With these "start-up" research funds, the PI, a beginning tenure-track faculty member in development psychology at the University of South Florida, and a former NSF post-doctoral fellow, will complete data analysis from her previous NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship research, and establish a collaborative relationship with Hillsborough Head Start in the Tampa area in order to pursue further new research on Spanish-speaking pre-school children. Accomplishing these two goals will provide her with the opportunity to disseminate her research up to this point in time, and develop a program of research in the Tampa Bay area. English Language Learners are a growing demographic in our schools today. It is important to analyze the data that has been collected as well as continue to research this population. The No Child Left Behind Act focuses on helping children to succeed in school. It is important to take into account all children, including those for whom English is not their first language. Identifying the best practices for working with these children will help not only them, but their teachers, classrooms, and schools to succeed as well. It is therefore important to start working with these children before they enter formal school, to ensure that they have the background skills necessary to do well. Two of the most important skills that will help these children are oral language skills, such as vocabulary, and phonological awareness abilities. These skills, along with positively developed relationships with parents and teachers, provide a recipe for success at the onset of their schooling career. As a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow the PI conducted interviews with the mothers of Latino preschool children in Massachusetts. The children were participants in the Early Childhood Study of Language and Literacy Development in Spanish-speaking Children. Follow-up interviews with a subset of the mothers were conducted when the children were in kindergarten. The interviews have been transcribed and coded. This grant will allow the PI to establish inter-coder reliability with the interviews, so that they may be reanalyzed and the information disseminated. Additional data from the study have also been provided and will allow the PI to develop an ecological model of development, looking at home and classroom factors as predictors of bilingual children's language development. The grant will also allow the PI to begin to establish research collaborations in the Tampa Bay area. The PI has discussed with the directors of Hillsborough Head Start the needs of their teachers and the students they serve. With the help of this starter grant, the PI will purchase the assessment materials needed in order to conduct an experimental pilot study assessing children's language and literacy needs, as well as teacher's management and instructional styles in two Head Start classrooms. An experimental and control classroom will be matched and teachers will be trained in the experimental classroom using the Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation Toolkit. Through assessment and observation, it will be determined whether training a teacher on this tool will inform them on the needs of their children and help the children in succeeding.
