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Dean and William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Education
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EDGE: CAROLINA EDUCATION REVIEW
EDGE: CAROLINA EDUCATION REVIEW
Framing the pandemic: What ESSER funding can tell us
about our educational institutions and good policy
UNC School of Education researchers Thad Domina and Ethan Hutt examine North Carolina school’s pandemic-era funding proposals, revealing how leaders made sense of what was happening in their schools and communities.
Five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted schools and lives in unforgettable ways, UNC School of Education professors Thad Domina, Ph.D., and Ethan Hutt, Ph.D., know that some people just want to forget about it.
But their new research on North Carolina’s educational leaders’ agility amid the disruption shows that there’s still much we can learn about crisis, the role of our educational institutions, and how good policy can strengthen and empower school districts — both in and outside of an emergency.
In their recent paper “Framing the Pandemic: Tracking Educational Problem Formulation, Spring 2020-Fall 2021,” Domina, the Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership, and Hutt, the Gary Stuck Faculty Scholar in Education, share what they found after analyzing texts from the 648 applications that local North Carolina school districts and charter schools submitted over the three phases of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding.
Domina and Hutt presented the research in June 2025 at meeting of the North Carolina Learning Research Network
– a partnership between the UNC School of Education, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and the North Carolina Collaboratory – which convened academic researchers, practitioners, and policymakers for a day of presentations and discussions featuring practiceinformed research and how that research’s findings can improve North Carolina K-12 and postsecondary education. The North Carolina Collaboratory funded Domina and Hutt’s research on ESSER funding.
While so much of how we now characterize the pandemic’s impact on education focuses on learning loss from remote
schooling, Domina and Hutt offer a more nuanced view of the complex needs of districts and how those evolved as the pandemic wore on.
By and large, they said the state’s educational leaders knew what to do. Those leaders responded quickly, came up with innovative solutions, and pivoted with the needs on the ground.
“To push the decision-making on how to use those resources down to the local level, to ask the school, district, and charter school leaders to make sense of what was going on around them and develop strategies themselves, was a decision made of necessity, and it was a wise one,” Domina said.
How did educational leaders respond?
So, what really happened when the pandemic hit, and how well did North Carolina’s public and charter schools respond from the onset up until districts started to return to in-person schooling?
In the springs of 2020 and 2021, the U.S. Department of Education allotted around $190 billion — ESSER funding — from the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to state educational agencies for the purpose of providing elementary and secondary schools with emergency funding
The Edge:
We should empower our local school leaders to do the most with what they have, and I think we can do more to design policy with that in mind.
to manage the new crisis. States granted those funds to local educational agencies (LEAs) in three phases with few limitations, empowering them to make sense of what problems the pandemic posed to schools in their communities and use the funds how they saw fit.
The research team started thinking about this work around the time students were returning to in-person instruction, and there was a sense that the pandemic was resolving. Questions circulated about how ESSER funding had been spent and whether it was spent wisely.
The UNC School of Education boasts experts in education policy who work collaboratively with leaders at state, district, and school levels to understand challenges seen and experienced in schools. The School also works with funding partners, like the North Carolina Collaboratory, to address those challenges and provide solutions that empower eductors and students. In recent work, Domina and Hutt have evaluated school systems’ responses to a generational event — the COVID-19 pandemic — and policies we should consider moving forward.
Had it worked?
The dominant narrative had become one of learning loss from remote instruction. But from the beginning, the pandemic posed a multifaceted problem for schools, and the ESSER funding applications show that LEAs recognized that. Domina and Hutt’s work broadens that conversation by looking at the phases of the pandemic and how schools’ needs changed as it played out.
“The question [if ESSER funding worked] was being framed almost entirely around student achievement, and to us, that felt too narrow,” said Domina. “We very quickly forgot how complicated the pandemic was, particularly in those early moments.”
Domina and Hutt argue that organizational sensemaking — or “the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some way violate expectations” (Maitlis and Christianson 2014, p. 57) — provides an important lens for understanding ESSER and its implementation.
The data showed the applications for funding from North Carolina LEAs — after their leaders had made sense of their district’s unique needs — fell into four categories:
1. Public health
2. Academics and learning loss
3. Student and community well-being
4. Instructional access
LEAs’ applications communicated needs for sanitation supplies and training on pandemic spread, upgrades to HVAC systems, and PPE. LEAs also had immediate instructional needs, like access to technology and internet services, remote technology for classrooms, software, and strategies for students with special needs. Broader concerns around student and community well-being required additional staffing of school counselors and social workers and partnerships with local nonprofits to help families access critical services. Academic concerns in applications pointed to the need for progress monitoring tools to track achievement and the need
for tutors as concerns of learning loss grew.
