Sharon Wolf

University of Pennsylvania | UP · Graduate School of Education

Think-alouds are a common HCI usability method where participants verbalize their thoughts while using interfaces. However, their utility in cross-cultural settings, particularly in the Global South, is unclear, where cultural differences impact user interactions. This paper investigates the usability challenges teachers in rural C\^ote d'Ivoire fa...

Children’s early skills are strong predictors of later learning outcomes. Research aiming to disentangle the causal effects of early skills from unmeasured, stable characteristics related to learning throughout development demonstrates that unmeasured confounders explain a large portion of the effects of early skills previously identified. To date,...

This article focuses on a widely used method in developmental and education research in majority world countries: large-scale impact evaluations and randomized controlled trials. We build on our experience implementing such programs in majority world countries, primarily in West Africa, and reflect on our experiences to propose a set of best practi...

While there is a strong link between caregiver mental health, caregiver engagement, and child development, limited research has examined the underlying mechanisms of these associations in Africa. We examined the mediating role of dimensions of caregiver engagement in the association of caregiver psychological distress with children’s academic and s...

The component structure of executive functioning (EF) has been shown to change across development. Empirical research examining this in Sub-Saharan Africa is limited. We report the development of EF component structure with a large sample of Ghanaian children (n = 2,979) followed longitudinally from ages 3 through 12 across six waves. Existing lite...

Parental engagement in stimulating activities and support in both formal and informal learning environments are important for early childhood development. However, little is known about how parental mental health and beliefs about early childhood development shape such investments. We draw on a sample of young children and their primary caregiver f...

High-quality early childhood education provides children with opportunities for engaged learning. Yet there are currently no classroom-level measures that focus specifically on how teachers support engagement in the classroom, a key underlying dimension of playful learning. We introduce the Playful Learning Across the Years (PLAY) observational too...

We report results from a school-randomized trial examining the impacts of a targeted-instruction program (“Teaching at the Right Level”) in Côte d’Ivoire implemented by teachers (N=167 schools, 303 teachers, 3,808 students). The program increased literacy and numeracy outcomes measured by learning levels (d=0.16 and 0.28) and had smaller marginally...

Achievement inequality has been on the rise. Globally, students from disadvantaged backgrounds perform worse academically than their peers, even with equal ability. This represents a significant loss of potential and perpetuates inequality. We organized this interdisciplinary Special Collection to uncover experiences that contribute to achievement...

Communities of practice can improve teachers’ professional development through informal in-person discussions among community members. However, infrastructural challenges pose difficulties in fostering in-person connections, particularly in rural communities in the Global South. The emergence of social media and chatbots has presented an avenue for...

Direct assessments of executive functions (EFs) are increasingly used in research and clinical settings, with a central assumption that they assess “universal” underlying skills. Their use is spreading globally, raising questions about the cultural appropriateness of assessments devised in Western industrialized countries. We selectively reviewed m...

We report midline impacts of a community-randomized cash transfer intervention to 1857 vulnerable mothers in 140 rural cocoa-farming communities of Côte d’Ivoire. Compared to mothers in the comparison group who participated in village savings and loan associations (VSLAs), treatment mothers participated in VSLAs and received 8 € each week for up to...

Direct assessments of executive function (EF) are increasingly used in research and clinical settings, with a central assumption that they assess “universal” underlying skills. Their use is spreading globally, raising questions about the cultural appropriateness of assessments devised in Western, industrialized countries. We reviewed multidisciplin...

Literacy and numeracy are correlated throughout development, however, our understanding of this relation is limited. We explored the predictors of literacy and numeracy covariance (i.e., shared fluency between literacy and numeracy) in children ( N = 1167, girls = 563) in rural Côte d'Ivoire, with specific focus on how developmental timing of instr...

Whether SMS-based nudge interventions can increase parent engagement and improve child learning outcomes across diverse contexts such as rural West Africa is unknown. We conducted a school-randomized trial to test the impacts of an audio or text-message intervention (two messages per week for one school year) to parents and teachers of second and f...

