Early Care and Education Research Scholars: Child Care Research Scholars

Overview

<p>Goals of the Child Care Research Scholar Program The Child Care Research Scholar Program aims to build capacity in the research field to focus research on questions that have direct implications for child care policy decision-making and program administration, and to foster mentoring relationships. Specifically, the goals are: <br>1) To directly support graduate students’ engagement in child care policy research. 2) To foster mentoring relationships between faculty members and graduate students who are pursuing doctoral-level research in the child care field. 3) To encourage active communication, networking, and collaboration among graduate<br>students, their mentors, and other senior child care researchers. 4) To encourage active communication, networking, and collaboration among graduate<br>students, their mentors, and policymakers. Research topics that are of particular interest for this year's Child Care Research Scholar<br>grants include (but are not limited to):<br>1. Impact of changes from the CCDBG Act of 2014;<br>2. Issues related to increasing access to high quality care;<br>3. Understanding the unique features of home-based child care, and how to increase the supply and quality of home-based child care;<br>4. Increasing access to, and quality of, care for infants and toddlers;<br>5. Issues related to tribal child care, including maintaining culture, language, and traditions through intergenerational approaches to child care;<br>6. Understanding the child care needs of diverse low-income families and/or improving child care programs and policies for various subpopulations (see FOA for further description). <br>7. Factors that play a role in parents' decisions about work, child care, and subsidy access;<br>8. Cost-effective investments (e.g., professional development interventions, child care environment improvement strategies, service coordination models) to improve child care quality in all settings;<br>9. Drivers of per child cost escalations, and innovations to mitigate per child costs, such as private-public partnerships and shared services;<br>10. Issues and outcomes related to early childhood workforce development;<br>11. Factors promoting or hindering partnerships among child care providers and other early childhood systems; and<br>12. Effectiveness of monitoring systems in the context of licensing, Quality Rating and Improvement System ratings, and other benchmarking or accountability systems in the</p>