Alumna Wins Early Childhood Dissertation Award

Dr. Michaela Cole, who earned a Ph.D. in Education with a specialization in Early Childhood Education from Walden in 2005, was recently awarded the Merrill/Prentice Hall and NAECTE Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award. The award recognizes dissertations that meet scholarly standards and have a positive impact on or relevance to early childhood teacher education, philosophy or practice.

Cole directs the early childhood education program at Our Lady of the Lake University, a Hispanic-serving higher education institution in San Antonio. 

Her dissertation, Mexican-Origin Mothers’ Views of Preschoolers’ Transition to Pre-kindergarten, is an ethnographic case study of families’ expectations, concerns and fears about sending their children to pre-kindergarten, and how they serve as their children’s first teacher at home and want to be involved in their children’s education.

Cole has spent most of her career working with Hispanic children and families. “With my experience and knowledge of this culture, it made sense for me to conduct this study, and I felt that the data collected would fill a gap in the literature and serve as a springboard for future studies focused on this topic and population.”

Cole got the idea to apply for the award when she was doing the research for a Knowledge Area Module (KAM) and came upon the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators’ (NAECTE) Web site. During her KAM process, she read many dissertations and discovered that the research and literature on the school-readiness construct was being viewed narrowly by scholars and that the focus was on the skills and characteristics that children possess upon entry into school. 

Cole became interested in another construct that encompasses the transition to school. This approach, she says, takes into account the spheres of influence and contexts in which a child’s development is affected over time and through various relationships.

“While there are studies on the transition to kindergarten, many of them focus on teachers’ perspectives—and less on the views of parents. I found few studies that focused on the transition process to pre-kindergarten programs,” Cole says. “Even fewer studies centered on the transition process that Hispanic children and families encounter when preparing to enter school.”

Cole also recognized, through individual interviews and focus groups conducted for her dissertation, the need to voice the concerns and expectations of Mexican-origin women, a group of marginalized women who have traditionally not been given the opportunity to voice their feelings. “Their views needed to be heard. I owed it to these women to share their views on a much broader scale,” Cole says.

In fact, one key reason she applied for the dissertation award was to share her research with other educators. “These educators are in a position to share with their students the importance of the transition process and how to smooth the transition to school by working with families—particularly families who are culturally and linguistically diverse,” she says.

Since graduating in 2005, Cole has presented her study results at six conferences, including the NAECTE Summer Institute in 2006. Cole received the Merrill/Prentice Hall and NAECTE Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award Nov. 8 at the NAECTE fall conference, a pre-conference to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Annual Conference in Atlanta. She presented a research poster session on her dissertation findings at the NAEYC conference.