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GoPro cameras are all the rage with skateboarders and other extreme athletes who want to capture their exploits for YouTube. The devices aren鈥檛 as well known as accessories for early childhood education research, but they proved to be a perfect fit for an innovative experiment in Columbus, Ohio.

is one of five $4.5-million statewide initiatives funded by , a division of the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Laura Justice, executive director of the Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy at the Ohio State University (OSU), and her team strapped video cameras onto the heads of preschool students so they could monitor the experience of each individual child in the classroom.

鈥淭he early education field is making progress,鈥� Justice says. 鈥淭here is strong consensus around certain practices, with statistically significant data to back it up.鈥� For example, it鈥檚 widely recognized that the classroom is the second most important environment for children, after the home.

At the same time, Justice says, 鈥淲e still don鈥檛 know how to measure quality in the preschool setting.鈥� Is quality a classroom-level phenomenon? Or does it vary from student to student?

Mathematically, she says, it鈥檚 simple to aggregate data and get a classroom score, but a great deal of valuable information gets lost in the process. There鈥檚 a tendency to overcount the students with close relationships to the teacher, who congregate at the front of the class, at the expense of the ones whose attention wanders. Those strap-on GoPro cameras are one way of measuring at the child level.

Student experiences tended to be uniform at the start of class, but, as this graphic visualizes, center time (when students move from station to station; after the dotted line) prompted a great deal of variety in children鈥檚 interactions. Child 鈥淚,鈥� for example, has lots of interactions with the teacher (purple), while 鈥淢鈥� has hardly any (white) and 鈥淟鈥� has the most peer interaction (green).

Chaparro-Moreno says that the findings may support teachers鈥� understanding of the 鈥渓inguistic ecology鈥� of the classroom. Activities that facilitate exchanges with one type of student might not work with another, or not every child in the classroom is exposed to the same activity in the same way. As increase, teachers will need to stay on top of varied responses to instruction and adjust it according to the children鈥檚 needs.

Some broader context for this study, and the urgency of early-child-education research: The nationwide opioid crisis has hit the State of Ohio with particular force. 鈥淥ur communities have been hammered,鈥� Justice says, noting that neonatal abstinence syndrome鈥攖he withdrawal condition caused by prenatal exposure to opioids鈥攊s widespread. (.) She adds that she鈥檚 heard from educators in the community that they鈥檝e never had parents as disengaged as they are right now. It is increasingly common for grandparents to step into the role of primary caregiver. Poverty, of course, compounds the problem. Half the children in one of their current studies reside in households earning less than $20,000 per year.

鈥淚t鈥檚 a whole new era,鈥� Justice says. 鈥淐ommunities need to figure out what they鈥檙e going to do.鈥� She鈥檚 not wrong. Efforts like Early Learning Ohio, and the committed researchers behind them, are undoubtedly part of the solution.

This story originally published on Early Learning Nation and is now archived on 蜜桃影视. Learn more here.