Information about the international conference June 12th & 13th 2024
About the project
The first objective of the project is to further design, implement and assess the effects of the OEES intervention in preschools serving children from 1 to 6 years old. The intervention includes three components:
- Practice-based professional development
- Pedagogical content to further enhance preschool practitioners’ capacity to support child participation, play and exploration in the center; and
- Collaboration between teachers and parents to further create continuity in children’s language learning experiences.
The participating preschools will be randomly assigned into an intervention and comparison group. The intervention group will gradually implement the intervention components over a period of two years. The comparison group will try out parts of the professional development model within the same timeframe. We will assess the immediate effects of the OEES intervention on the quality of caretaker–child interactions and child language learning. In addition, we will investigate implementation processes that focus on the conditions for change and user perspectives to better understand the link between the system-level developments and child language development.
The second objective of the OEES project is to strengthen the capacity of the pedagogical psychological counseling service and the preschool leadership to collaboratively work with system-level improvements to support children’s language learning in multiethnic preschools. We aim to achieve this through a university – pedagogical psychological counseling service – preschool sector partnership that involves user groups in the development, implementation, and evaluation of the project. We will investigate whether and what parts of the system-level developments are continued after the intervention period, and we will address whether potential immediate effects on child language learning are sustained.
Collaboration
This collaborative and knowledge-building project encompasses the Department of Education and the Center for Science Education at the University of Oslo, and the preschool leadership in five city districts and the pedagogical-psychological counseling service in Oslo municipality. The project includes international research collaborations with experts from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and University of California Irvine. The project also cooperate with the scientific unit Engagelab.
Funding
The OEES is financed for a period of four years by the Research Council of Norway (from April 2021) and the Program for childhood and education, Oslo municipality
