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Guest lecture by Prof. Sylva on the project "Effective Provision of Preschool Education"

7/3/2012

Prof. Kathy Sylva is Professor of Educational Psychology in the special field of pedagogics at Oxford University and member of the NEPS Scientific Board. As part of of the 4th meeting of the Scientific Board, she visited the National Educational Panel Study from June 28 to July 2 and gave a lecture entitled “The Effects of Preschool Quality on Children’s Developmental Outcomes at Ages 11 and 14”.

In the photo (from left to right): Prof. Hans-Günther Roßbach, Prof. Kathy Sylva, Prof. Sabine Weinert, Dr. Jutta von Maurice

In her lecture, she reported on experiences and results from the longitudinal project “Effective Provision of PreSchool Education“(EPPE), which examines the effects of preschool education and care on child development. In this project, information from about 3,000 children has been collected since 1997, and their development has been monitored until today.

At first, Prof. Sylva gave an insight into the structure of the EPPE project and reported on the experience of panel care and survey design. In addition to this, she introduced the measures applied to evaluate the quality of institutional care during early childhood, like the ECERS-R (Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale – revised) and ECERS-E (extension), as well as the domestic learning environment. Subsequently, Prof. Sylva explained the impact of this quality on different areas of development, which is still identifiable between the ages of 11 and 14. Besides, Prof. Sylva also pointed out that she continues to be very interested in an active cooperation with the NEPS and invited staff members to Oxford.