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The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) is a major source of information on Head Start programs and the children and families they serve. Since 1997, FACES has conducted studies in a nationally representative sample of Head Start programs, but has historically not included Region XI, whose programs are designed to serve predominantly AI/AN children and families. AI/AN FACES, is designed to fill this information gap.

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), in collaboration with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has initiated this project to explore...

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), has contracted with Mathematica Policy Research to launch the Assessing the Implementation and Cost of High-Quality ECE (ECE-ICHQ) project...

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency Capstone project, led by MDRC, will produce a final synthesis report on the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project and conduct related dissemination activities. While several reports will be produced under the BIAS contract, including a report describing findings from the knowledge development phase and a site specific report for each of the eight sites where behavioral interventions are tested...

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project demonstrated that applying behavioral insights to challenges facing human services programs can improve program operations and outcomes at relatively low cost. The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency Next Generation project will continue ACF’s exploration of the application of behavioral science to the programs and target populations of ACF. This next generation project, launched in September 2015...

Many human services programs are designed such that individuals must make active decisions and go through a series of steps in order to benefit from them — from deciding which programs to apply for, to completing forms, attending meetings, showing proof of eligibility, and arranging travel and child care. Program designers often implicitly assume that individuals will carefully consider options and make decisions that maximize their well-being. But over the past 30 years...

Many human services programs are designed such that individuals must make active decisions and go through a series of steps in order to benefit from them — from deciding which programs to apply for, to completing forms, attending meetings...

The Center for Early Care and Education Research: Dual Language Learners (CECER-DLL) is a cooperative agreement awarded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The primary goal of the Center...

The National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families generates new research and translates research across three priority areas—poverty reduction and self-sufficiency, healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood, and early care and...

The Urban Institute was awarded a contract that will support the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in learning from high-quality, rigorous research, to be conducted by Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) lead agencies in partnership with researchers, on the implementation of policies responding to the goals of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act of 2014...

OPRE’s child and family development work includes research and evaluation projects primarily concerned with child care and child welfare. This portfolio additionally examines the culturally diverse experiences of children and families served by ACF programs.

Research focuses on five major areas, including: Child Care, Head Start and Early Head Start, Child Welfare, Cultural Diversity, Cross-Cutting Early Childhood Research...

The overall purpose of the Child Care Administrative Data Analysis Cooperative Agreements is to support Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) Lead Agencies in conducting rigorous, policy-relevant research that primarily involves the analysis of child care...

The CCDF Policies Database is a source of information on the detailed policies used to operate child care subsidy programs under the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). Since 2008, The Urban Institute has collected, coded, and disseminated the CCDF...

The Child Care and Early Education Policy and Research Analysis Project is a contract awarded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation to Child Trends. The purpose of this contract is to support the provision of expert...

Child Care & Early Education Research Connections (RC) promotes high-quality research in child care and early education and the use of research findings in policymaking. This easy-to-use website offers a free, comprehensive, and up-to-date collection of scholarly research, policy briefs, government reports, datasets, and instruments from a wide range of disciplines and sources. Interactive tools allow users to refine searches, download full text documents, build customized tables...

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) awarded eight cooperative agreements in fiscal year 2016 for the first cohort of Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Implementation Research and Evaluation Planning Grants: Phase I/Cohort 1. These cooperative agreements are intended to help CCDF Lead Agencies plan for an evaluation of the implementation of regulations in response to the goals of the CCDBG Act of 2014. Projects are led by CCDF Lead Agencies....

The Child Care Research Partnership grants support research on child care policy issues conducted by state agencies, researchers and other organizations in partnership. Partnerships must include the State agency that administers the Child Care and...

Funds for Child Care Research Scholars grants are available to support dissertation research on child care policy issues in partnership with State Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) lead agencies.

Since 2000, Congress has appropriated about $10 million per year of CCDF discretionary funds to be used for child care research and evaluation. These funds have supported projects that add to our knowledge about the efficacy of child care subsidy policies and programs in supporting employment and self-sufficiency outcomes for parents, and providing positive learning and school readiness outcomes for children. Previously funded Child Care Research Scholars have made significant contributions to the child care policy research field.

To ensure that research is responsive to the changing needs of low-income families, partnerships between the graduate student, their mentor and the State CCDF lead agency are essential. This partnership ensures the research will be policy-relevant and is the foundation that fosters skills necessary to build the graduate student's career trajectory of successful partnership-building and contributions to the policy and scientific communities.

The purpose of this project is to leverage implementation science to close the gap between knowledge and practice in early childhood programs. ACF is interested in understanding how child care and Head Start programs can improve the quality of services received by young children, and also how such quality improvement can be institutionalized to create a culture of ongoing quality improvement at the program level...

The Design Options for Home Visiting Evaluation (DOHVE) project supports the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program and includes two key components...

The goal of this project was to develop a new measure that will assess the quality of child care settings, specifically the quality of caregiver-child interactions for infants and toddlers in non-parental care. The new measure is sensitive to the...

The purpose of this task order is to expand the knowledge base on early childhood development and programming by supporting secondary data analysis using archived datasets funded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE)...