Teacher burnout can directly shape students’ learning environments and outcomes, as burnt-out teachers may provide less emotional support and less positive behaviour management to students. Yet studies of the effects of burnout on student outcomes – particularly non-academic outcomes – are scarce, even more so in low-income countries. This study at...

Background: In Côte d'Ivoire, cocoa farming is a widespread practice in rural households, an occupation with increased risks of depression and anxiety exacerbated by economic instability. We used the Goldberg-18 Depression and Anxiety diagnostic tool to identify predictors of depressive and anxiety symptomatology among a sample of parents in rural...

This study investigated associations between kindergarten teachers' (N = 208) depressive symptoms and students' (Ghanaian nationals, N = 1490, Mage = 5.8) school-readiness skills (early literacy, early numeracy, social-emotional skills, and executive function) across 208 schools in Ghana over one school year. Teachers' depressive symptoms in the fa...

Bringing together research from several lines of inquiry in psychology and education, this paper proposes a conceptual model for understanding how entrenched inequalities embedded within ecological macrosystems play out in the classroom to affect student learning. We consider how implicit teacher beliefs and belief expression affect teacher-student...

Risks associated with school dropout have been studied in West Africa, yet more research is needed to understand what protective factors can be associated with academic resilience (i.e., remaining in school despite facing adversity). At the beginning of our longitudinal study in rural Côte d’Ivoire, 1195 students (Mage=10.75, SDage=1.42) were enrol...

Introduction: Many children in developing countries grow up in environments that lack stimulation, leading to deficiencies in early years of development. Several efficacy trials of early childhood care and education (ECCE) programmes have demonstrated potential to improve child development; evidence on whether these effects can be sustained once p...

Literacy and numeracy are correlated throughout development and require many of the same underlying cognitive skills. We explored the predictors of literacy and numeracy and their covariance (overlap between the two skills) in rural Côte d’Ivoire. Many Ivorian children are old for their grade due to late enrollment and grade repetition, leading to...

Child labor is a pervasive practice; according to the International Labor Organization, there are 160 million child workers worldwide. That figure might, however, greatly underestimate the extent of the issue, since child labor indicators are typically based on surveys with parents – who have no incentive to truthfully disclose that their children...

The role of executive function skills and motivation in supporting children's academic achievement is well-documented, but the vast majority of evidence is from high-income countries. Classrooms in sub-Saharan Africa tend to be large, teacher-driven, and lecture-focused, which may provide extra challenges for children to stay engaged in the learnin...

Remote learning programs were rapidly implemented throughout the COVID-19 pandemic during school closures. We drew on an ongoing longitudinal study of a cohort of children in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana to survey children (N = 1,844), their caregivers, and teachers to examine learning experiences during the ten months of school closures in Gh...

Extant work on the importance of children's executive function (EF) for academic skills typically employs either direct assessments of EF skills or adult reports of children's EF behaviors. Each approach has advantages, yet few studies have examined how different EF measurement approaches distinctly relate to child outcomes. We examined how direct...

Background Children ages 6 to 17 years can accurately assess their own food insecurity, whereas parents are inaccurate reporters of their children's experiences of food insecurity. No globally applicable scale to assess food insecurity of children has been developed and validated. Objective We aimed to develop a globally applicable experience-base...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to extended school closures globally. Access to remote learning opportunities during this time was vastly unequal within and across countries. Higher-quality early childhood education (ECE) can improve later academic outcomes, but longer-term effects during crises are unknown. This study provides the first experimental evi...

Early childhood care and education (ECCE) programs are an important mechanism for supporting foundational skill development and successful progression through later schooling. School readiness assessments that serve as reliable indicators of children’s later educational outcomes are most useful for education systems, but little is known about how w...

Research on the associations among adversity, executive function (EF), and academic outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, where developmental risk factors are more prevalent and impoverished environments are more widespread than in high income countries, is sparse. This study examines the relations among cumulative risk, EF, and learning ou...

Child labor is a pervasive practice; according to the International Labor Organization, there are 160 million child workers worldwide. That figure might, however, greatly underestimate the extent of the issue, since child labor indicators are typically based on surveys with parents – who have no incentive to truthfully disclose that their children...

