Terri Sabol
Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy
IPR Fellow | Faculty Co-Chair of the Early Childhood Research Alliance of Chicago (EC*REACH)
PhD, Applied Development Science, University of Virginia
Terri Sabol is a developmental psychologist who conducts research at the intersection of child development and social policy. She investigates how individual and environmental factors contribute to children’s healthy development and applies this scientific evidence to strengthen early childhood education (ECE) programs and policies in the United States. Her broad goal as a scholar is to produce innovative research to help optimize investments in ECE and support children in the 21st century. In particular, she has initiated three lines of research that focus on ways to optimize investment in early childhood education. First, she studies how young children’s lives unfold over time to discover new ways that early childhood education can enhance child development. Second, she examines micro-level classroom processes to advance the framework for assessing and improving ECE quality. Third, she expands the study of ECE to include the broader contexts in which ECE takes place, including families and neighborhoods.
Her work has been published in developmental journals (Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Annual Review of Psychology), as well as policy (Journal of Policy Analysis and Management), education (American Education Research Journal, Journal of Research on Education Effectiveness) and social science journals (Science, Annals of the New York Academy of Science). Her work has been supported by the National Institutes for Health, Institute for Education Sciences (IES), Administration of Children and Families, as well as numerous local and national foundations. She received the AERA-SRCD Early Career Fellow in Early Childhood Education and was awarded the Association for Psychological Science (APS) Rising Star award. She currently serves as the director of the Development, Early Education, and Policy (DEEP) lab and is the Faculty Co-Director of the Early Childhood Research Alliance of Chicago (EC*REACH).
Current Research
Exploring the Impact of Universal Pre-K in Chicago. In 2019, Chicago expanded free pre-school to all four-year-old students in Chicago. Sabol and Diane Schanzenbach, are leading a mixed method study of the expansion of free full-day prekindergarten (pre-k) to all four-year-old children in the city of Chicago. The study is exploring issues related to access, quality, and outcomes, including: Whether the program meets the ambitious goal of expanding access to high-quality pre-k, especially for children from the most economically disadvantaged backgrounds; The effect of Chicago UPK on the broader childcare market within Chicago; Whether UPK affects the quality of programs that children attend in preschool and kindergarten; and The effect of Chicago’s UPK on children’s academic and health outcomes from grades K-3, all with a lens toward reducing educational and health inequities in the city.
Streetlight Project. Sabol and Dana McCoy (Associate Professor, Harvard University) are leading The Streetlight Project, which seeks to expand the measurement of child outcomes in early childhood education evaluations. Developmental theory has long emphasized a range of foundational skills that young children need for healthy development across the life course. But evaluations of early childhood programs and policies have largely focused on outcome measures that do not reflect these competencies. This project seeks to combat the so-called “streetlight effect” in early childhood research and shine a light on the often-missed developmental skills that underlie success in the early childhood period (ages 3-5 and beyond) for the broadest range of children possible, ultimately expanding the set of developmental skills and behaviors taught to and measured in young children.
Developing New Tools to Understand Young Children’s Perceptions of Early Childhood Interventions. Too often, researchers do not include children’s own voices and interpretations of their experiences in early childhood interventions/policies. Advances in measurement tools, largely based in clinical and therapeutic research, suggest that young children can accurately and reliably report on their own experiences (e.g., the Berkeley Puppet Interview [BPI]), refuting decades of prior assumptions that very young children cannot express interpretations of their experiences. Yet, tools like the BPI have not been widely used in ECE evaluations, largely due to their time and cost (live data collection and intensive coding). Sabol and her former graduate student, Andrea Busby, developed a novel, time-efficient assessment paradigm—the Childhood Assessment Tool - Electronic (CHAT-E)—to assess children’s meaning making of themselves and their broader environments. The CHAT-E uses a similar approach to the BPI—namely, using two identical puppets that express two opposing statements and asks children to choose the one that is more like them (e.g., I like school/I don’t like school)—but adapted for a tablet-based system using animated characters (see https://sites.northwestern.edu/chate/). She has used this tool in an evaluation of an ECE intervention, namely the Kindergarten to College program, which provides college savings accounts to all kindergarteners in Oakland Public Schools. The long-term goal is to continue refinement of the CHAT-E with the goal that researchers could develop their own scales for a range of ECE interventions and use the tool to learn what children think about the very programs/policies designed for them.
Selected Publications
Sabol, T., C. Kessler, O. Rogers, A. Petitclerc, J. Silver, M. Briggs-Gowan, and L. Wakschlag. 2022. A window into racial and socioeconomic status disparities in preschool disciplinary action using developmental methodology. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1508(1): 123–36.
Sabol, T., D. McCoy, K. Gonzalez, L. Miratrix, L. Hedges, J. Spybrook, and C. Weiland. 2022. Exploring treatment impact heterogeneity across sites: Challenges and opportunities for early childhood researchers. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 58: 14–26.
McCoy, D., T. Sabol, W. Wei, A. Busby, and E. Hanno. 2022. Pushing the boundaries of education research: A multidimensional approach to characterizing preschool neighborhoods and their relations with child outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology 115(1): 143–59.
Sabol, T. 2021. Improving preschool accountability systems: Bringing individual children’s experiences back to child policy. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8(2): 217–24.
Sabol, T., A. Busby, and M. Hernandez. 2021. A critical gap in early childhood policies: Children’s meaning making. Translational Issues in Psychological Science 7(1): 9–20.
Sabol, T., T. E. Sommer, P. L. Chase-Lansdale, and J. Brooks-Gunn. 2021. Intergenerational economic mobility for low-income parents and their children: A dual developmental science framework. Annual Review of Psychology 72(1): 265–92.
Elliott, W., H. Zheng, T. Sabol, and M. O’Brien. 2021. A step toward measuring children’s college-bound identity in children’s savings accounts programs: The case of Promise Scholars. Children and Youth Service Review 121: 105791.
Wei, W., D. McCoy, A. Busby, E. Hanno, and T. Sabol. 2021. Beyond neighborhood socioeconomic status: Exploring the role of neighborhood resources for preschool classroom quality and early childhood development. American Journal of Community Psychology 67(3–4): 470–85.
Hong, S., T. Sabol, M. Burchinal, N. Forestieri, L. Tarullo, M. Zaslow, E. Peisner- Feinberg. 2020. ECE quality indicators and child outcomes: Analyses of six large child care studies. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 49: 202–17.
Sommer, T. E., W. Schneider, E. Chor, T. Sabol, P. L. Chase-Lansdale, J. Brooks-Gunn, H. Yoshikawa, A. Morris, and C. King. 2020. A two-generation education intervention and children’s attendance in Head Start. Child Development 91(6): 1916–33.
Sabol, T., E. Ross, and A. Frost. 2019. Are all Head Start classrooms created equal?: The relation between within-center classroom quality and child outcomes. American Education Research Journal 57(2): 504–34.
Sabol, T., N. Bohlmann, and J. Downer. 2018. Low-income ethnically diverse children’s engagement as a predictor of school readiness above preschool classroom quality. Child Development 89(2): 556–76.
