Anika Anthony
Principal Investigator: Anika Anthony, Educational Studies
Project Dates: 08/1/2016-05/30/17
Anticipated Total Award Amount: $50,000
Project Sponsor: The Ohio State University, Impact Grants
Creating On-Ramps for Underserved Students Towards Rewarding Careers in Engineering
This program is an engineering outreach designed to increase the interest of underrepresented youth in engineering by providing teachers pre-engineering professional development and by disseminating pre-engineering design challenge materials to K-12 educators and volunteers in Ohio and throughout the U.S. It will enable university team members with expertise in teaching, research and outreach to connect and collaborate with schools, teachers and community organizations, inspiring children to reach for rewarding careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
David Bloome
Principal Investigator: David Bloome, Teaching and Learning
Project Dates: 5/01/2016 – 8/31/2017
Anticipated Total Award Amount: $15,000
Project Sponsor: National Writing Project Corp
2016-2017 SEED Invitational Leadership Institute to invest in developing new teacher-leaders grant
The Columbus-Area Writing Project (CAWP) Summer Institute is designed for teachers who are interested in their students becoming more proficient writers and who enjoy writing themselves. The Columbus Area Writing Project has continued to attract a committed group of educators to its Invitational Summer Institute which has been offered every summer for the past 11 years. Participants come from all disciplines and all level of instruction, including kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, community college, and university. The grant will provide a paid Retreat for the ISI fellows, materials, and tuition support as needed. It will also pay one of the co-directors (a CAWP teacher-consultant) to be part of the team in leading the Invitational Summer Institute.
Carolyn Gunther
Principal Investigator: Carolyn Gunther, Human Sciences
Project Dates: 2/01/2016 – 7/31/2017
Anticipated Total Award Amount: $24,589
Project Sponsor: Purdue University
North Central Nutrition Education Center for Excellence
At the conclusion of this project, it is our expectation that children who routinely participate in daily structured summer programming, such as the USDA SFSP, compared to non-participating children, will manifest improved diet and physical activity behaviors, and a more positive food, physical activity, and social environment, which may reduce the risk of inappropriate weight gain during the summer and ultimately obesity. This study can be expected to have a significant positive impact by providing information on the factors that protect disadvantaged children from unhealthy summer weight gain which can be used by stakeholders at the local, state, and federal level to reform current policy that will increase child participation in health promoting programming during the summer window of risk.
Laura Justice
Principal Investigator: Laura Justice, Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy (CCEC)
Project Dates: 4/01/2016 – 1/31/2019
Anticipated Total Award Amount: $331,265
Project Sponsor: Kellogg (W K) Foundation
Scaling up the Solyluna Club de Lectura in Mexico’s indigenous communities
This project expands the Solyluna Club de Lectura, an early-literacy program designed for indigenous bilingual children ages 3-6 in 23 rural Yucatecan communities, in an effort to promote their early-literacy skills as important precursors of future reading achievement. This project aims to improve reading and learning skills in Mayan children in Yucatan, Mexico, by developing capacities in teachers, principals and caregivers as reading promoters and by providing bilingual books for use in reading clubs, schools, and homes. The Club de Lectura provides a project-developed bilingual book collection to children to keep as their own, and uses interactive workshops to train caregivers and teachers in how to enhance children’s interactions with these books to improve their early-literacy skills. In the proposed three-year project, we provide the Club to an estimated 1,000 preschool-aged children and their caregivers and teachers. Implementation involves a multi-pronged approach through formal collaboration with area preschools, creation of lending libraries within each community that includes a large selection of culturally appropriate children’s books, interactive workshops for parents and caregivers, parallel professional development workshops for teachers in participating preschools, and community-wide “Literacy Celebrations” to promote reading and discuss the importance of sharing books with children.
