ABSTRACT
The goals and missions of most university-based child development laboratory schools (hereafter referred to as UBCD lab schools) are to serve as 1) a professional training site for future early childhood professionals; 2) a nucleus for various types of child development or early care and education research; and 3) a model of high quality early care and an education program for the community (Osborn, 1991), all while providing a safe, developmentally appropriate learning environment for young children and a supportive service for their families. Considering the amount of research and professional preparation that occurs in many UBCD lab schools, adopting an applied developmental science (ADS) perspective to guide the mission to engage in research can help to ensure the lab school is maximizing its potential to be a valuable resource for the university and the wider eld of early education and care (Lerner et al., 2005; McBride et al., 2012). The rst guiding principle of this ADS approach is that real-world problems of children, families, and professionals provide a focus for rigorous scientic inquiry (Lerner et al., 2005). ADS-focused researchers can use the context of the UBCD lab school to understand and explore how theoretical principles or new approaches to practice are “enacted in the natural laboratory of the real world” (Lerner et al., 2005, p. 9). A second guiding principle of ADS is that there are complementary and reciprocal relations between practice and research. “ADS work is reciprocal: science drives application, and application drives science” (Lerner et al., 2005, p. 7). For example, teaching practices within lab schools are often derived from child development theory and research (i.e. science drives application), but also the rigorous evaluation of these teaching practices in a lab school context can drive further development of theory and research, i.e. application drives science (Lerner et al., 2005). UBCD lab schools provide an ideal context for reciprocal collaborations among early childhood educators and researchers. This productive
reciprocity in research participation can be actualized in a variety of ways. Some of the possibilities are illustrated by using a collaboration continuum, ranging from faculty-directed research to teacher-directed research, with faculty-teacher collaborations of various kinds in the center (see Figure 4.1).