All applications included references to all four categories to varying degrees and in varying ways. District leaders assessed the needs on the ground based on the emergencies happening in their community. For instance, in districts where the infection rate was high, applications reflected more requests for tools to support public health. Many charter schools focused more on academic requests — which is in line with their organizational mission around certain kinds of academics or educational approaches, Hutt said.
“What was really interesting was that the extent to which they were focused on those four areas varied dramatically across districts and then also changed over time as the pandemic progressed. At the start, concern was relatively evenly distributed among those four buckets, but two — student and community well-being, and public health — were leading. Fast forward a year or so, and those two had kind of moved into the
Thad Domina Domina, the Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership, has spent more than 20 years documenting educational inequalities and looking for educational policies and strategies that help to create a more just society.
How was ESSER funding used in North Carolina school districts?
Domina and Hutt’s examination of ESSER funding applications found that requests fell into four categories:
1. Public health (sanitation supplies, PPE, trainings on virus spread)
2. Academics and learning loss (progress monitoring, tutoring)
3. Student and community well-being (school counselors, social workers)
Hutt, the Gary Stuck Faculty Scholar in Education and an associate professor, conducts research focused on the numbers that we use to describe, define, and evaluate American schools.
background, and learning loss was by far the predominant concern,” Domina said.
“Even within districts that were similar in terms of their environments and demographics, they made different choices, or they perceived the challenges in different ways and responded, which reflects the theory behind the policy as constructed,” Hutt said.
In any crisis, the people closest to the ground know the real issues more acutely and how to distribute help where it needs to go. From an organizational standpoint, Domina and Hutt’s research shows that local leaders acted quickly to care for their communities. From a policy perspective, it suggests that, sometimes, this is the most efficient way to act.
“There are many times when it may make sense to direct people’s attention to a particular area that needs it. But this helps us understand that we have a system
of education that is dramatically decentralized, and I think good policy can use that as a strength, rather than treating it as a weakness,” Domina said.
Making sense of it
The researchers stress that North Carolina is about as wellpositioned as any state in the country to handle an opportunity like the one presented by ESSER funding — the state has good data, a sophisticated Department of Public Instruction, and strong leaders. The specificity and variety with which they responded to COVID across time, and how well they read the shifting needs, signals that policy should harness these assets for good.
Hutt said that sometimes people forget that, for children and families, schools are a nexus, and the pandemic was a blunt reminder. Schools and districts provide not only education, but also care for children, oversight while parents are working, spaces for children to interact, health services, and food.
“We should empower our local school leaders to do the most with what they have, and I think we can do more to design policy with that in mind,” Hutt said. “When the pandemic gets collapsed to criticism about not going back in-person fast enough, or not doing enough, it’s a bit of revisionism. You can always say in retrospect that more attention could have been paid to a certain area. But that’s not what it was like in the moment.”
“Sensemaking happens with any policy. And this policy was defined in a way that gave them a lot of discretion to make sense of it,” Domina said. “We have the capacity for doing that implementation. I think the other side of that is policy needs to be really thoughtful
about maintaining and building, respecting that capacity.”
Both researchers think there’s going to be a long tail to the events of the pandemic as it relates to education. Even as many move on or try to forget how traumatic it was, they’re going to keep researching and writing about it, continuing to examine it, and drawing out what we can take from it to keep making our educational systems better.
“We’re hoping that through research, we can really help people understand the totality of this experience and its effects on our schools,” Hutt said.
Domina said this close look at ESSER funding has changed the way he thinks about his work and education research. Educators and educational leaders are often trying to come up with the best strategies that work for business as usual, when in reality, leaders often need to be nimble. What can we learn about the quick pivots schools made in COVID?
“People sometimes forget how messy and complicated the life of a school is. But educators never forget that. Their work is all about making sense of the mess and trying to find a way forward amidst complexity. I think honoring that complexity and ability to improvise is a key to excellent educational research and professional preparation,” Domina said.
Ethan Hutt
School-NCDPI-Collaboratory
efforts advance
North Carolina research-practice partnerships
The North Carolina Learning Research Network – a partnership between the UNC School of Education, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and the North Carolina Collaboratory – hosted its third annual convening of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers June 26, 2025, for presentations and discussions on practice-informed research and how findings can improve North Carolina K-12 and post-secondary education.
Researchers from universities across the state shared 20 projects focused challenges that arose during and have persisted since the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting also featured an interactive workshop and panel discussion focused on researchpractice partnerships and how to sustain those partnerships.
“This is great work and is the kind of work that we in North Carolina should feel very proud to talk about and to continue,” said Maria Pitre-Martin, Ph.D., deputy state superintendent who welcomed attendees. “These efforts reflect the power of combining rigorous research with our local expertise to drive meaningful change.”
