Research is at the heart of all we do at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. As one of the nation's foremost multidisciplinary centers devoted to the study of children from infancy to adolescence, our scientists are committed to conducting research and evaluation studies that improve children's lives, support families, and inform public policy.
Learn more about our current projects by clicking on the links below. Change the project end date to view completed projects. And to stay up to date on news and events related to our work via social media, visit our Project Digital Directory.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 456
The purpose of this project is to support the development of the early childhood practitioners’ ability to care for children and get them ready for kindergarten by improving their capacity for implementation of interventions in primary care settings.
Successful adoption, implementation, improvement, and scale of empirically supported interventions (ESIs) holds the promise of improving the social, emotional, cognitive, and physical wellbeing of children and families in the Carolinas. Current system-wide conditions signal the need for a well-positioned Center of Excellence to serve as partnership infrastructure to advance multi-partner readiness for, public and private investments in, and well-supported implementation of ESIs. This project aims to capitalize upon current intermediary organization functions provided to partners and projects supported by The Impact Center at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, including (1) Implementation support for Triple P – Positive Parenting Program in the Carolinas and (2) the Summer Literacy Initiative.
This project is an attempt to inform the role of FMR1 in autism symptomatology through the study of 1st degree relatives who are at increased genetic liability – relatives of individuals with autism and relatives of individuals with FXS, who are carriers of the FMR1 premutation.
This project aims to identify specific linguistic markers of genetic liability to autism which may be used to illuminate the pathogenesis of autism and its component features.
FPG served as the coordinating body for A Gathering of Leaders (AgoL). This invitation-only convening brought together dynamic leaders from different sectors, perspectives, and approaches focused on improving the life outcomes of males of color.
The current study examines the link between poverty and executive functions (cognitive processes that facilitate learning, self-monitoring, and decision making) which are known to undergo rapid developmental change during the first years of life.
The purpose of this project, in partnership with ServeMinnesota, will focus on two distinct but related research aims. First, it will evaluate the effectiveness of the updated and expanded Florida Reading Corps program. Second, it will ensure that the Florida Reading Corps program operates in a maximally equitable manner for all students, especially for Black and Latine students, multi-lingual learners, and/or students experiencing poverty.
This project will conduct a randomized clinical trial in five Educare schools. It will include longitudinal follow-up of 250 infants and their families through kindergarten. Measures will include annual child developmental assessments, videotaped parent-child interaction observations, and parent interviews and surveys. The specific aim of the project is to examine the effectiveness of Educare, a model early intervention program for children from low-income families.
The Abecedarian Project was a carefully controlled scientific study of the potential benefits of early childhood education for poor children. Four cohorts of individuals, born between 1972 and 1977, were randomly assigned as infants to either the early educational intervention group or the control group.
The purpose of this project is to deploy a comprehensive stakeholder engagement and program assessment strategy to support a deeper understanding of the current landscape of disability inclusion, along with unique challenges, opportunities, perspectives and relevant factors impacting states, tribes, and territories as well as children with disabilities and their caregivers.
Representatives from the Child and Family Policy Institute of California and the California Department of Social Services are working as a Core California Staff Team to coordinate technical assistance and support to Fresno, Humboldt, and Santa Clara counties and two Los Angeles County child welfare offices for implementing and sustaining a Child and Family Practice Model as part of the California Partners for Permanency project.
The aim of this study is to delve deep into the factors that hinder or support the optimal development of children, families, and educators in Black-majority Educare schools.
This project was a 5-year continuation of a Fragile X Syndrome (FXS) Research Center, the focus of which was on family adaptation to FXS.
The dual increases in the prevalence of students with autism needing special education services and the number of paraeducators providing instruction in special education had created a need for preparing paraeducators to use evidence-based practices (EBPs) with autistic students in educational settings. The AFIRM for Paraeducators (AFP) program is a professional development program for paraeducators to be delivered by special education teachers in authentic educational settings. The purpose of this project is to examine the promise of the AFP program, through a pilot randomized control trial (RCT), for increasing paraeducators use of EBP with high fidelity of implementation and resultant goal attainment by autistic students receiving instruction.
This project examined the production and development of African American English through early adolescence, its impact on literacy acquisition from school entry thru middle school, and youth, family, and school factors that may affect this linkage.
This project will develop an African-centered, culturally responsive practice guide with specific strategies, exemplars, and materials with connected professional learning modules to guide effective implementation. The ultimate and long-term goal is to increase Black children’s social, cognitive, and emotional skills (e.g., racial identity, engagement, learning motivation, regulation), leading to strong academic and social competence and school success.
This project aims to have timely data about a significant policy bill slated to cut poverty by almost half, especially for families with young children. It will examine whether receiving direct payment is disproportionately benefiting Black and Latine families, economically and psychologically (e.g., perception of hardship). And will provide actionable information to ensure that the Black families with young children are protected, promoted, and prioritized in national, state, and local policies and strategies.
This replication study seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of Targeted Reading Instruction (TRI, formerly called Targeted Reading Intervention) in helping grade 1 struggling readers make substantial gains in reading during one school year. It extends prior TRI studies by conducting an independent external evaluation of the TRI, testing long-term impacts for struggling readers into grade 3, and examining teachers’ sustained impacts for three years.
The purpose of this project is to document the efficacy of a widely used professional development model that promotes program quality, teachers' use of evidence-based practices (EBPs), and outcomes for elementary school-age children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The study will respond to a national need to prepare teachers to design effective, research based educational programs for children with ASD.
Elementary school is the critical period for setting the stage for children's future academic success. The most important academic skill that is developed during this period is literacy, without which most other content area material cannot be learned well. The current project will have unique opportunities to better understand what factors contribute to literacy trajectories, as well as factors that may buffer children against poor trajectories.
This project involved the concatenation of longitudinal data sets from several key early childhood educational programs for poor children in order to study the dynamic evolution of capabilities that promote adult and child mental health, and the role of education, parental investments, and community influences on this developmental process.
This study compared boys with fragile X syndrome with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD), boys with ASD only, and typically developing boys to identify profiles of language prosody that overlap in autism and FXS or are specific to autism, and also examined concordance between rater judgments and objective quantitative indices of prosody.
This subcontract supported collaboration between UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the long-term outcomes from the Abecedarian and Carolina Approach to Responsive Education (CARE) studies.
This subcontract to the University of Chicago allows UNC-CH to join an interdisciplinary team that will collect, analyze, and compare data on the impacts on participants through midlife, and on their children, of the two most influential early childhood education programs: the HighScope Perry Preschool Program (PPP) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC) that targeted disadvantaged, predominantly Black, children.
