Soojin Oh Park

Dr. Park directs the Early learning, Parenting, Immigration, and Culture (EPIC) lab in pursuing three interconnected lines of research.

1. Supporting immigrant-origin, racialized Dual Language Learners (DLLs) 

Decades of scientific evidence suggest that high-quality early education benefits all children, with substantially larger gains in learning among DLLs in low-income, immigrant families. However, much work is needed to understand the developmental contexts and processes of this increasingly diverse and fastest growing segment of U.S. child population. In one of Dr. Park’s current projects, BASECAMP (Bolstering Asian American Students in Early Childhood in Advancing Multilingual Practices), she examines how families and communities support the sociocognitive, language, and literacy development of emergent bilingual learners. In collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of colleagues, she is committed to increasing the pipeline of early childhood bilingual teachers in Washington state while ensuring equitable access to multilingual learning environments across home and school.

2. Understanding Parenting and Family Context of Early Childhood Development

Families and home environment serve as the first and primary context of development in the early life span. The role of parenting and family context present promising policy levers (or family-level mediators) yet current evidence base and broad-based early childhood quality improvement efforts focus much less on the role of families and communities. To this effort, Dr. Park examines the role of parental investment in exacerbating or dismantling educational inequities in early childhood from racially, socioeconomically, and linguistically diverse communities. In particular she is interested in meaningful yet understudied ways in which non-dominant families engage and expand their young children's learning at home. The central aims of her study, FAMILY (Fathers And Mothers Investing in the Learning of Young Children), are to [1] expand and complicate dominant notions of critical parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) by privileging the voices of families most often left invisible and silence in academic literature and policymaking process; [2] explore how family socioeconomic factors shape parenting during early childhood and reproduce educational injustices; and [3] understand what, how, and why families support their children's early learning and development, in order to reimagine transformative possibilities for equitable policy and practice.

3. Improving and Evaluating Early Childhood Policies, Systems, and Programs through an Equity Lens

Dr. Park's current program of research stems from her early work in evaluating the impact of early childhood policies and programs on children’s development and parenting practice. While causal inference is central to answering many policy-relevant questions, experimental evaluation can only tell us whether a treatment causally affected an outcome but they cannot tell us how and why such an effect occurs. Greater attention in the field of ECE has been focused on impacts than processes. To better understand “active ingredients” or mechanisms in these programs that enhance the quality of early learning experiences, Dr. Park examines the role of statewide research-practice-policy partnership (RPP) in anchoring systemic supports for states to continuously improve the quality of publicly funded prekindergarten (preK). She is leading a team to conduct multi-year, cross-state case studies to investigate (1) how these states develop equitable, cross-sectoral partnerships for continuous quality improvement and evidence-based decision making; and (2) how contexts of state preK (governance, leadership, advocacy, fiscal systems, workforce development, and politics) facilitate or impede quality improvement efforts. This will be one of the first large-scale, cross-state studies to investigate state-driven improvement efforts in advancing equity and quality at scale.