Children's mental and socio-emotional skills are of great importance for their schooling, ability to make friends and general well-being. In the family programme, we therefore first examine which factors in the home are important for children's linguistic and socio-emotional development. Subsequently, we design and evaluate interventions to improve the home learning environment for at-risk children in order to reduce the achievement gap between at-risk children and their classmates. Vulnerable children in this context are children at risk of starting school with insufficient language skills.

In this programme, we focus on how we promote children and young people's mathematical skills. We investigate how children and young people learn mathematics and how the acquisition of mathematics skills interacts with reading skills and socio-emotional and psychological characteristics. Furthermore, we are concerned with how parents, teachers and peers can make a difference. We are particularly interested in which differences apply in these contexts across gender and parental background.

In this programme, we examine the significance of political and economic management tools for children’s development of skills and well-being. We do this because there is evidence that children’s long-term outcomes, such as education, crime, and teenage parenting, are influenced by the investments made by parents and society in their schooling and upbringing environment. Therefore, in the programme, we investigate whether social inequality in long-term outcomes can be reduced by allocating funds to schools and daycare based on the socio-economic background of the child group. We also explore under what circumstances it is cost-effective from a societal perspective to replace public interventions with voluntary initiatives, such as mentoring services for children in the risk group, and the implications of this for social equality.

The overall purpose of this programme is to create new evidence about the interaction between pedagogue/teacher and child and, on that basis, design and evaluate an intervention that improves the importance of pedagogues and teachers to children's schooling. We do this by examining how different educator and teacher characteristics and behavior affect the learning and well-being of individual children as well as the group of children and the class. For example, by identifying which educators and teachers enhance the children's skills the most, and whether there are educators and teachers who are better at boosting certain groups of children than others.

In the cross-disciplinary programme, we gather the results from the other programmes (and previous projects) into a unified model of how children and young people's professional skills and well-being can be expected to develop over time, and how interventions at different age levels will affect this development in the long run. We start with the development of vocabulary in early childhood education and reading skills in school age, but will gradually expand the model to include other skills and well-being, to distinguish the development of children and young people from different socioeconomic backgrounds (parents' education, genetic heritage, etc.) and finally to calculate how the development and long-term effect of interventions depends on the quality of the day care and school environment in which the children subsequently find themselves - for example in terms of educator and teacher competences.

For more than ten years, Vi lærer sammen has been researching how to design interventions for children in nurseries, daycare, kindergartens, and now also the youngest classes in primary school, with the aim of strengthening children’s language development. Our focus is now primarily on spreading the evidence-based interventions to daycares in Danish municipalities while also researching how to best implement such an intervention. At the same time, we are focused on developing and testing the interventions in pre-preparatory classes.

Signature project description in English. 

READit is a reading initiative for children in 1st and 2nd grade, which has previously been successfully tested in a randomized trial in Aarhus municipality. The initiative focuses on supporting parents in reading with their child and provides guidance on how parents can create enjoyable reading moments with their child through dialogic reading. This way, reading becomes a good habit that helps children become happy and proficient readers. The current projects in READit focus on scaling up and implementation at national level.

Signature project description in English.