SBIR Phase I: Facilitating Early Childhood Teacher and Family Engagement During COVID-19

这项小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛影响是确保全国最年轻的学习者及其家庭得到支持，因为他们的教育经历因COVID-19大流行相关的家庭学习配置而中断。由于远程学习模式带来的所有变化，家长和照顾者都不堪重负。该项目使教师能够与家庭更密切地合作，并在远程学习环境中为他们的孩子提供支持，从而减轻他们的负担。高质量幼儿教育的缺失使最年轻的学习者面临在入学准备方面落后的风险。通过这个项目，教师将能够获得每个孩子发展的持续信息，并能够在远程环境中提供更好的支持。此外，即使教室关闭，家庭也可以在家里获得高质量、低接触的资源来支持他们的孩子。拟议的项目正在开发一种幼儿教师和家庭参与工具，以支持幼儿在家进行远程充实。该方法将该组织的基于游戏的评估系统结合在一起，以支持教师在课堂上使用该组织的基于研究的儿童学习游戏。该项目将使其评估产品在家庭环境中可访问。家长和看护人将能够使用他们的智能手机或平板电脑收集评估数据。将进行研究，以确定在远程环境中收集的评估数据的易用性和准确性。然后，这些数据将用于推荐该组织基于研究的游戏，其中两款游戏将通过这项工作开发，以及家庭和孩子可以一起使用的其他教育资源。评估数据通常由教师在课堂上通过基于观察的方法收集；该项目将使家长和看护人能够通过触屏游戏收集与入学准备有关的评估数据。然后，幼儿教师将能够使用评估和学习产品的数据来指导他们的远程教学计划。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to ensure that the nation’s youngest learners and their families are supported as their educational experiences are disrupted due to the at-home learning configuration associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents and caregivers are overwhelmed with all of the changes due to remote learning models. This project can ease their burden by enabling teachers to more closely collaborate with families and support their child in a remote learning context. A lapse in high-quality early childhood education puts the youngest learners at risk of falling behind in school readiness. With this project, teachers will have access to ongoing information on each child’s development and be able to provide better support in the remote context. Moreover, families will have access to high-quality, low-touch resources to support their child at home, even if the classrooms are closed. The proposed project is developing an early childhood teacher and family engagement tool to support remote enrichment for young children at home. The approach brings together the organization’s game-based assessment system to support teachers in the classroom with the organization’s research-based learning games for children. This project will make its assessment product accessible within a home context. Parents and caregivers will be able to use their smartphones or tablets to collect assessment data. Research will be conducted to ascertain ease of use and fidelity of assessment data collected in a remote context. This data will then be used to power recommendations on the organization’s research-based games, two of which will be developed through this work, as well as other educational resources that families and children can do together. Assessment data is typically collected by teachers through an observation-based approach in the classroom; this project will enable parents and caregivers to collect assessment data pertaining to school readiness at home through touchscreen games. Early childhood teachers will then be able to use the data from the assessment and learning products to guide their remote instructional plans.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.