The meeting was led by Jeni Corn (’97 B.A., ’02 M.Ed.), Ph.D., the NC Collaboratory’s director of research – social sciences, and Ethan Hutt, Ph.D., Gary Stuck Faculty Scholar in Education (above right).
The research findings shared had two goals: 1) to determine effectiveness of ESSER III-funded policies and programs and 2) to shed light on the longitudinal impact of COVID-19 on student learning.
Research examined state and local teacher bonuses, literacy professional development, software to mitigate cyberbullying, the pandemic’s impact on the educator workforce, virtual learning practices, post-secondary opportunities of high schoolers, and more.
School of Education faculty members and doctoral students presented on research topics that included: North Carolina’s supplemental salary fund, ESSER budgeting across North Carolina, and Patterns of Post-Secondary Enrollment in North Carolina.
Faculty member Martinette Horner, Ed.D., (above left) the School’s Master of School Administration program director, moderated a
panel discussion between university researchers and district practitioners focused on research-practice partnerships.
All panel members are participants in the North Carolina Practitioner Network — another School-NCDPICollaboratory effort which brought together administrators from 14 districts, university researchers, and policymakers to build school districts’ capacity to identify unique challenges their districts face, utilize research tools, and then develop evidence-based strategies. Horner co-leads the Network with Amy Richardson, the School’s director of PK-12 partnerships.
“This network has shown what is possible when we align research with the needs of educators,” said Jeff Warren, Ph.D., NC Collaboratory director. “It has underscored the power or partnerships and driving change. Through these researchpractice partnerships, we have demonstrated to policymakers the tangible impact that collaborative research has.”
The science of teaching reading
Annemarie Hindman has spent more than 20 years understanding how young children learn to read and how teachers support that learning. With increased momentum around literacy and the science of reading in North Carolina and across the U.S., she says now is the time to support educators who teach reading.
Reading, especially reading English, doesn’t always come naturally for children. Mastering concepts like cracking the code of print — recognizing letters and understanding sounds — and the ability to connect those sounds and letters to meaning, will happen for children differently, and at different rates.
To better reflect the complexities of how children learn to read, North Carolina joined other states across the nation in 2021 by passing legislation that would change how teachers approach reading instruction. By the 2022-23 school year, elementary school teachers would base literacy lessons on an evidence-based body of research called the science of reading.
While a required professional development training called Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) covered the ins-and-outs of the science of reading, it doesn’t quite capture the complexity of teaching the science of reading.
Enter Annemarie Hindman, Ph.D., a longtime literacy researcher and teacher educator who joined the UNC School of Education faculty in 2024 and has spent two decades studying how young children learn to read and what specific day-to-day guidance teachers need to get them there.
Hindman's arrival in North Carolina happened to come at just the right time. How do teachers get access to the kinds of tools, letter games, print materials and activities they need? How will they work them into their lesson plans? What is the best way to support new and experienced teachers on implementation? These are all good questions, Hindman says. She has them, too.
“As teachers finish the LETRS training, they might think, ‘That was amazing. Now I know all these new things, but what exactly does that mean for me next week?’” says Hindman. “The whole empirical question of how we do these things well in classrooms, in ways that are sustainable, manageable and rewarding for teachers as well as for kids, is a really pressing question and an interesting one.”
And with the increased momentum around language and literacy in the state she now calls home, she thinks Carolina and the School of Education can help.
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Literacy specialists, education researchers and teachers know a lot about the kinds of foundational skills in language, vocabulary, and code- and meaning-focused strategies that kids need to build so they can learn to read. The measures and assessment tools to understand how well kids are doing are well-known, too.
The Edge:
If you’re a teacher standing in front of a first-grade classroom, you’re going to have a very wide collection of skill sets in front of you. We happen to have a particularly diverse populace ... kids with varying levels of learning approaches and challenges. So kids are going to learn things in different ways. That’s a really tall order for teachers.
“We know less about the nitty gritty of how teachers in a classroom of 25 or 30 children, who have very diverse background knowledge and interests, can really provide these experiences in feasible ways for kids,” says Hindman.
Hindman was raised by educators in rural Maryland, but the field didn’t interest her until college, when AmeriCorps placed her in a Head Start classroom. It was a surprising and delightful fit.
Preschoolers – the things they had to stay, the observations they had about the world
Annemarie Hindman’s research explores, broadly, how to help young children who are at risk for later reading difficulty build the foundations for reading by improving their access to high-quality, culturally sustaining instruction at school, at home, and throughout the community. She pursues a variety of approaches, including secondary data analysis; observational research in classrooms, households, and community organizations; and intervention design and evaluation.
– fascinated her. Children learn, in large part through conversations by building vocabulary and contexts.
