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

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.