Auburn University received the grand donation of the Harris Early Learning Center in Birmingham to fund outreach research and student internship possibilities for the College of Human Sciences.
The $6.4 million center provides childcare in an advanced facility accommodating 200 children, ranging from 6 weeks to 5 years old.
The university association began in 1994 when Elmer Harris, an Auburn alumnus and president of Alabama Power Company from 1989-2001, invited Auburn's human development and family studies department to participate in the center's creation. The current co-directors are Auburn faculty members. They administer the facility and have for its entire 17-year history. The facility is equipped with an observation room and an apartment for overnight stay for people engaged in extended study. It provides internships for HDFS students and opens avenues to potential careers.
"What was a state-of-the-art facility when it was built and continues to be a leading edge kind of facility, it is quite a remarkable building," said Joe Pittman, head of the Department of HDFS. "It has high-quality care, highly educated staff and just a really excellent partnership between Auburn and the city of Birmingham. From what I gather, it is a place people want to get their kids."
The facility is home to research like peer-to-peer tests and observational studies. The research gauges social competence and behavioral effects within children.
"Social development is about how kids develop emotionally and interpersonally in the context of relationships with peers and teachers," Pittman said.
Brian Vaughn, professor in the College of Human Sciences, has been conducting an ongoing study of social development in young children.
"It's a not-for-profit organization, and one of the goals within that was to participate and initiate leading-edge research on infants and young children in care, with the ultimate goal to advance understanding and development, but also provide a framework for improving the quality for service delivery," Vaughn said.
Vaughn is trained in child psychology and development.
"My work in Birmingham initially started with trying to characterize what it meant to be a socially competent preschool kid," Vaughn said. "That evolved to studies of friendship. The bulk of my research initially was devoted to finding a valid way of assessing what it means to be a socially competent 3-to-5-year-old kid."
Vaughn's research led to a examination model of determining social competence using a hierarchical structure based off three domains: peer acceptance, children's social engagement or the frequency of social interaction and then comparisons of behaviors based on a similarity index.
"The very young child is assembling a set of skills and some products of those skills at an early age that actually support their integration and interaction as they get older," said Vaughn. "Once established, this social competence quality changes in the sense that kids get more skilled as they get older, but that doesn't change the relations among the various factors or domains."
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