And she loved talking to them. The more she discovered about how preschoolers learn, the more she wanted to know. She went to graduate school at the University of Michigan, earning master’s and doctoral degrees in education and developmental psychology to learn about how to design and evaluate the kinds of programs that support teachers, literacy coaches, and families as they help children learn to read.
Hindman and her team have published extensively on their work to bring educational research into practice, and their observations have pointed out — and worked to resolve — an important missing piece in the conversations about teaching reading – much of the processes require very individualized instruction for children and few explicit directions on how a classroom teacher can make that work.
“If you’re a teacher standing in front of a first-grade classroom, you’re going to have a very wide collection of skill sets in front of you. We happen to have a particularly diverse populace in the United States, and kids with varying levels of learning approaches and challenges. So kids are going to learn things in different ways. That’s a really tall order for teachers.”
In North Carolina, the new legislation and training came right on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and unfolded against the backdrop of high levels of teacher stress, anxiety, turnover, and teacher shortages nationally. It presents a unique opportunity for targeted support to teachers that works — guidance about structuring and organizing classroom activities that build literacy and specific print materials they need.
Teachers are often familiar with the science of reading, but they may have a wide range of complex circumstances that make it hard to implement this science the classroom. For example, new teachers may not have experience with smoothly managing activities,
while experienced teachers may have other challenges, like burnout. While a well-resourced school may have literacy specialists who can help teachers choose instructional materials, many schools do not have these resources.
“I’m very interested in where the rubber meets the road,” says Hindman. “What’s the science of teaching reading? What is working in classrooms? What can teachers actually do on the average day? Folks don’t have a lot of time, and early and elementary teachers are responsible for teaching all the content areas, unlike teachers in later grades. The more we can provide concrete supports that are grounded in research, but classroom friendly, the more successful we find teachers and kids are,” she says.
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In her work, Hindman and her team have spent 20 years working alongside in-service preschool and kindergarten teachers who serve both native English speakers and English learners in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to provide this support and develop targeted coaching programs that improve their literacy instruction. They help teachers to organize and structure the chaos of a room full of eager young children, and to develop the kinds of routines that children need to learn to communicate with one another. The results show, in a variety of contexts, that the support tools they provide, when used all year, produce large increases in the quality of the teachers’ language and literacy instruction and in the children’s retained knowledge of vocabulary.
An essential part of the process is to work in partnership with teachers and get their feedback on what works and what doesn’t. It’s an iterative process of development, Hindman says.
This approach not only improves literacy skills, but it also helps teachers feel valued and respected.
“We aim for something where we give teachers specific tools, like: here’s a lesson guide with a series of open-ended questions. Here are vocabulary cards that you can use. If the science of reading says kids need multiple meaningful opportunities to talk about words, here’s a package of tools where you can show kids the picture card, ask five open-ended questions over the course of the week about this word, and then do these activities where kids are using the word. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of trying to round up the tools that you need.”
As the science of reading is newly implemented in North Carolina classrooms, new complexities will present. The state has both urban and rural settings and an increasing number of English learners. There’s a lot of work that can be done to make sure teachers feel like researchers are in their corner – and, that’s an opportunity for universities like UNC-Chapel Hill.
“My hope is that there might be interest in these kinds of endeavors in the state of North Carolina now that we have teachers who are trained in the LETRS training, using it, and this is where UNC can be really helpful,” she says. “We have opportunities to fill some of those gaps that teachers will identify. What do they need to know to implement this, and what questions do they have that we don’t have answers for yet? What research can we do with them now to develop the kinds of materials they need? I think that’s an essential role that we can play in this process now.”
Annemarie Hindman Professor
Where Nature Meets Nurture
Roger Mills-Koonce studies how early childhood experiences in family and caregiver settings from birth to age 4 impact psychobiological functioning as children develop, showing how the moods and emotions of those first trusted adults shape the brain as it grows.
Roger Mills-Koonce, Ph.D., remembers it vividly: the moment years ago when the hospital handed over a tiny infant and sent his new family on their way.
“I remember our first kid being born and taking them out of the hospital and putting them in the car and thinking – my wife and I are both developmental science Ph.D.s. We’d spent 10 years studying this, and even we felt like we had no idea what we were doing.”
Caring for a baby is a lot of pressure, Mills-Koonce acknowledges, because research shows that even from as early as conception, humans — children — are absorbing the atmosphere of the caregiving mood around them.
And, that mood makes a difference.
These fraught first moments of family life capture a 20-year-long research passion for MillsKoonce — the impact that positive or negative caregiver influences from birth through early childhood can have on brain development, attachment, behavioral pattens, or even complex emotions like empathy or guilt.
Every child has tremendous potential, says Mills-Koonce, a professor of Human Development and Family Science at the UNC School of Education. And his research shows that those early life experiences with a parent or caregiver — even before we think children are cognizant of it — can actually modulate that potential, optimizing it or impeding it, as brains grow.
