Rebecca Smees

University of Sussex · School of Psychology

Sensory sensitivities in children are found not only across a range of childhood disorders, but also within the general population. The current exploratory study examines the reliability and validity of a novel parent-report measure which assesses sensory-sensitivities in both typically developing and non-typically developing children. This 42-item...

This paper discusses the challenges facing a national evaluation of a major early years intervention programme, Sure Start Children’s Centres (SSCCs), that was rolled out across England in the first decade of the 21st century. The paper describes the rationale for the evaluation’s mixed methods research design and the ecological theoretical approac...

Creative orientation is the extent to which different individuals are drawn toward creative activities (e.g., art, music). We know relatively little about child‐level creative orientation given certain testing limitations. Adult tools often measure time spent engaged in creative pursuits, but this method is unsuitable for children because their fre...

Objective Misophonia is an unusually strong aversion to a specific class of sounds – most often human bodily sounds such as chewing, crunching, or breathing. A number of studies have emerged in the last 10 years examining misophonia in adults, but little is known about the impact of the condition in children. Here we set out to investigate the well...

Home learning environments prior to school are well-known predictors of educational trajectories but research has neglected children aged under three. The new Toddler Home Learning Environment (THLE) scale is one response and this paper investigates its reliability and validity. The THLE is an adaptation of the Preschool HLE (PHLE) measure develope...

Synaesthesia is a neurodevelopmental trait that causes unusual sensory experiences (e.g., perceiving colours when reading letters and numbers). Our paper represents the first evidence that synaesthesia can impact negatively on children's well-being, and that there are likely to be important mental health co-morbidities for children with synaesthesi...

Previous research into personality and synaesthesia has focused on adult populations and yielded mixed results. One particular challenge has been to distinguish traits associated with synaesthesia, from traits associated with the ways in which synaesthetes were recruited. In the current study we addressed recruitment issues by testing randomly samp...

Background: Home learning environments prior to school are known predictors of educational trajectories. However, existing evidence concentrates on home learning environments that are experienced by children aged 3 years and up. In response, this paper reports on the validity and reliability of the Toddler Home Learning Environment (THLE) scale. T...

Cognitive benefits associated with grapheme-colour synaesthesia in adults are well documented, but far less is known about whether such benefits might arise in synaesthetes as children. One previous study on a very small group of randomly sampled child synaesthetes found cognitive benefits in short-term memory and processing speed (the ability to q...

Understanding variations in children's well-being is key to addressing inequalities. It is especially useful to understand children's own perspectives, although there is a lack of short questionnaires using simple language which can be administered to younger children (or in situations when testing-time is limited). Here we first present the VSWQ-C...

This study examined how colored educational tools improve children’s numerosity (“number sense”) and/or mathematics. We tested children 6–10 years (n = 3,236) who had been exposed to colored numbers from the educational tools Numicon (Oxford University Press, 2018) or Numberjacks (Ellis, 2006), which map colors to magnitudes or Arabic numerals, res...

UK Sure Start Children’s Centres (SSCCs) aim to lessen behavioural disorders yet we lack evidence concerning how this is achieved. This study evaluates one possible mechanism: improved home learning environments (HLEs). Data come from a longitudinal study of 2,568 families and children recruited at mean age 14 months from 117 SSCCs in England in 20...

Developmental grapheme-colour synaesthesia is a rare condition in which colours become automatically paired with letters or digits in the minds of certain individuals during childhood, and remain paired into adulthood. Although synaesthesia is well understood in younger adults almost nothing is known about synaesthesia in aging. We present the firs...

“How far does engagement with children’s centres (CCs) promote better outcomes for families, parents, and children?” Impact is explored using multilevel statistical models that predict child, parent, and family outcomes when children were age 3 years plus, controlling for effects of other influences such as background characteristics. ‘Engagement’...

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/485346/DFE-RR495_Evaluation_of_children_s_centres_in_England__the_impact_of_children_s_centres.pdf

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/485362/DFE-RR494_Children_s_centres_changes_in_resourcing_and_characteristics.pdf

Since 1997 the Effective Pre - school, Primary and Secondary Education Project (EPPSE) has investigated academic and social - behavioural development in a national sample of approximately 3,000 children from the ages of 3+ years to age 16+. This report summarises some of the main findings about students’ views of thei r secondary schools based on a...

Since 1997 the Effective Pre - school, Primary and Secondary Education Project (EPPS E) has investigated academic and social - behavioural development in a national sample of approximately 3,000 children from the ages of 3+ years to age 16+. This report details the post 16 destinations of the EPPSE students six months after they left compuls ory ed...

Using data from the longitudinal EPPSE study, this report provides an account of the latest findings on the analysis of students’ dispositions in Year 11 of secondary education. It covers Mental well-being, School enjoyment, Disaffected behaviour, General Academic self-concept and students’ relationships with their peers (Resistance to Peer Influen...

The Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE 3-16+) project is a longitudinal study, funded by the Department for Education (DfE), that has tracked the academic progress and social-behavioural development of approximately 3,000 children from their early years (age 3/5) to their early post age 16 destinations. During 17 years the...

