Shana E. Rochester

University of Maryland, Baltimore County | UMBC · Sherman Center for Early Learning in Urban Communities

From extensive school closings and abrupt transitions to distance learning in spring 2020 to varied levels of face-to-face, hybrid, and virtual learning in school year (SY) 2020–2021, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has disrupted education across the world. While several studies have examined academic changes that have occurred over the past yea...

The purpose of this chapter is to describe a series of community-based family literacy sessions and the responsive strategies used to modify the sessions for remote instruction to meet the needs of caregivers of young children (birth to age 3). Situated within a two-generation approach to family engagement, the sessions were implemented through a f...

This study used secondary data from the My Teaching Partner‐Math/Science 2013–2016 randomized control trial to explore whether equitable sociocultural classroom interactions (see Curenton et al., 2019) were associated with the skills of 105 four‐ and five‐year‐olds (52% boys; drawn from 20 unique video recordings of preschool teachers/classrooms; 4...

In recent years, policymakers’ and practitioners’ interest in school climate as a contributor to K-12 student learning and classroom processes has increased, both in the US and internationally. However, researchers have not yet examined the influence of school climate on the youngest learners in these contexts — prekindergartners. Using data from t...

Family literacy programmes can take many shapes, and are often focused on training adult caregivers to engage in particular literacy activities with their young children. In this study, through a series of five, two-hour workshops, we instead worked to help families take advantage of opportunities to infuse literacy learning into their daily routin...

This study leverages naturally occurring lotteries for oversubscribed Boston Public Schools prekindergarten program sites between 2007 and 2011, for 3,182 children (M = 4.5 years old) to estimate the impacts of winning a first choice lottery and enrolling in Boston prekindergarten versus losing a first choice lottery and not enrolling on children’s...

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to refine and validate the Assessing Classroom Sociocultural Equity Scale (ACSES), an observation tool for measuring equitable sociocultural interactions in early childhood classrooms (pre-K to Grade 3) with racially minoritized learners (RMLs). Preliminary psychometric information from 142 observati...

In this study, we investigated the impact of past and current service-learning on the civic attitudes of African American college women: 44 students enrolled in either service-learning or non–service-learning courses were given pretests and posttests measuring civic attitudes. Repeated measures analyses of variance were conducted to examine the eff...