“My work has focused specifically on the nuances of what parents or caregivers do in those first three to four years of life that either promote or constrain that potential, particularly from an attachment perspective,” Mills-Koonce said. “It’s in those first relationships that children develop, and it’s more than just a physical context for development. It’s a set of increasingly complex emotional experiences that provide a lens for the child to understand and interact with the world around them for years to come.”
Roger Mills-Koonce Professor
A perfect storm
Mills-Koonce studies how early childhood experiences in the family or caregiver setting from ages birth to 4 impact psychobiological functioning — the relationships between biological processes and psychological phenomena like behavior, for example — as children develop, showing how the moods and emotions of those first trusted adults shape the brain as it grows.
“It’s the little things that add up over time. They require physical, emotional, and cognitive engagement and attunement, and it’s a lot to commit to, and it’s challenging,” he says. “This is why I’m so passionate about the parentchild relationship, because that relationship is everything.”
Mills-Koonce is a longtime collaborator on the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development-funded Family Life Project, a longitudinal study of families living in lowwealth, nonurban areas. The study has found that children whose caregivers interacted with them in positive ways, such as being sensitive to their needs and expressing positive feelings about them, had better language development, behavior, and
executive functioning than those with negative or problematic interactions with caregivers. His research has also shown that when mothers have high levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress reactivity, they interact more negatively with their children, showing the link between stress and the kinds of negative experiences that can impact a child’s trajectory.
As part of the federally funded Brain and Early Experience study, a fiveyear, multidisciplinary, longitudinal study looking at the influence of poverty and early life experiences on neurocognitive and behavioral development, Mills-Koonce is looking at how the developing brain and the gut microbiome connect lived experiences to child outcomes. The gut microbiome can tell us a lot about our health, most obviously about digestion. But it also can tell us about our stress, mood, and anxiety.
Infants and toddlers can’t think about their experiences yet, but it’s clear they’re impacted, and that’s part of why Mills-Koonce is so fascinated by the topic. The salience of those early relationships and experiences affect them directly in terms of their physical growth and safety, but as their brains develop, it impacts behavioral patterns, shaping their emotional experience in the world and how they’ll see themselves and others.
One example: A child might be anxious, he explains, because they have a genotype that promotes anxiety. But, with positive early relationships, they can be equipped to push the boundaries of what
they’re comfortable with and try new things, which can mitigate the experience of that anxiety.
“Other kids that are anxious and have more controlling and limiting experiences might end up withdrawing even more. There is a lot of variation that kids bring into the world with them genetically, and the ways these relationships carry forward and evolve over time affect them in ways that we might not see for years to come.”
One of those ways Mills-Koonce has spent the last decade researching: how young children with callous and unemotional (CU) traits, which can be indicative of psychopathy, begin to exhibit those behaviors and what can be done very young to modify that course. Children with CU traits may lack empathy or the ability to experience guilt or remorse. They may exhibit persistent antisocial behavior throughout their lives, leading to conduct problems in school or in society. The roots of those complex emotions are developing in the context of relationships from the start, he says.
Though most research investigates CU behaviors in older children and adolescents, recent findings indicate that children as young as 3 who exhibit elevated levels of oppositional defiance and CU behaviors, and who have insecure attachments with caregivers, are at increased risk for exhibiting elevated levels of aggression across middle childhood.
“Empathy doesn't just emerge magically,” he said. “It emerges as a product of interacting with people
The Edge: Roger Mills-Koonce's areas of expertise integrate experiences and psychobiological functioning across development. His primary research interest focuses on biopsychosocial models of parenting, parent-child attachment relationships, and the emergence of self-regulation in early childhood.
We’ve evolved over time to [develop empathy]. It’s a normative part of our development as humans, so we have a fascinating question – what makes this happen for some children but not for others?
that you care about. That's why you care about why they feel the way they feel, and how that starts to affect you, and those mirror neurons in your brain allow you to experience the feelings of others the way you experience them yourselves.
“We’ve evolved over time to do that. It’s a normative part of our development as humans, so we have a fascinating question – what makes this happen for some children but not for others?”
Mills-Koonce believes these children could be in a perfect storm of where nature meets nurture — where their genetic predispositions to these disorders are affected in big or small ways by negative or positive early emotional socialization experiences with their caregivers.
“Let’s say you have a child who doesn’t respond to behavior modification,” he says. “You couple that with a parent who is very stressed and who has tried all the right things, but nothing is working. That parent is going to wear down. Their temper gets short, and they become more controlling or more punitive. They start saying things that they know are hurtful, because they're at the end of their rope.”