Early childhood education (ECE) programs are expanding across sub-Saharan Africa. But the quality of these programs, and their effectiveness when implemented at scale, remains unclear. Defining quality is not simple, as learning environments are shaped by cultural values and societal socio-demographics. Framed within sociocultural theory, this stud...

Parental engagement in early childhood education can promote children's development, though context-driven studies examining parental perceptions of and barriers to engagement in low- and middle-income countries are scarce. In this study, we employ mixed methods to focus on parents in the Greater Accra region. Using semi-structured interviews, we e...

The role of executive function skills and motivation in supporting children’s academic achievement is well-documented, but the vast majority of evidence is from high-income countries. Classrooms in low- and middle-income countries tend to be large, teacher-driven, and lecture-focused, which may provide extra challenges for children to stay engaged...

Young children’s access to early childhood education (ECE) is increasing in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), though often without attention to service quality. Monitoring quality requires classroom observations, but most observation tools available were developed in high-income western countries. In this article, we examine key issues in m...

The Covid-19 pandemic led to school closures all over the world, leaving children across diverse contexts without formal education for nearly a year. Remote-learning programs were designed and rapidly implemented to promote learning continuity throughout the crisis. There were inequalities in who was able to access remote-learning during school clo...

Social-emotional (SE) skills grow rapidly during the preschool years and support children’s ability to manage stress and form positive relationships. Yet little research exists on how SE skills develop over time, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. We examined the development of prosocial SE skills with four waves of data over three y...

Research on classroom peer effects has focused nearly exclusively on high-income countries and on academic skills. Little is known about peer effects in low-income countries and whether effects differ under different educational environments (e.g., teacher-directed versus child-centered, conditions of concentrated advantage or disadvantage). Based...

Many children in developing countries do not acquire functional literacy skills despite being in school. We apply a cumulative risk (aggregate over a range of risk) and protection framework to assess Ghanaian kindergarteners’ early academic skills (N = 1,852, M(age) = 5.3 years; 50.2% female), considering how family-level risk factors and classroom...

This study investigated how early childhood education teachers' (N = 444) depressive and anxiety symptoms predicted their professional well-being outcomes and absenteeism over the course of one school year in Ghana. Higher anxiety and depressive symptoms predicted lower job motivation and job satisfaction and higher levels of emotional exhaustion a...

Is income during children’s earliest years a key determinant of long-term child and adult success in the longer run? The research to date, Christopher Wimer and Sharon Wolf write, suggests that it is. Wimer and Wolf review substantial descriptive evidence that income can enhance child development and later adult outcomes, and that it does so most s...

A growing body of research demonstrates the multiple dimensions and dynamism of family income and employment. The metrics of household economic instability and their associations with household characteristics and hardship require further examination in order to compare across studies, subgroups, and historical periods. This paper empirically exami...

Teacher absenteeism and shirking are common problems in developing countries. While monitoring teachers should ameliorate those problems, mobilizing parents to do so often leads to small or even negative effects on learning outcomes. This paper provides causal evidence that this might result from non-monotonic effects of monitoring teachers. Cross-...

The transition from student-teaching to full-time teaching is an understudied period in teachers’ careers. This paper uses a cumulative risk (CR) framework to assess personal and professional risks experienced by 135 student-teachers in rural Ghana during pre-service training and later as newly qualified teachers, and examines how risks relate to t...

The burden of food insecurity is large in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet the evidence-base on the relation between household food insecurity and early child development is extremely limited. Furthermore, available research mostly relies on cross-sectional data, limiting the quality of existing evidence. We use longitudinal data on preschool-aged children...

We examined how exposure to two intervention programmes designed to improve the quality of pre-primary education in Ghana—the Quality Preschool for Ghana project—impacted children’s rate of growth in academic (literacy and numeracy) and non-academic skills (social–emotional and executive function) across two school years. This cluster-randomised tr...