Book synopsis: The Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education study (EPPSE) has investigated the academic and social-behavioural development of a national sample of approximately 3,000 children across different phases of education, from the age of 3+ years to age 16. This Research Brief focuses on the relationships between a range of ind...

Book synopsis: The Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education study (EPPSE) has investigated the academic and social-behavioural development of a national sample of approximately 3,000 children across different phases of education, from the age of 3+ years to age 16. This Research Brief focuses on the relationships between a range of ind...

Book synopsis: This report focuses on a large number of teenagers poised at the start of young adulthood. Most have continued after compulsory schooling to study further academic qualifications (typically ‘AS/A’ levels), some were following more vocational routes, and a small number were NEET (‘not in education, employment or training’). All are dr...

The Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) project explores the impact of preschool centre provision on young children’s cognitive progress and their social/behavioural development. The EPPE study was commissioned and funded by the DfES. The research has tracked a large sample of over 2700 young children and analysed their cognitive att...

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/224096/DFE-RR297.pdf

Since 1997 the Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education project (EPPE/EPPSE) has investigated the attainment and development of approximately 3,000 children from pre-school to the end of Key Stage 3 (KS3). This current phase of the research explored how different phases of education, especially secondary school, are related to students...

The Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education Project (EPPSE) has investigated the cognitive and social-behavioural development of approximately 3,000 children from the age of 3+ years since 1997. This Research Brief focuses on the relationships between a range of child, family, home, pre-, primary and secondary school characteristics a...

This questionnaire is designed to be completed by the centre leader. There are two types of questionnaire: one designed for completion by the centre leader (this one), and the other for completion by two or three other members of the senior leadership team (SLT). This centre leader questionnaire asks the leader to respond to statements reflecting h...

This questionnaire is designed to be completed by two or three members of the senior leadership team (SLT). There are two types of questionnaire: one designed for completion by members of the SLT other than the centre leader (this one) and the other for completion by the centre leader. The centre leader questionnaire asks the leader to respond to s...

The Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education Project (EPPSE) has investigated the academic and social-behavioural development of approximately 3,000 children from the age of 3+ years since 1997. This Report and Research Brief focuses on the relationships between a range of child, family, home, pre-, primary and secondary school charact...

Since 1997 the Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education project (EPPE/EPPSE) has investigated the attainment and development of approximately 3,000 children from preschool to the end of Key Stage 3 (KS3). This current phase of the research explored how different phases of education, especially secondary school, are related to students’...

The Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education Project (EPPSE) has investigated the academic and social-behavioural development of approximately 3,000 children from the age of 3+ years since 1997. This Report and Research Brief reports on students’ dispositions when they were age 14 (Year 9) in six main areas: ‘enjoyment of school’, ‘aca...

The Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education Project (EPPSE) has inves tigated the academic and social behavioural (+ in the later stages the affective) development of approximately 3,000 children from the age of 3+ years since 1997. This report presents the results of analyses related to student’s experiences in Year 9 (age 14), with...

Pupil attitude data have frequently been utilised in school effectiveness and improvement research to examine aspects of a school’s educational processes, culture and ethos. However, a related approach is based on the belief that the views and attitudes of pupils are important outcomes of schooling in their own right, in addition to academic or voc...

In studies of child development, the combined effect of multiple risks acting in unison has been represented in a variety of ways. This investigation builds upon this preceding work and presents a new procedure for capturing the combined effect of multiple risks. A representative sample of 2,899 British children had their cognitive development meas...

The Effective Pre-school and Primary Education Project 3-11 (EPPE 3-11) is a largescale longitudinal study of the impact of pre-school and primary school on children’s developmental outcomes, both cognitive and social/behavioural. The study has been following children from the start of pre-school (at age 3 years plus) through to the end of primary...

A range of information about pupils’ self-perceptions and views of their primary school were collected as part of the Effective Provision of Pre-school and Primary Education (EPPE 3-11) Project. The EPPE 3-11 study is funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and has followed children’s development from pre-school throu...

The Effective Pre-school and Primary Education Project 3-11 (EPPE 3-11) is a largescale longitudinal study of the impact of pre-school and primary school on children’s developmental outcomes, both cognitive and social/behavioural. The study has been following children from the start of pre-school (at age 3 years plus) through to the end of prima...

This report presents the results of analyses of pupils’ self-perceptions in primary school. It is part of the longitudinal Effective Pre-school and Primary Education 3-11 (EPPE 3-11) research project funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). The focus of this report is pupils’ self-perceptions in Year 5 (age 10) in four...

The Effective Pre-School and Primary Education 3-11 (EPPE 3-11) project investigates the impact of preschool, primary school and family on a range of outcomes for a national sample of approximately 2,800 children in England between the ages of 3 and 11 years. This Research Brief presents findings on pupils’ Self-perceptions (‘Enjoyment of school’...

This article outlines the research design of a large‐scale, longitudinal research study in England intended to describe and explore variations in teachers' work, lives and their effects on pupils' educational outcomes. The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and incorporated into the Teaching and Learning Research Progra...

Education in the early years is a key element in the Government's current strategy. Recently, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) funded a major study of Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE). The Early Years Transition and Special Educational Needs (EYTSEN) Project developed from the EPPE research and was also funded by the...