While early childhood experts agree that school expulsion is an ineffective behavior management strategy, each year more than 17,000 children aged three to five—largely boys and Black, Latine, and Native American children—are permanently removed from preschools. Recognizing the negative impacts of exclusionary discipline, Iheoma U. Iruka co-edited Early Childhood Research Quarterly’s “Special Issue: Advancing the science of early childhood expulsion prevention."

While research shows that external implementation support can help successfully implement and scale up interventions, there has been less investigation about the experience of those receiving it. To address this lack of information, a team at The Impact Center FPG explored the feasibility of implementation support and published, “A feasibility study of external implementation support provided across two states in the U.S.” in Implementation Research and Practice.

A significant body of research highlights the negative impact of summer learning loss, where students experience academic setbacks when they are not engaged in learning during school breaks. This issue disproportionately affects children in low-income and under-resourced communities, where access to summer educational opportunities is often limited, further widening the achievement gap. See what some folks at FPG are doing to help address this issue.

One of the many ways that FPG fulfills its mission of transforming children's lives through innovation in research, practice, and policy is by collaborating with North Carolina state agencies and other partners. The Impact Center at FPG’s Build Up project is one of the most recent efforts to help partner organizations design effective systems for delivering their policy programs and activities.

FPG Faculty Fellow Cathi Propper, PhD, an associate professor at the UNC School of Nursing, has been awarded a new NIH R01 grant of $2,656,378 for a project titled, “Early Education, School Readiness, and Early School Success Among Children in Poverty: Exploring the Role of Parasympathetic Function in the Preschool Classroom.”

Kylie Garber, PhD, is a research scientist at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG). As part of our FPG profile series, we recently spoke with her to learn more about her work at the Institute. Find out what she had to say.

Utilizing her interdisciplinary experience in social science and epidemiology, Ping Chen specializes in conducting research focusing on social, environmental, behavioral, and biological linkages in developmental and life-course health trajectories. This interest led Chen, an advanced research scientist FPG, to collaborate with colleagues on “Polygenic risk, childhood abuse and gene x environment interactions with depression development from middle to late adulthood: A U.S. national life-course study,” which was published in June in Preventive Medicine.

While there has been extensive research on parenting risk and protective factors for the general population, knowledge of parenting specific to queer youth—those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, queer, or other sexual minority identities—remains very limited. Recognizing this gap, two FPG Faculty Fellows joined with colleagues from Carolina and the University of Wisconsin at Madison to examine previous research. The findings, “Parenting and Queer Youth Mental Health and Substance Use: A Systematic Review and Meta‐analysis,” were published earlier this year in Adolescent Research Review.

The ECERS-3: Assessing Disparities and Challenges in Equity project, which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aimed to review the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Third Edition (ECERS-3) using an equity lens. The project has released final recommendations for authors of the ECERS-4.