Laura Justice
Principal Investigator: Laura Justice, Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy (CCEC)
Co-Investigators: Jacqueline Goodway, Human Sciences
Project Dates: 12/14/2015 – 12/31/2017
Anticipated Total Award Amount: $20,000 (City of Columbus); $60,000 (The Ohio State University)
Project Sponsor: City of Columbus; The Ohio State University
Summer success: Promoting kindergarten readiness in Weinland Park
Summer Success: Promoting Kindergarten Readiness in Weinland Park addresses the challenge of improving kindergarten readiness for children entering school within our local community. Many children reach kindergarten without the requisite skills needed to achieve within the academic milieu. Research indicates that poor kindergarten readiness is associated with a number of short- and long-term adverse outcomes, including social outcomes and academic achievement. This project brings together key community stake-holders to design, implement, and evaluate an innovative and comprehensive kindergarten readiness program, delivered to 4-year-old children within the Weinland Park community during the summer prior to kindergarten entry. The program is designed to systematically and explicitly develop critical skills and interests that help children arrive to kindergarten ready to learn, including core academic competencies in language, literacy, and math, while also supporting children’s social-emotional development, their physical and motor development, and their interest in the arts. Participation is free, but parents will be asked to commit to their child’s participation in at least 90% of programming, and to complete specific tasks with their children that are designed to develop parents’ understandings about their children’s kindergarten readiness. We intend for our work to have significant impact on the local community, by developing and testing an approach to improving kindergarten readiness that can be used across Columbus. To demonstrate and support the mutual commitment among four key stake-holders –OSU faculty and staff, Columbus City Schools, Columbus Metropolitan Library, and FutureReady Columbus –the City of Columbus has committed $20,000 in funding to support this endeavor.
This project also received an OSU Impact Grant. Ohio State has awarded a 2016 Impact Grant to the Schoenbaum Family Center and Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy. The $60,000 grant offers two four-week Summer Success camps for children entering kindergarten in the fall. The camp will provide children with creative activities in literacy, math and art, as well as free admission to Franklin Park Conservatory and the Columbus Museum of Art. Priority is given to children in the Weinland Park neighborhood and those who have not attended preschool. More information
Julie Kennel
Principal Investigator: Julie Kennel, Human Sciences
Co-Investigators: Richard Bruno ; Carolyn Gunther; Irene Hatsu; Tonya Orchard
Project Dates: 5/15/2016 – 5/14/2021
Anticipated Total Award Amount: $187,000
Project Sponsor: National Institute of Food & Agriculture, USDA
Equipping racial and ethnic minority nutrition students with modern skills required for post-baccalaureate training in childhood obesity
The specific aim of this Multicultural Scholarship Program is to recruit 4 undergraduate minority Scholars to the OSU Human Nutrition (HN) program and engage them with intensive faculty mentoring, a diverse enrichment program, and active participation in research and outreach activities focused on the prevention of childhood obesity. This program will increase competitiveness for admission and success in post-BS professional and graduate programs in the health sciences. Partnership with the OSU Office of Minority Affairs (OMA) and Columbus State Community College (CSCC) will enhance recruitment and retention of highly motivated minority students into USDA MSP program titled Training Competitive Nutrition Scientists from Underrepresented Backgrounds in 21st Century Skills to Stem the Tide of Childhood Obesity. Expected outputs include number of Scholars recruited and retained, overall progress achieved in mentoring relationship as self-assessed by faculty mentor and reviewed by PD, change in GPA of Scholars, engagement in research and outreach experiences, Scholar accomplishments (awards, honors, professional meetings attended, etc.), completion rate (number recruited/number graduated), and most important, post-baccalaureate placement.
Natasha Slesnick
Principal Investigator: Natasha Slesnick, Human Sciences
Project Dates: 4/1/2016 – 3/31/2020
Anticipated Total Award Amount: $238,165
Project Sponsor: University of Texas at Austin
An intervention to promote healthy behaviors in homeless youth
Homeless youths, ages 18-23 years, are extremely vulnerable to poor health outcomes related particularly to substance use and risky sexual behaviors; thus, we need to develop and test interventions that help them live lives that are productive and satisfying. Without such interventions, they represent a great threat to the public health for costly health problems such as substance abuse, alcoholism, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted infections. Findings from this study will contribute to the further development and testing of theory driven interventions that are brief, effective, and can be delivered at low cost in multiple public health service settings.