In many circumstances, it can undermine closeness, confidence and trust, and maybe even the child’s sense of safety and security in the relationship. When problematic things happen in the lives of these kids, and they’re carrying a good degree of genetic risk as well, it can be a foundation
for having less concern about others, less guilt about what happens to others, and more difficulty considering their feelings.
Caring in community
Mills-Koonce says there’s a reason why this kind of research belongs in the School of Education — caregivers really can’t, and shouldn’t have to, do this alone.
Many families are under incredible pressure and experience varying degrees of life stress, and no matter how much they prepare themselves, there’s only so much they can do. In so many ways, they already feel like they aren’t doing enough, and they’ve carried their own life experiences into parenting.
But, he says, broader community support can lessen the load and enhance child development outcomes.
That’s where schools can come in. Educational settings, which are full of adults who care about children, are about more than just education; they also focus on a child’s total well-being. Those adults are the “heart and soul of the community,” he says, a hub for family and community engagement.
“Any significant and caring adult can play an important role in a child’s life, and that’s why we say it take a village to raise a child. This is nothing new. When we all invest in the welfare and well-being of our children, of course they benefit but so does the entire community. " Mills-Koonce says he’s inspired by
the work of Maya Bracy, a Ph.D. student in the School’s Applied Developmental Science and Special Education concentration, who brings a community focus that takes the ideas of these essential kinds of interactions to the next level. A school is a place where families naturally converge, and there’s an opportunity there to connect those who are dealing with the same things, or for parents of older children to help scaffold parents of younger children, and to invest in more wraparound services and opportunities to connect.
Within communities, young children watch the adults in their lives interact with other adults, extend courtesies or navigate frustrations. These kinds of models can provide an opportunity for young children to see how others navigate the cultural norms of interacting with others, even if they lack the ideal relationships in the home.
Embedded, community-based support and social networks of real people and real relationships can go far, says Mills-Koonce.
“The soul of the community is the school. It fits in so well into an evolutionary model collectivist childrearing. We don’t just have kids and go off to live by ourselves. We can survive that way, but we thrive in groups that invest in each other and especially in the next generation.”
Bernacki edits Journal of Educational Psychology special issue focused on learning analytics
Matthew L. Bernacki, Ph.D. –a leading scholar in learning sciences and learning analytics, and the Kinnard White Faculty Scholar of Education at the UNC School of Education – served as guest editor of a January 2025 special issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology titled “Leveraging Learning Theory and Analytics to Produce Grounded, Innovative, DataDriven, Equitable Improvements to Teaching and Learning.”
The issue’s introduction, written by Bernacki, frames the importance of learning analytics and how they can be used to test and improve education theories and to represent hard to observe processes. He discusses how learning analytics researchers can benefit from sturdy guardrails that learning theory can place on learning analytics tools, especially as they increasingly involve artificial intelligence.
Bernacki highlights “the potential advantages of integrating learning theories common to educational psychology scholarship with learning analytics as a methodological approach that can improve the representation of individuals and their actions in the environments where they learn.”
Bernacki notes the methodological approaches “involved in learning analytics include the study of event-based data produced by individuals in learning environments where they use technology.”
In his own research, Bernacki examines event-based data produced by college students using learning management systems in introductory science
and mathematics courses. Data produced by this work have yielded timely information for teachers, specifically helping them to identify students who might be at risk of course failure and then provide student-specific interventions.
Bernacki calls the studies published within the issue “exemplars” that show “how the tremendous potential of learning analytics can be more fully realized when practices are informed by insights and guidance from psychological theories of learning” and “that when analytics are aligned to reflect theorized phenomena, learning analytics can be plied to test novel research questions that include variables that heretofore were challenging to observe and that have stymied the study of learning.”
One entry in the special issue –“Using theory-informed learning analytics to understand how homework behavior predicts achievement.” – features research by Bernacki; Jeffrey A. Greene, Ph.D., McMichael Professor and associate dean for research and faculty development at the school; and Robert D. Plumley, a doctoral student and the School’s research associate in adaptive learning. The article was led by collaborators at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
“This special issue is meant to invite those thinking very hard about the design of technologies and tools for learning to partner with those who think hard about how people learn, so theorists, designers, and learners can benefit from better research and development on tools for
learning,” Bernacki said. “Learning technologies will continue to shape teaching and learning, and as more and more diverse students use them in their dayto-day learning activities, the data they produce when they learn have immense value.
“If we can study learning at the scale and precision that learning analytics affords, we can better represent learners and use better, more representative data to test and refine the theories we use to describe the learning process.
“I hope this special issue convinces the learning, information, and computer science communities on campuses to gather and consider how working together can improve the theories they study and the products they provide to people who wish to learn about their world.”
