Impact
Funded Since: 2022 | Total Funding: $196,000
Funding Sources: U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services, Administration for Children & Families, George Kaiser Family Foundation
Outcomes
B-PAD’s research has produced peer-reviewed publications identifying preschool experiences, including classroom quality and family engagement, that predict children’s school readiness in Head Start populations (e.g., Jeon et al., 2026a; Jeon et al., 2026b). The lab is also developing new statistical methods and open-source tools for integrating national early childhood datasets, with the goal of enabling more robust, generalizable evidence on program effectiveness across cohorts and populations. Anticipated outcomes include practical guidance for Head Start programs on strengthening classroom quality and family-school partnerships, and broader adoption of data integration methods by ECE researchers working with existing national datasets.
Research Purpose
The Bridges in ECE: Partnerships & Data Lab (B-PAD) partners with Head Start and other early childhood programs to use evaluation and classroom data for improving program quality, family engagement, and family-school partnerships, while also advancing methods for integrating and analyzing large-scale national datasets on early childhood development.
Through these research-practice partnerships, the lab supports programs in understanding and strengthening children’s classroom experiences and the connections between families and programs. Through its data integration work, the lab develops approaches for combining and extending national data resources to generate more robust evidence on the factors that support young children’s school readiness. Together, these two lines of work reflect B-PAD’s core mission: bridging research and practice, and bridging data sources, to strengthen the evidence base for early childhood education.
More Information
Our visiting faculty and graduate students are active members of the lab community, engaging in research, mentorship, and professional development while contributing to ongoing projects.
Visting Faculty: Dr. Jungmin Pyo
Graduate Students: Uma Awasthi
Researcher
Dr. Shinyoung Jeon
Q162 1400 Rock Quarry Road Columbia, MO 65211
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