Young Learners' Project
Staffing
E. Care, E. Chan, E.Barringer
Summary
This Australian Research Council funded project is contributed to by members of the Early Learning Development and Inclusion cluster, the Assessment Research Centre and Deakin University. Esther Care is one of four Chief Investigators on this project and Esther Chan is the Australian Postgraduate Award Industry awardee. Esther Care's role in the project is centred around research design and analysis, accompanied by specific interest in literacy development, and relationships between reasoning ability, symbolic play, and standardised measures of literacy achievement. She also supervises both doctoral and masters postgraduate students who contribute to the project, primarily students from the Educational Psychology stream. The doctoral research of Esther Chan and Emelie Barringer is focused around the measurement and development of early literacy. For additional information about the breadth of the project, go to the main Young Learners Project site at http://www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/younglearners/.
The personal and community benefits of achieving high levels of literacy are widely recognised, as are the costs of low achievement. However, some students leave school-education systems without achieving adequate levels, thereby limiting both their employment and life-style options. This project gives attention to the preschool years in which there is potential to develop skills within young children that will guard against future literacy failure. The Young Learners' Project is a six year (2007-2012) research project which aims to identify factors in a four-year-old preschooler’s educational program, home-life or personal characteristics that are positively associated with the development of strong literacy outcomes in the first year of school-education. Through investigating factors within preschool children, their family and educational settings, this project addresses a significant need to ensure all children have the necessary early literacy skills to enable them to achieve to their fullest potential.
Funding Source
This project is funded through an Australian Linkage Project. Chief Investigators from University of Melbourne are Associate Professor Margaret Brown, Associate Professor Esther Care, Professor Bridie Raban and Professor Field Rickards. Partner Investigator is the Australian Scholarships Group.