Rationale While teachers are heralded as key drivers of student learning outcomes, little attention has been paid to teachers’ mental health, especially in less-developed countries such as Ghana. Professional background, workplace environment, and personal-life stressors may threaten teachers’ mental health and subsequent effectiveness in the class...

We tested the role of teacher-child closeness in moderating the associations between early childhood adversity, measured as a cumulative risk index, and child outcomes during the kindergarten year. Using the ECLSK:11, a national dataset of kindergarteners in the 2010-11 academic year, we examined three dimensions of executive function (cognitive fl...

Low-cost private schools are expanding across sub-Saharan Africa and are often perceived by parents to be of better quality than public schools. This article assesses the interplay between kindergarten (or preschool) choice, household resources, and children’s school readiness in Ghana. We examine how child, household, and school characteristics pr...

Parental involvement in early childhood education (ECE) is presumed to be important. Yet little research exists on how parents view their role in their child's early schooling, nor on how parent-teacher relationships may shape classrooms. This is particularly true in low-and middle-income countries. This study analyzes interviews with 25 parents an...

We examine second-year impacts of a 1-year pre-primary teacher training and coaching program, delivered with and without parental-awareness meetings, evaluated with a school-level randomized trial. Outcomes included teachers’ professional well-being and classroom practices. Most gains observed during the program year faded out. However, there were...

Governments around the world are increasing investments in early childhood education as a way to promote children’s learning and development. As research grows on the longer-term effects of early educational programs, some have hypothesized that sustained impacts may depend on the quality of children’s subsequent classroom environments and may be m...

Violent discipline can have harmful effects on child development, particularly behavioral outcomes. The majority of research on the topic has been conducted in high-income countries, despite the fact that high rates of physical discipline have been documented across low-and middle-income countries. In this study, we examined three forms of discipli...

Objective: To conduct a scoping review of the literature to describe current conceptualization and measurement of socioeconomic status in pediatric health research. Study design: Four databases were used to identify relevant studies, followed by selection and data extraction. Inclusion criteria for studies were the following: enrolled subjects <...

We used a cluster-randomized, wait-list controlled trial to examine impacts of a school-based social-emotional learning intervention on Congolese students and teachers. Seventy-six school clusters in two groups (A and B) were randomized to treatment or control. The groups differed in geographic location, accessibility, exposure to violence, and ext...

Preschool programs have expanded rapidly in low- and middle-income countries, but there are widespread concerns about whether they are of sufficient quality to promote children’s learning and development. We conducted a large school-randomized control trial (“Quality Preschool for Ghana”—QP4G) of a one-year teacher training and coaching program, wi...

This study explores the personal, professional, and contextual conditions faced by early childhood education (ECE) teachers in under‐resourced settings and how these relate to teacher responsiveness to professional development (PD): namely, teacher attrition (a sign of PD failure when occurring shortly after PD), take‐up of offered PD, adherence to...

Literacy is a powerful tool against poverty, leading to further education and vocational success. In sub‐Saharan Africa, school‐children commonly learn in two languages—African and European. Multiple early literacy skills (including phonological awareness and receptive language) support literacy acquisition, but this has yet to be empirically teste...

We examine how incidence and accumulation of two domains of risk factors--deprivation and threat of harm--predict early childhood development, testing a framework put forth by McLaughlin and Sheridan (2016). Using the ECLSK: 11 (N = 18,200, M = 5.6 years; 48.7% female), a nationally representative sample of kindergarteners, we consider behavioral a...

The majority of evidence on the interplay between academic and non‐academic skills comes from high‐income countries. The aim of this study was to examine the bidirectional associations between Ghanaian children's executive function, social‐emotional, literacy, and numeracy skills longitudinally. Children (N = 3,862; M age = 5.2 years at time 1) wer...

The Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educators Survey (MBI-ES) was administered to a representative sample of 444 kindergarten teachers in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. Two dimensions of burnout were found: Emotional Exhaustion and Lack of Personal Accomplishment. Public and private kindergarten teachers did not have different levels of burnout. Also...

Relatively little research has addressed whether conceptual frameworks of early learning generalize across different national contexts. This article reports on a cross-country measurement invariance analysis of the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA). The IDELA is a direct assessment tool for 3- to 6-year-old children, i...

