Skip to main content

 

Current Research

 

FEDERAL FUNDING TO SUPPORT CURReNT RESEARCH

ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN MEXICAN-AMERICAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION TEACHER STRESS AND MEXICAN-AMERICAN CHILD EXECUTIVE FUNCTION AND VOCABULARY

PI: Cynthia Wiltshire

Sponsor: INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION SCIENCES

Amount awarded: $587,216

The College of Education at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), a public Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in El Paso, Texas seeks $600,000 over four years to support an investigation entitled Associations Between Mexican-American Early Childhood Education (ECE) Teacher Stress and Mexican-American Child Executive Function and Vocabulary, which has been developed for consideration for the Institute of Education Sciences' Research Training Programs in the Education Sciences: Early Career Development and Mentoring Program for Faculty at Minority-Serving (MSI). This project is led by Dr. Cynthia A. Wiltshire, a third-year, tenure-track Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education in the College of Education at UTEP. The primary goals of the investigation are to understand the experiences of stress, both physiological and psychological, with which Mexican-American ECE teachers contend, and examine the relationship between these experiences and student outcomes in executive function and vocabulary. To do so, the proposed study has four research aims: Aim 1) characterize psychological and physiological Mexican-American ECE teacher stress, Aim 2) examine associations between high and low physiological and psychological Mexican-American ECE teacher stress and sociodemographic factors, Aim 3) record the lived experiences of Mexican-American ECE teachers, and Aim 4) examine associations between Mexican-American ECE teacher stress and Mexican-American child outcomes in executive function and vocabulary skills. This project should be considered under the Teaching, Teachers, and the Education Workforce and the Early Learning Programs and Policies research topics and the Exploration project type. The target populations include 1) Mexican-American ECE workforce members (e.g., district teachers, childcare workers), and 2) Mexican-American preschoolers (e.g., PreKindergarten, Head Start) in the El Paso, Texas community.

Posting date: Tue, 09/24/2024

Award start date: Thu, 08/01/2024

Award end date: Mon, 07/31/2028

 

 

Previous Research

 

PILOT RESEARCH

Since arriving to UTEP, Dr. Wiltshire has collaborated with two local Independent School Districts to characterize the perceived and physiological stress of early childhood education teachers in the community. To do so, she collected both quantitative and qualitative data to examine 1) what teachers report as stressful experiences, both professionally and personally, 2) the means of coping teachers employed to combat described stressors, and 3) teachers’ stories, histories and lived experiences.

These pilot data have led to the four-year, Institute of Education Sciences supported study described above.

DISSERTATION RESEARCH

Dr. Wiltshire’s dissertation research reexamined Chicago School Readiness Project (Raver et al., 2011) data for associations between teacher stress, teacher warmth, and child behavior problems. This quantitative reanalysis served as the foundation for semi-structured, individual and focus group interviews with present-day Head Start (HS) teachers in the Chicago area. Taken together, these data demonstrated that both stress and warmth circulated in the HS classrooms of this study.  Moreover, the results and findings suggested that HS teachers were able to create rich and warm experiences for children, despite the personal and professional stress with which they contended, formulating a set of practices that benefited the children in their care.