The overall goal the Early Head Start University Partnerships research grant program is to contribute to the knowledge base regarding how Early Head Start (EHS) and other early care and education programs can promote and improve early child development by supporting both parenting and caregiving. Researchers are working in partnership with one or more EHS center-based programs and/or EHS-Child Care Partnership programs...

The Early Learning Mentor Coach Study (ELMC) was a descriptive study of professional development grants awarded competitively to Head Start programs. The Head Start Early Learning Mentor and Coach grants were funded in September of 2010 to 131...

This project will implement a redesigned Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), a nationally...

The goals of the Head Start Health Manager Descriptive Survey include 1) to describe the characteristics of Health Managers and related staff in Head Start (HS) and Early Head Start (EHS) programs; 2) to identify the current landscape of health...

ACF’s Hispanic Research Work Group brings together experts in a wide range of content areas relevant to ACF’s mission to assist ACF/OPRE in identifying research priorities concerning low-income, Hispanic families.

The goal of the Home Visiting Career Trajectories project is to examine the state of home visiting careers to understand how people enter the field, the perceived and actual pathways for professional advancement and tenure, and reasons for field attrition.  This work aims to address the paucity of data on the home visiting workforce that can be used to learn how to best recruit and retain high quality staffThe project has two purposes. First, it will provide information on the state of the...

OPRE plays a central role in advancing understanding and disseminating knowledge about research and evaluation methods and tools that are, or could be, used to enhance knowledge about program and policy effectiveness. The purpose of the Methods...

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation worked in conjunction with the Office of Head Start and the Employment and Training Administration to develop, pilot and implement a Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) Supplement to the National...

The Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation-Strong Start (MIHOPE-Strong Start) will evaluate the effectiveness of two evidence-based home visiting models to improve birth and health outcomes for expectant families enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The two models that will be studied in MIHOPE-Strong Start are Healthy Families America (HFA) and Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), both of which have...

The National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) documents the nation's current utilization and availability of early care and education (including school-age care), in order to deepen the understanding of the extent to which families'...

The Network of Infant Toddler Researchers (NITR) was founded by OPRE in 2011 in order to bring together leading researchers studying pregnancy and the first three years of life. OPRE convened NITR to answer questions of interest to ACF and programs...

The Quality of Caregiver-Child Interactions for Infants and Toddlers (Q-CCIIT) observation tool was developed between 2010-2014 to assess the quality of early care and education (ECE) settings for infants and toddlers in non-parental care—specifically, the support that caregivers provide for the social-emotional, language and literacy, and cognitive development of infants and toddlers. The Professional Development Tools to Improve the Quality of Infant and Toddler Care...

This project will examine associations between the quality of early care and education settings and child outcomes, asking whether certain thresholds of quality or dosage need to be met or particular aspects of quality need to be present before...

This project, launched in September 2015, will investigate how existing work on racial and ethnic disparities could inform more accurate identification and interpretation of ethnic and racial differences in programs administered by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF).

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation is carrying out several research projects for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) related to two-generation approaches. Two-generation approaches combine intensive, high quality, adult-focused services with intensive, high quality, child-focused programs. Although there is growing interest in this area, more evidence is needed about how these models achieve their goals or if it is possible to implement them at scale...

The eighteen projects funded under the grant program for Secondary Analyses of Data on Child Care and Early Education are conducting  analyses of existing data sets  to answer critical research questions that will inform both policymakers and future research. Topics include associations between subsidy receipt and long-term child achievement, access to early care and education for low-income families, and links between subsidy rates and child care quality...

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation awarded a grant to ICF International to fund the launch and maintenance of the Self-Sufficiency Research Clearinghouse (SSRC) as a strategic part of OPRE's goal...

This contract was awarded to Mathematics Policy Research and will explore how coaching practices are implemented and vary in early care and education (ECE) classrooms serving children supported by Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) subsidies or Head Start grants. This project aims to advance understanding of how core features of coaching are implemented in ECE classrooms, how they may vary by key contextual factors...

The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) is undertaking a descriptive study to document the approaches and strategies utilized by tribal organizations awarded cooperative agreements under the Coordination of Tribal TANF and Child Welfare...

The Study of Early Head Start-Child Care (EHS-child care) Partnerships will assess the knowledge base and develop a theory of change model for understanding EHS‐child care partnerships to support quality improvement, child development, and family....

OPRE has commissioned a series of four inter-related reports titled Self-Regulation and Toxic Stress from a team at the Center for Child and Social Policy at Duke University. The team is also preparing a brief focused on implications of these reports for adolescence and young adulthood. The first report, Foundations for Understanding Self-Regulation from an Applied Developmental Perspective provides a comprehensive framework for understanding...

The Tribal Early Childhood Research Center (TRC) seeks to address gaps in early childhood research with American Indian and Alaska Natives through partnerships with tribal Head Start, Early Head Start, child care, and home visiting programs. The goals of the TRC are to engage in a participatory research process and to build capacity for researchers to work effectively with early childhood programs in tribal communities.  The grant award...

ACF launched the Two-Generation Approaches to Improving Family Self-Sufficiency project in September 2015 to better understand approaches that intentionally combine intensive, high-quality, adult-focused services with intensive, high-quality, child-focused programs.  Conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, this project seeks to better understand two-generation approaches and provide options for how these emerging models might be evaluated...