Education researchers modernize how they assess preschool community characteristics--using Google Street View

In their article released this month in AERA Open, authors McCoy et al. introduce a new virtual tool called iSNAP (internet-based School Neighborhood Assessment Protocol) for measuring “understudied physical dimensions of young children’s preschool communities, including both their school grounds (i.e., the school building and its surrounding land) and school neighborhoods (i.e., the block encircling the school)” that could provide insight into areas where preschoolers’ “physical safety, care, and order have not yet been systematically studied.” The National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education Teacher Professional Development Study (NCRECE TPDS) (2007-2011) (ICPSR 34848) played a key role both in validating the iSNAP and providing data for the authors to analyze in conjunction with iSNAP measures.The NCRECE TPDS, distributed by the Child and Family Data Archive, was a multiphase randomized control trial of two professional development interventions –coursework or coaching– for early childhood teachers in nine US cities across two cohorts. A total of 291 schools with teachers who had participated at any point in the NCRECE TPDS were used to validate the iSNAP. McCoy et al. input each school’s address into Google Street View and used its historical feature to view and then code the physical features around each, circa 2007, when the NCRECE TPDS was fielded. After testing and validating their coding with iSNAP against an established set of neighborhood structural measures, McCoy et al. analyzed data from 1,230 low-income preschoolers, which had been collected in the NCRECE TPDS by teachers and others during the coaching phase of the study. This included demographic as well as end-of-year outcome data in language and literacy, and other measures. McCoy et al. tested the extent to which iSNAP school community characteristics were predictive of young children’s outcomes, ranging from self-regulation to language and literacy skills. Despite controlling for some covariates, they found “few positive associations between iSNAP community characteristics and [the] 1,230 low-income preschoolers’ end-of-year outcomes.” This was not unexpected, based on modest results in other, similar research, as well as several important limitations in their approach. Even so, the authors’ main contribution was providing “a proof of concept for how education researchers might leverage freely available geospatial technology like Google Street View to produce more cost-effective and scalable measures of children’s learning environments, broadly defined.” More publications using data from the NCRECE TPDS can be found here.