Explore:
Inequities in early childhood education and care (ECEC), formal education and youth training.
Test:
Novel solutions to known problems, collaborating with stakeholders.
Create:
Knowledge mobilization tools, including evidence-informed policy.
We draw on multidisciplinary insights from many fields, including economics, applied psychology and human development, and political science. We work with researchers across Canada and abroad to answer questions, develop interventions and mobilize information.
Featured Insight…
Teaching Interpersonal Problem-Solving Skills to Young Children in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) Settings: An Integration of Evidence
Problem-solving has been identified as a critical 21st-century skill. This review integrated evidence on the effectiveness of existing approaches to teaching and assessing problem-solving in an interpersonal context (IPS) for children from birth to age six, in early...
Quantitative Analysis and Methods
Full-Day Kindergarten: Effects on Maternal Labor Supply
We examine the effects of offering full-day kindergarten as a replacement for half-day kindergarten on mothers’ labor supply using the rollout of full-day kindergarten in Ontario, Canada. We find no effect on the extensive margin but found an effect on the intensive...
More Money Is Not Enough: (Re)Considering Policy Proposals to Increase Federal Funding for Special Education
New policy proposals to increase funding for the American Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)—including recent efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to “fully fund” IDEA—bring a new sense of urgency to understanding how federal special education...
Unequal and Increasingly Unfair: How Federal Policy Creates Disparities in Special Education Funding
The formula used to allocate federal funding to US states for special education is one of IDEA's most critical components. The formula serves as the primary mechanism for dividing available federal dollars among states and represents policy makers’ intent to equalize...
Intervention Creation and Testing
Assessing Educator Responsivity in Outdoor Early Childhood Education and Care Settings
Outdoor time is essential in early childhood education, yet quality assessments that are specifically focused on outdoor settings remain limited. Existing indoor measures primarily evaluate environment-level quality while neglecting educator-child interactions and the...
Both Me and My Daughter Would Cry Sometimes: Parents’ and Children’s Experiences with Home Education During the Early and Later COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented disruptions to children’s education across the globe, including abrupt transitions from in-person learning to learning from home. The current study investigates patterns of change in the educational challenges that 453...
Defining Peer Collaboration: A scoping review and network analysis
Peer collaboration is a complex skill that emerges in early childhood. However, researchers and practitioners lack a shared understanding/definition of what peer collaboration means and how to observe it in early educational settings. This review aimed to examine...
Designing Effective Policy Responses
Training and Skills Development Policy Options for the Changing World of Work
This article offers a critical assessment of empirical knowledge regarding labour market training and skills development in an era of technological disruption. Although exactly which skills and jobs will become obsolete is not known, technological change may cause unemployment to spike and increase the need for retraining.
The Role of Reflexive Learning in Universal Pre-kindergarten (UPK) Policy Formulation in Canada and the USA
Building on theories of social learning and policy change, this article argues that reflexive learning provides a causal mechanism for how public engagement in policy formulation can trigger policy innovation. Reflexive learning is a mode of learning that takes place during policy formulation and is most likely to occur in policy areas marked by considerable uncertainty and complexity (low problem tractability) and the participation of a wide range of actors (low actor certification).
Understanding Unlicensed Early Childhood Education and Care Utilization in Canada
This study examined early childhood education and care (ECEC) utilization in Canada,
focusing on use of unlicensed home child care (HCC) from an equity perspective. Data from the 2011 cycle of the General Social Survey (GSS) were used. Across Canada, parent responses reveal that 16.6% of children between the age of 12 months and entry to school were in unlicensed HCC.
Mailing Address
Department of Management
University of Toronto Scarborough
UTSC Instructional Centre
1095 Military Trail
Toronto, ON M1C 1A4
