Our research
Research and development for new practices in education
The main outputs of our research are new practices in education and principles and methodologies for working with children, parents and educators, as well as the development of the theory of change and research methods themselves.
For the research of the Good Start, KiVa, Porticus programmes, we have developed our own research design that corresponds to the current best practice (state-of-the-art) of leading academic institutions such as Oxford University or the Centre for Evidence-Based Early Intervention, Bangor University, University of Turku, i.e. workplaces that are our long-term research partners. Furthermore, we have also, among others. locate and validate key scales and create new analytical tools.
Data, measurement tools and evaluation findings are shared with other researchers through international databases in the framework of the so-called. open access. We also provide an open-source library for working in R called reschola. Reschola enables semi-automated processing of different types of data and is published in the “R-universe” research tools database of the rOpenSci consortium.
Children's social-emotional skills develop better with Good Start
Children’s negative behaviours decrease significantly faster over time in kindergartens where teachers use the Good Start methodology than in others. The positive area of prosocial behaviour then grows faster.
Research with a longitudinal quasi-experimental design was conducted 1. January 2017 – 1. June 2021 on a non-representative sample of 2603 kindergarten children across the Czech Republic. The areas presented are based on the standardized Strenghts and Difficulties Questionnaire, which was used by the kindergarten teachers to assess the children’s behaviour.