Matthew Bernacki Kinnard White Faculty Scholar in Education
Hattan edits Educational Psychologist special issue featuring the latest science of reading research
UNC School of Education faculty member Courtney Hattan, Ph.D., an assistant professor and a leading scholar focused on incorporating students’ backgrounds and knowledge in reading instruction and enhancing the science of reading, served as guest editor of a December 2024 special issue of Educational Psychologist titled “Expanding the Science of Reading: Contributions from Educational Psychology.”
Hattan edited the issue with Panayiota Kendeou, Ph.D., Distinguished McKnight University Professor and the Guy Bond Chair in Reading at the University of Minnesota.
The authors open the issue with an overview of the state of the science of reading, highlighting theoretical advances in the field and discussing future directions for related research.
They note that “the science of reading consists of a large, evolving, and impressive body of evidence about how humans learn to read and how reading should be taught” and that educational psychology scholars have “robust research programs in the area of reading and are well-positioned to contribute to expanding the science of reading beyond narrow conceptualizations that have been popularized.”
“This special issue brings together educational psychology and reading in a way that provides a more holistic understanding of reading theory,” Hattan said. “I hope that the theories in the special issue are taken up by the research community to inform qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods studies of reading.
“I also hope that the special
issue encourages researchers to talk across silos and consider how research and theory from both educational psychology and reading, across theoretical paradigms and methodological preferences, can complement each other, with the ultimate goals of improving instruction, developing better assessments, and enhancing students’ reading abilities.”
Following is a Q&A with Hattan. What was the impetus for this special issue?
I came to Carolina in 2023, but this issue is one that’s been in the works since I was at Illinois State where I had been since 2018. In that time, the science of reading has become the focus of state-level policies, instructional shifts, and journalistic endeavors. Given the national and international focus on reading science, Dr. Kendeou and I wanted to amplify theories and research that come from the intersection of educational psychology and reading research. While we’re having these important conversations about reading and the science behind it, this issue and the expansion of perspectives within it may help shift how students, teachers, administrators, and policymakers think about reading — in terms of how reading is defined, assessed, and taught. Why is the educational psychology lens such a valuable one for the science of reading?
Educational psychology is the “science and practices that describe and promote people’s learning, motivation, development, and well-being.” Educational psychologists study learning across domains — such as math or reading — and in varied contexts
Courtney Hattan Assistant Professor
like online environments or K-12 classrooms. Researchers who sit at the intersection of educational psychology and reading research are well-positioned to integrate the science of learning with the science of reading. Educational psychologists can help teachers tailor the science of reading to students’ knowledge and motivation, helping those students learn to read more efficiently and with greater investment.
Are there takeaways for education leaders or policymakers focused on ensuring students learn to read?
A takeaway for education leaders and policymakers, or for anyone invested in discussions around the science of reading is that the science of reading continues to evolve. As new theories and research are developed, our understanding of reading processes, components, contexts, instruction, and assessment should also shift. I hope that we continue to have conversations about how to improve reading instruction.
‘How do I do this?’:
Assessing for the future
Peter Halpin has made a career out of navigating how to improve measurement and assessment — for national surveys and large-scale program evaluations, for state and district education policy, for peer learning and group dynamics within classrooms, and more.
A recent project with UNICEF, required him to create an assessment with global implications that will help to ensure all children have access to quality early childhood development, care, and pre-primary education.
EDGE:
For Peter Halpin, Ph.D., where there’s a measurement, there’s a way.
As a quantitative methodologist and psychometrician, he has made a career out of navigating how to address pressing questions faced by education researchers and policy makers. As an associate professor at the UNC School of Education, he’s continuing to ask pressing questions about how to improve measurement and assessment in settings ranging from national surveys and largescale program evaluations, to state and district education policy, to peer learning and group dynamics within classrooms.
When you can measure something, he said, you can study it, and Halpin’s research has long focused on how measurement can inform policy, particularly when related to early childhood development and equitable access to education across the globe.
“Early childhood development and educational opportunity are something I believe in a lot, especially in the developing world.
I think that’s an important thing to contribute to as a researcher,” he said. “It’s hard to improve on something if you can’t measure it.”
Through his research and his partnerships with groups looking for his expertise on targeted educational measurements, Halpin continues to look for answers.
And, “How do I do this?” is a question he never stops asking himself.
Psychometrics and the child development puzzle
Halpin studied psychology at the University of Calgary, and by the time he was pursuing his Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University, he’d become interested in psychometrics, how psychosocial
constructs — things like achievement, personality or emotions — are quantified, and how the statistical analyses of these constructs can be used to improve lives.
This kind of methodology used to develop educational assessments had been successfully applied to subjects like reading and math. A need for that same level of statistical rigor on the measurement of the softer skills that are often used to track a young child’s development — like social emotional learning or collaborative problem solving — was becoming an increasingly important part of the child development puzzle.
