Jessica Mercer Young

Education Development Center · Early Childhood

All children, including emergent multilingual learners (EMLs), are primed to engage with science from an early age. Yet preschool educators traditionally have not been offered in-depth professional learning (PL) in science, how to teach it effectively to young EMLs, and how to communicate its importance to families. This quasi-experimental study in...

Considered a core component of children’s foundational cognitive development, early mathematics experiences can support children’s long-term academic success. Teachers and families alike share the common goal of wanting children to succeed developmentally, socially, and academically. Given the importance of early mathematics to academic success in...

This poster spotlights our Young Mathematicians project at EDC, which has partnered with teachers and families who have historically been denied access and equitable opportunities to engage in high-quality STEM experiences to develop over 50 math games for children 3 to 6 years old. We have found that family engagement with YM’s math materials prom...

Collecting and organizing data to understand and answer real-world questions is an increasingly important skill in our current world. Fostering data collection and analysis (DCA) skills in young children leverages key mathematics skills as well as the data representation, visualization, and interpretation skills of computational thinking (CT), culm...

Differences in children's mathematics knowledge are evident at kindergarten entry, favoring children who have greater access to economic resources. Fostering preschoolers’ mathematics learning at home and in classroom settings, through games and other developmentally appropriate activities, is of great interest to educators, early childhood leaders...

The Young Mathematicians (YM) program, developed by the Education Development Center (EDC), has partnered with early childhood programs for almost a decade to research and develop early childhood mathematics games and educator professional development. The YM intervention program aims to promote the mathematics skills of young children from under-r...

To support preschool children's learning about data in an applied way that allows children to leverage their existing mathematical knowledge (i.e. counting, sorting, classifying, comparing) and apply it to answering authentic, developmentally appropriate research questions with data. To accomplish this ultimate goal, a design-based research approac...

Data collection and analysis (DCA) skills apply mathematical knowledge, such as counting, sorting, and classifying, to investigations of real-world questions. This pursuit lays the foundation for learners to develop flexible problem-solving skills with data. This pilot study tested a preschool intervention intended to support teachers in promoting...

My team at Education Development Center (EDC) prioritizes broadly sharing our research with early childhood teachers and the public. Thus, this research-to-practice article appears on the website of the National Association for the Education Young Children. In the article, we share findings from our ongoing work with early childhood and elementary...

This poster provides a quick look at the Young Mathematicians program. It was presented at the 2021 National Science Foundation Discovery Research PreK-12 Principal Investigators' convening.

Published in the National Association for the Education of Young Children journal "Teaching Young Children," this article guides early childhood teachers in using books to help children understand how to identify, label, and describe two different types of patterns: repeating and growing.

Published in the National Association for the Education of Young Children's journal "Teaching Young Children," this article is the first in a series about math games and how they support preschooler math readiness.

In this brief presentation, we share the theoretical underpinnings of our Young Mathematicians program--which uses games to help all children become confident mathematics learners. We describe mathematics mindset, the importance of early mathematics learning, and the link between adults' feelings about mathematics and children's early mathematics l...

This research to practice paper summarizes a study of Supporting Preschoolers with Language Differences (SPLD), a professional development (PD) program aimed at building the capacity of preschool teachers to support the language and literacy development of young English learners (ELs). It describes practical strategies and approaches included in th...

This study details the implementation and evaluation of a professional development (PD) intervention program in language and literacy for early childhood teachers using a mixed method, quasi-experimental study design. The program, Supporting Children with Language Differences (SPLD), was offered over a six-month period to 19 teachers in a federally...

Can district-led elementary mathematics improvement efforts increase student achievement? We describe a mixed methods, National Science Foundation-funded project that studied 12 districts’ implementation of K-5 mathematics materials. In light of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, this study suggests lessons about the use of coherent i...

This poster discusses a four-year National Science Foundation-funded project that Investigated the implementation of elementary mathematics materials: Everyday Mathematics and Investigations in Number, Data, and Space. The research team's hypothesis was that school districts that have greater coherence in their support for curriculum implementation...

In this paper, we describe the concurrent and sequential mixed methods and multilevel design we used to study 12 districts' implementation of the elementary mathematics materials Everyday Mathematics (EDM) and Investigations in Number, Data and Space (INV). This study, Coherent Implementation of Mathematics Instructional Materials, was a National S...

This chapter highlights the theoretical foundations that have guided research on mother-child interaction. It discusses the physical and behavioral characteristics of children with Down syndrome (DS) that influence their social interactions, then reviews research findings on mother-child interaction in these dyads. It discusses research conducted d...

To address questions about the relationship between preK expansion and the supply and quality of child care available to families with lower incomes, researchers at Education Development Center (EDC) and Rutgers University conducted a four-year, mixed-methods study. The research was divided into three distinct areas of inquiry. In two different sta...

A team of researchers from Education Development Center engaged in a set of rigorous activities to study the provisional Massachusetts Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) Standards and develop recommendations for revisions to the standards. The EDC Study Team worked closely with the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care (EEC...

The Massachusetts’ Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) Pilot was successfully launched by the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) in the Spring of 2010, and a team from Education Development Center (EDC) conducted an evaluation of the Pilot. This implementation evaluation report by the EDC team documents the accompli...

Two studies investigated the effects of a storytelling-context for teaching geometry skills to kindergarten girls and boys. In Study 1, the story+geometry intervention consisted of an adventure story teaching geometry through part-whole-relations puzzles. Learning was assessed through transfer of skills, using a pre-/post design comparing intervent...

In this chapter, the authors provide an overview of research on the relationship of block play to the spatial and mathematics skills of young children, with a focus on gender differences.

This study examined mother-child interaction as a predictor of mastery motivation (i.e., persistence on a problem-posing task) in 3-year-old children who were born premature and had either motor impairment or developmental delay (n = 34). Two aspects of mother-child interaction were hypothesized to predict for mastery motivation: response to child'...

This article describes a unique supplementary program that teaches early childhood mathematics (Pre-K to Grade 2), through a series of six problem-solving adventure stories. The mathematics concepts are taught to the children through the medium of oral storytelling sagas in an integrated approach that addresses language arts as well as early childh...