Margaret R. Burchinal is a quantitative psychologist and statistician known for her research on child care. She is Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Data Management and Analysis Center of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Burchinal was lead editor of the Society for Research in Child Development monograph Quality Thresholds, Features, and Dosage in Early Care and Education: Secondary Data Analyses of Child Outcomes and co-editor of the monograph Best Practices in Quantitative Methods for Developmentalists.
Burchinal's research program has investigated the impact of high quality of childhood education on children's language and cognitive development. She served as an investigator on the Abecedarian Early Intervention Project, a controlled experiment that established the benefits of early childhood education for children growing up in poverty. This study enrolled over 100 predominantly African-American children born to low income families between 1972 and 1977. Infants were randomly assigned an early education group, which received an educational intervention in a childcare setting up to age five years, or to a control group. The educational intervention used games to encourage social, emotional, and cognitive areas of development with an emphasis on language skills. Follow up studies on the children's progress at ages 12, 15, 21, and 30 years indicated long lasting benefits of early childhood education. Burchinal has collaborated with NICHD Early Child Care Research Network on studies of the long-term effects of early child care on children's functioning from ages 4 to 12 years old. This study determined that higher quality child care from infancy to school entry was associated with higher vocabulary scores through age 12. Additionally, they found that greater exposure to center-based child care was associated with increased rates of teacher-reported externalizing behavior. Another study using this data set focused on the Black-White achievement gap observed among low income children in the United States, and found group differences to be largely explained by family, child care, and school experiences. Burchinal and her colleagues have studied the impact of teachers' relationships with their students and the role of instructional scaffolding in supporting children's learning and development. Their research has shown how high quality relationships between preschool teachers and their students have beneficial effects on the children's academic and social skills.
