Mission

The Early Development and Education (EDE) Initiative is an interdisciplinary community of researchers at Lehigh University who conduct high quality empirical research. Our mission is to build knowledge and inform best practices about young children’s early learning and social-emotional development.

We enhance the capacity of families and educators to promote positive development of young children. We are deeply committed to community-researcher partnerships that reflect a strength-based perspective to understand and support children in their family, school, and community contexts.

We combine our individual areas of expertise (i.e., language/literacy, math, and social-emotional development) to develop innovative comprehensive and integrated initiatives to promote young children’s overall school readiness. To be successful and sustainable, such initiatives must be responsive to families’ and educators’ beliefs, values, and practices. We work closely with the local community to identify needs and develop and implement unique evidenced-based practices in a manner that will have the most impact for young children. 

We know that fundamental and lasting positive changes in the outcomes for our very young children is only possible if we do three things. First, the changes must be based on the best available data regarding the challenge of providing successful policies and programs. Second, it is becoming increasingly clear that transformative change will only occur if educators are engaged in a collaborative effort to provide support for both the child and the family. Finally, models of successful change must be taken to scale through the alignment of research and national policies for early education.