We assessed the impacts of a teacher professional development program for public and private kindergartens in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. We examined impacts on teacher professional well-being, classroom quality, and children's readiness during one school year. This cluster-randomized-trial included 240 schools (teachers N = 444; children N...

Rates of participation in early childhood education (ECE) programs are on the rise globally, including in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet little evidence exists on the quality of these programs and on the role of classroom quality in predicting learning for young children across diverse contexts. This study uses data from the Greater Accra Region of Ghana...

In recent years, there has been an increase in the demand for and supply of early childhood education (ECE) in low- and middle-income countries. There is also growing awareness that unless ECE is of high quality, children may attend school but not learn. There is a large literature on the conceptualization and measurement of ECE quality in the Unit...

Using a randomized-control trial, this study evaluates a program designed to support Ghanaian kindergarten student-teachers during pre-service training through mentorship and in-classroom training. Several potential barriers to teaching quality and learning outcomes are examined. Findings show that the program improved knowledge and implementation...

The post 2015 context for international development has led to a demand for assessments that measure multiple dimensions of children's school readiness and are feasibly administered in low-resource settings. The present study assesses the construct validity of the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) developed by Save the...

As policy makers and practitioners work to increase access to early childhood education (ECE) and to improve the quality of existing services, it is important that the field consider the perspective of a key stakeholder: parents. This study analyzes 33 interviews with parents of young children in urban Ghana. The interviews investigate (1) what par...

Although there is a wealth of research on the relationship between income level and employment status and child well-being, the relationship between economic instability and health during early childhood is understudied. We examine the associations between the incidence, accumulation, and timing of intrayear employment and income instability with h...

This study examines how parent socioeconomic status (SES) directly and indirectly predicts children's school readiness through pathways of parental investment. Data come from direct assessments with preschool children and surveys with their primary caregivers in Ghana at the start of the 2015-2016 school year (N = 2,137; Mage = 5.2 years). Results...

This paper examines how neighborhood and family poverty predict children's academic skills and classroom behavior at school entry, and whether associations have changed over a period of twelve years spanning the Great Recession. Utilizing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten 1998 and 2010 cohorts and combined with data from the U.S....

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are one of a number of approaches that have been put forth to address income-based early developmental disparities. CCT programs transfer cash to needy households conditioned on their making pre-stipulated investments in their children's health and education, and thus have a dual focus on increasing family income a...

This paper examines the effects of Opportunity New York City–Family Rewards, the first holistic conditional cash transfer (CCT) program evaluated in the USA, on adolescents' mental health and problem behavior (key outcomes outside of the direct targets of the program) as well as on key potential mechanisms of these effects. The Family Rewards progr...

Improving children's learning and development in conflict-affected countries is critically important for breaking the intergenerational transmission of violence and poverty. Yet there is currently a stunning lack of rigorous evidence as to whether and how programs to improve learning and development in conflict-affected countries actually work to b...

Background: children in low-income countries (LICs). Currently, there is little information available on the use of brief screening instruments Increased attention is being paid to identifying and responding to the social-emotional and behavioral needs of in LICs. The lack of psychometrically sound brief assessment tools creates a challenge in det...

This paper examines the effects of one year of exposure to ?Learning to Read in a Healing Classroom? (LRHC) on the reading and math skills of 2nd to 4th grade children in the low-income and conflict-affected Democratic Republic of the Congo. LRHC consists of two primary components: Teacher Resource Materials that infuse social-emotional learning pr...

We evaluated a program to improve literacy instruction on the Kenyan Coast using training workshops, semi-scripted lesson plans and weekly text message support for teachers to understand its impact on students' literacy outcomes and on the classroom practices leading to those outcomes. The evaluation ran from the beginning of Grade 1 to the end of...

Governments in sub-Saharan Africa have made marked strides in increasing school enrolment. Yet attendance and completion rates of both primary and secondary school remain low, particularly for girls. This study examines the reasons children report missing school in a sample of Ghanaian primary and junior secondary school students in peri-urban Accr...