruments brought by Co-PI Dr. Thomas and his scholarship on developing instruments for critical teacher reflection (Thomas & Liu, 2012, 2011, 2009). Goals for the project build on a central premise of that scholarship: “There is great potential for ePortfolios to support such skill development among teachers and prospective teachers in a way that is technology-rich and intellectually engaging.” This research study is designed to explore connections between critical reflexivity of portfolio implementation and foundational principles of systemic racism. This study integrates expertise in critical race theory, decolonizing curriculum, urban teacher education, instructional technology, and ePortfolio innovations. As part of the design based research project we will conduct Human Computer Interface trials that include usability studies of both paper prototypes and web-based prototypes of the interface design of the ePortfolios. In this way, we will be able to move from simple design/naive design to a more robust understanding and interpretation of necessary design elements for maximizing learning of the program’s anti-racist theoretical framework.

Racial Justice Salience

This project builds on the current movement in the College of Education to expand our understanding and implementation of racial justice in education, and this collaboration establishes a new dimension of those efforts. This moment in history also calls us to innovate in racially-just ways around technology that make education accessible for all when pandemics alter the medium, content, and goals. This project, therefore, interweaves both current crises of justice and opportunity and uses our current struggles to call ourselves to find synergies in academia where they might not previously have existed. The PIs of this research project propose to develop a permanent advancement in technology pedagogy that centers complex knowledges for teaching – fundamentally those grounded in critical understandings of race and inequity in urban education. These complex knowledges and their location in the program curriculum are demonstrated in the critical framework developed by program leadership and used to ground all instruction for all Urban Education students.

Project Impact

This collaborative research project broadens access for pre-service teachers to effective resources for curating their work, while providing opportunities for reflection and reflexivity. It will accomplish this through the use of existing technologies adapted for the purpose of expanding the impact of the Reparative Framework for Decolonizing Teacher Preparation across teacher education programs in the College of Education. By preparing pre-service teachers in Chicago through the use of ePortfolios and accompanying reflexive practice, we may impact not only the preservice teachers but their colleagues, schools, and a generation of the children they interact with toward adopting a decolonizing orientation.

Dr. Victoria Trinder
Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction

Activities grounding the decolonizing framework in teacher education ethnic studies include ethnic studies curricula and an Urban Education Rotations model for initial fieldwork for undergraduate pre-service teachers. Inaugurated in 2015, these activities establish expansive opportunities to become child-centered educators, and the Rotations model ensures that students experience early childhood settings in their early fieldwork of their teacher education program, and offers students overviews of the complexities in public schooling challenging teachers, students, families, and communities as they pursue educational justice and opportunity.