Harold E. Jones Child Study Center

[2] The Jones Child Study Center has a special relationship with the Institute of Human Development as a site for research, training and outreach to the community, parents, and teachers.

Research conducted at the Institute of Human Development and the Jones Child Study Center is interdisciplinary: psychology, education, social welfare, architecture, sociology, linguistics, public health, and pediatrics.

[4] The Jones CSC preschool has an outdoor play area that is accessible virtually all day long via sliding doors and partially protected by an overhead canopy.

Esherick and Landreth believed that a higher ceiling would shift the observers' focus from the height differential of the people occupying the space to the activities taking place.

The mission for the Institute of Child Welfare was to provide a quality nursery school for children while giving scholars and students easy access to a young population for observation and research.

[12] In 1960 the nursery school moved to its current location from the original site on Bancroft Way and was named for Harold E. Jones, the Director of the Institute of Human Development from 1935-1960.

[13] The current facility was designed by University of California, Berkeley architect Joseph Esherick in collaboration with Catherine Landreth, to meet the educational and physical needs of young children as well as to support research on early childhood.

Children's development at the Jones Child Study Center is cultivated by spatially defined learning centers, where small group child-generated play experiences happen in a two-level indoor playhouse, several sand-and-water stations outside, spacious and varied large motor opportunities, as well as activities in aesthetics, mathematics, science, literacy and language-all accessible both indoors and out.

[26] Due to its architectural design, the Jones Child Study Center establishes a social ecology for learning where children, alone and in small groups, use defined indoor and outdoor areas.

Since 1993, the University Preschool at the Jones Child Study Center has been run by the Early Childhood Education Program, which oversees seven other campus childcare sites.