Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal (PhD04), an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, won a highly competitive Young Scholars Award from the Foundation for Child Development. She is one of the early-career scholars selected in 2010 for this prestigious fellowship that supports researchers to conduct research about the early education, health and well-being of children in immigrant families.
Basic information is lacking about these children, who comprise the nation's fastest-growing child population, according to the Foundation. FCD provides fellowship support through its Changing Faces of America's Children - Young Scholars Program to support young scholars to conduct research on the challenges facing immigrant families and their children.
Votruba-Drzal's research study focuses on examining the early childhood education and care (ECEC) experiences of immigrant children. In her project, entitled "Early Education and Care Experiences and School Readiness of Children of Immigrants," she will examine the relation between characteristics of immigrant children's educational settings and the transition to kindergarten. She will also investigate how immigrant parents select early childhood education settings for their children.
"Advanced educational attainment is a key to upward mobility for children of immigrants; however, they often start school with fewer of the skills that are important for early academic success," Votruba-Drzal says. These disparities are especially concerning because they and can grow more severe and become harmful in adolescence and adulthood.
"In order to improve immigrant families' access to high-quality and dependable ECEC, we must better understand the factors that influence families' selection of ECEC settings," says Votruba-Drzal, a graduate of the Human Development and Social Policy doctoral program. "From the perspective of child development, it is imperative to understand how ECEC arrangements influence the development of children of immigrants through the transition to formal schooling. More broadly, the results will help to inform early educational policy and practice and efforts to diminish inequalities related to parental nativity status."
Her study uses data from an extensive longitudinal study, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort. This multi-method study followed a nationally representative sample of U.S. children from birth through the transition to kindergarten, including a sizable sample of 2,550 children of immigrants from diverse countries/regions.