Data Use in Early Childhood

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Early childhood lays the groundwork for future learning, health and well-being. Especially relevant to global learning goals, a strong body of research demonstrates the importance of early childhood development for children’s emerging cognitive, language, and mathematics skills. Effective early childhood programs are critical for supporting the learning and development of children facing adversity, including poverty, exposure to conflict, malnutrition and other environmental challenges. Thus, early childhood investments can play a central role in promoting equity.
Accurate and reliable data are essential for ensuring that early childhood investments lead to more equitable education systems. Not all early childhood investments lead to better outcomes: research has documented that high-quality, culturally responsive and inclusive programs and policies create the most impact. As such, tracking program impacts, hearing from parents and caregivers, and continually building insight through research are important pieces of effective systems.
Further, generating and using data well creates greater involvement in early childhood systems and holds governments and other stakeholders accountable for children’s learning and development. Data relevant to early childhood offer an opportunity to gain insight into the strengths and challenges of early childhood systems, including data on access to quality early childhood programs, the long-term impacts of investments in early childhood, and experiences of children, caregivers, and parents within the early childhood systems.
However, in many countries, data on early childhood systems is limited, due to lack of investment in reliable data systems, inability to track children over time to document the impacts of early childhood services on later outcomes, and lack of capacity to collect and use data. The resulting lack of insight undermines the potential power of early childhood systems to promote equity.
This panel addresses the use of data within early childhood systems, by integrating three papers focused on different methodologies and approaches. All papers will address questions of how data are used to give voice to groups that may not consistently be heard in early childhood systems. We will also ask each team to reflect on what lessons they learned and what they would have done differently.
The first paper is focused on Together for Early Childhood Evidence (T4ECE), an initiative supported by USAID to promote the use of data within early childhood systems in sub-Saharan Africa. T4ECE convenes country-based teams to identify how data can leverage more effective early childhood systems in Liberia, Rwanda, Malawi, Ethiopia and South Africa. The paper will report on T4ECE’s model and reflect on lessons learned regarding the use of data to generate greater insight into early childhood systems.
The second paper is focused on a longitudinal study of children’s development in Cambodia. This study offers unique insight into the long-term impacts of early childhood investments in one country, and also offers examples of how the resulting data can be used to guide future early childhood programs and policies.
The final paper is examines the possibilities of video-cued ethnography for early childhood systems change in Tanzania. The study provides insights on how different types of stakeholders view early childhood classroom video data differently, shedding light onto new ways to open up policy conversations on early childhood quality.
The discussant will tie these papers together by reflecting on themes from each project, how data from diverse projects can coalesce around similar themes, and how to engage stakeholders to use the data.
Taken together, these papers offer three examples of how data on early childhood can contribute to accountability, documentation of program and policy effectiveness, and greater abilities to track equity in early childhood. Each paper presents a different angle on what kind of data can be useful and how it is used to build more effective systems. Results from this panel can be used to improve our understanding of how to use data in service of equity in early childhood systems.

Sub Unit

• Early Childhood Development SIG

Chair

• Rebecca Sayre Mojgani, ECD Measure

Individual Presentations

• The Possibilities of Video-Cued Ethnography for Early Childhood Systems Change - Bethany Wilinski, Michigan State University

• Integrated Early Childhood Development in Cambodia: Initial data from a cluster stepped-wedge trial - Katherine Merseth King, RTI International

• Building capacity for early childhood data generation and use in Africa - Abbie Raikes, University of Nebraska, College of Public Health; Rebecca Sayre Mojgani, ECD Measure