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Dana Charles McCoy is the Marie and Max Kargman associate professor in Human Development and Urban Education Advancement at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her work focuses on understanding the ways that poverty-related risk factors in children's home, school, and neighborhood environments affect the development of their cognitive and socioemotional skills in early childhood. She is also interested in the development, refinement, and evaluation of early intervention programs designed to promote positive development and resilience in young children, particularly in terms of their self-regulation and executive function. McCoy's research is centered in both domestic and international contexts, including Brazil, Peru, Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia. She has a particular interest in interdisciplinary theory, causal methodology, and ecologically valid measurement. Before joining the HGSE faculty, McCoy served as an NICHD National Research Service Award post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. She graduated with an A.B. in psychological and brain sciences from Dartmouth College and received her Ph.D. in applied psychology with a concentration in quantitative analysis from New York University. McCoy's work has been published in journals such as Developmental Psychology, Child Development, Pediatrics, and The Lancet. She has presented her work to audiences around the world, including the WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank.
Dr. McCoy will clean data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) collected since 2009. These data will be used to estimate the proportion of 3- and 4-year-old childrens development in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) achieving basic developmental milestones according to the Early Childhood Development Index(ECDI) collected in the MICS and DHS. The team will also estimate the proportion of 2- to 4-yearolds exposed to early learning opportunities (e.g., reading, counting, singing, playing) by an adult in the home using the MICS and DHS. Finally, they will calculate estimates of the proportion of 3- and 4-year-old children attending early learning or education programs outside of the home using these data sources. They will provide each of these estimates by country,examining trends over time. In addition, they will provide estimates of disparities in ECDI scores, home-based learning opportunities, and educational opportunities within countries by child gender, residential area (urban/rural), maternal education, and household wealth. Across countries, they will examine disparities in these characteristics by region and country-level wealth.
Contexts inside and outside of school walls as predictors of differential effectiveness in preschool professional development (2016-2019)
This project aims to understand the conditions under which professional development programs are more versus less effective. Specifically, we explore whether variation in treatment effects in the NCRECE professional development study is predicted by characteristics within school walls (e.g., the composition of students and teachers), as well as those outside of school walls. As part of this work, we will adapt an existing Systematic Social Observation (SSO) protocol to assess the characteristics of center neighborhoods and school grounds using publicly available neighborhood imaging.
This project is conducted in collaboration with Dr. Terri Sabol and her research team at Northwestern University and is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences.
Assessing the impact of socio-emotional learning programing in Brazil (2016-2018)
This study aims examines the efficacy of a culturally adapted social-emotional learning curriculum — Programa Compasso (PC) — in Brazilian primary schools. Using a three-arm cluster randomized control trial, we assess the impact of PC on children's social-emotional skills (e.g., executive function, emotion regulation, social competence) and academic outcomes (e.g., literacy, math scores). To address questions about scalability, we will also explore whether there are differences in the effectiveness of PC based on the level of training and support provided to teachers.
This study is being completed with support from the Harvard Lemann Fund, and involves a collaboration with Dr's. Vladimir Ponczek and Cristine Campos de Xavier Pinto from the São Paulo School of Economics and representatives from the Instituto Vila Educação.
Developing and disseminating the most effective tools for measuring population-level development for children under age 3 (2016)
The aim of this project is to develop the first population-level measure of early childhood development for children from birth to age three. This tool, called the Caregiver Reported Early Development Index (CREDI), quantifies children's motor, cognitive/language, and social-emotional skills and has been pilot tested in 16 countries. Final publication of the CREDI is scheduled for the end of 2016.
A long-term follow-up of the Chicago School Readiness Project (2016-2019)
The Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) is a randomized control-trial intervention lead by Dr. C. Cybele Raver at NYU. CSRP aims to improve low-income preschoolers' emotional and behavioral adjustment through a comprehensive, classroom-based intervention in Head Start. Through additional funding from the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Institutes of Health, we will follow CSRP participants into high school to study their long-term social-emotional and academic outcomes.
Measuring child reactivity and regulation in the early childhood classroom setting (2016-2017)
This project aims to develop an ecologically valid, observer-rated measure of children's executive function and regulation-related skills for use in early childhood classroom settings. We also aim to determine whether this new measure is sensitive to second-to-second changes in children's physiological arousal (e.g., skin conductance, heart rate, movement), as measured using a wearable but non-intrusive autonomic sensing device.
These aims will be achieved via a collaboration between Dana McCoy and Stephanie Jones at HGSE, and Deb Leong and Elena Bodrova of Tools of the Mind. This work is funded by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child and the HGSE Dean's Venture Fund.
The do’s and don'ts of empowering young children in the face of climate change
McCoy's research focuses on understanding how poverty-related risk factors in children's environments affects development