“In education, the stakes for psychometric research are high,” Halpin said. “You have achievement tests and performance assessments, and the field uses the most advanced methods with the most statistical rigor to develop these kinds of measures. I was drawn to that.”
Once Halpin found the intersection of education and psychology in psychometrics, he knew it could be a gamechanger for one of the biggest questions in the field: how do we take the methodological lessons learned from the development of high-stakes assessments and use them to improve measurement across a broader range constructs and settings?
The Edge:
In 2018, UNICEF reached out to Halpin to address that “how” on a global scale. Could he help revise a previous version of an early childhood assessment for use in the developing world?
Goal 4 in the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Target 4.2 of that goal is to ensure that by 2030, all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care, and preprimary education so that they are ready for primary education.
Halpin was being asked to help develop and validate an assessment that could be used to measure one of 4.2’s indicators – “Proportion of children aged 24-59 months who are developmentally on track in health, learning and psychosocial wellbeing, by sex.”
Halpin’s work typically follows two paths. One is the improvement of statistical methodology used in educational measurement, so that the methods work better in a wider range of settings. The other is applying those methods to develop measures that can provide researchers with the tools needed to conduct research on a larger scale. His work with the UN would require drawing from both lines of work.
Peter F. Halpin specializes in psychometrics and educational measurement. His research seeks to develop innovative and rigorous statistical methodology to address pressing issues that arise in educational research, practice, and policy. His applied work has addressed the development, validation, and/ or scoring of assessments of early childhood development, child functioning, childhood adversity, children’s home environment, student collaboration, academic outcomes, instructional practices, and teacher working conditions.
An updated, rigorously designed assessment tool to measure these three factors — health, learning, and psychological well-being — would need to be administered by multiple countries, across multiple languages and cultures. When he thought about this goal, his reaction was a familiar one — how?
“It sounded impossible,” he said. “How can you measure all these broad concepts and create an assessment you can apply across the globe?
“We couldn’t do the kinds of things you’d do in a western context, like adaptive testing or computerbased scoring. It seemed like such a challenge to reliably, fairly, validly measure all these developmental domains while ensuring the resulting survey would be feasible to implement across the globe. But I believed that this was a problem worth solving.”
It was an incredible technical undertaking. Over nearly five years, the team asked their own questions to drill down to the right kinds of data to seek, designed measurements and analyzed data, and they emerged with a group of questions that would provide the least-biased comparisons across cultures. The result was a caregiver survey with 20 questions that focus on health, learning, and psychosocial well-being for children ages 2-5 that can be administered around the world.
With the data collected, UNICEF published the Early Childhood Development Index ECDI2030, which countries can use to monitor progress against the goal. The ECDI2030 is available in multiple languages and includes implementation tools such as interviewer guidelines, trainings, reporting templates, and more.
Halpin co-authored a paper, “Monitoring early childhood development at the population
level: The ECDI2030,” in Early Childhood Research Quarterly in 2024 outlining their process for developing the survey and providing initial results from the survey in Mexico and the State of Palestine.
“Sustainable development goals are about advocating for investment in certain sectors within a country,” Halpin said. “There’s a lot of evidence on how poverty, malnutrition, and other stressors early in life have detrimental effects on lifelong outcomes like employment, income and mental health.
“But we didn’t have good direct measures of early childhood development that could validate theoretical models or advocate for investment in early childcare and related areas. The goal is that, by the end of 2030, all United Nations partners will have administered the survey at least once.
“It has a lot of potential to improve early childhood development outcomes worldwide.”
When answers bring more questions
When Halpin joined the project to develop the SDG indicator, it was classified as Tier 3 — with no methodology for the indicator, and it wasn’t being measured. The indicator is now at Tier 2, which means there is now, in part to his participation, an internationally recognized method for measuring early childhood development across these three factors.
To reach Tier 1, the survey needs to be administered in at least half of the countries where it’s applicable. Data collection has been completed in 12 countries so far and is in progress in another 40. The goal is to reach 80 countries by 2030.
From a psychometrician’s standpoint, Halpin’s part of
Peter Halpin Associate Professor
the project is complete — he helped develop a way to obtain population-level data about early childhood development in international settings.
But, now, he has more questions. How will we explain variation in child development observed across countries? Where should countries invest their limited funds to make the most impact on early childhood development and school readiness? He’ll continue to collaborate with UNICEF on the data as it becomes available.
“These kinds of questions all captivate my interest. And I love being able to say – ‘I’m going to figure out how to measure that.’”
REFERENCES
Halpin, P., de Castro, E. F., Petrowski, N., Cappa, C. (2024). Monitoring early childhood development at the population level: The ECDI2030. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 67, 1-12.
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