Alere Education
Overview
Alere Education is an open resource library with science-based customizable activities for kids to build important cognitive, social, and emotional skills. This is a work-in-progress.
Alere Education is the result of a need-finding exercise with the Stanford Graduate School of Education, Children's Advocacy Center of Santa Clara County, Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office, and Harvard Graduate School of Education.
I am leading this project from conceptualizing the idea to proving its value. This includes conducting literature reviews and expert interviews, wire-framing, coding the prototype, sourcing trusted testers, gathering feedback, and securing grant funding.
Children are experiencing more stress than ever before.
Childhood is a formative time for cognitive, social, and emotional development. In early years (birth to age 5), children form more than one million new neural connections every second, establishing the brain's architecture.
However, adversity is widespread and it affects normative childhood development. Global research indicates that approximately two-thirds of the population in wealthy nations have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE), with higher rates in environments marked by systemic violence. Children's stress, anxiety, and depression levels have shown a significant upward trend over the last decade. Between 2016 and 2020, child anxiety increased by 29% and depression by 27%, while behavioral issues rose by 21%.
When adversity is strong or prolonged, it leads to stress responses known as toxic stress that disrupt the development of brain architecture. Specifically, toxic stress impacts executive functions, the processing skills responsible for memory, flexible thinking, and impulse control.
Social-emotional learning activities for the in-between moments.
Children are learning all the time. I created this resource library to make it easy for parents, educators, and caregivers to infuse short, less than 10-minute long, science-based activities in their days and nurture important skills for kids.
The activities focus on nurturing three areas:
Thinking Skills: The ability to focus attention, interpret information, adapt to change, and solve problems. Strong thinking skills help children plan, organize, and stay flexible.
Emotional Skills: The ability to recognize, understand, regulate, and express emotions. Key skills include self-awareness and self-efficacy (the belief in one’s own ability).
Social Skills: The ability to listen well, communicate clearly, and resolve conflict. Showing empathy, understanding diverse perspectives, and taking turns help maintain healthy relationships.
Executive functions and foundational social-emotional skills are malleable; they can be strengthened through practice. Adults play an important role in modeling the skills and scaffolding, providing enough support to help a child master skills beyond their current ability. By focusing on face to face adult-child activities and empowering adults to customize activities for each child’s unique environment, Alere helps families strengthen relationships and build resilience together.
