Income-based childcare programs provide children access to developmentally appropriate and vocabulary-rich literacy experiences. For this study, participating U.S. Head Start Centers requested families complete a weekly home literacy log to encourage vocabulary-rich shared book reading activities in the home. Using participant characteristics,…

Growth-to-standard models evaluate student growth against the growth needed to reach a future standard or target of interest, such as proficiency. A common growth-to-standard model involves comparing the popular Student Growth Percentile (SGP) to Adequate Growth Percentiles (AGPs). AGPs follow from an involved process based on fitting a series of…

Multi-site randomized controlled trials (RCTs) provide unbiased estimates of the average impact in the study sample. However, their ability to accurately predict the impact for individual sites outside the study sample, to inform local policy decisions, is largely unknown. To extend prior research on this question, we analyzed six multi-site RCTs…

This short-term longitudinal study examined how economically-impoverished children's moral reasoning predicts specific aggressive subtypes. Children (N = 106, M[subscript age] = 52.78 months, 51% boys, ethnically diverse backgrounds) from urban Head Start programs completed a structured story-interview pertaining to moral reasoning and judgement…

Public preschool boosts academic skills in kindergarten, but little is known about whether that boost lasts to third grade because many studies stop directly assessing children after kindergarten. The current study tests for sustained associations between preschool attendance and an array of repeatedly measured, directly assessed language and math…

Research Findings: Preschool teachers' relationships with children are a critical component of classroom quality. We draw from a sample of N = 2,114 children attending Head Start to examine child-centered profiles of experiences across two dimensions of classroom interaction quality that are often considered separately: individual teacher-child…

Research Findings: Better understanding the correlates of teacher stress is critical to develop effective, targeted prevention and intervention efforts to decrease early childhood educator stress and ultimately improve outcomes for educators and young children. Previous studies of early childhood educator stress have mostly focused on teacher…

Racially and ethnically diverse youth with disabilities receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits were randomly assigned to usual services, including available school and vocational rehabilitation (VR) transition services, or enhanced case management and transition services through the Wisconsin Promoting Readiness of Minors in SSI…

Research Findings: This study examined associations between observed emotion-focused teaching practices and preschool children's emotion expression, emotion-related behaviors, and learning behaviors. Four centers located in large midwestern and mid-Atlantic metropolitan areas participated in the study. Of these, one center was a Head Start…

Suicidality is significantly more common in autistic adults than the general population, yet the factors that increase risk for suicidality among autistic adults remain largely unknown. We identified characteristics associated with suicidal ideation and suicide attempts/self-inflicted injury in a U.S. national sample of Medicare-enrolled autistic…

Using propositions within critical race theory, this study examined differences between parent and teacher engagement in ethnic-racial socialization and links between parent--teacher congruence in ethnic-racial socialization and children's social and emotional development across racial and ethnic groups. The participants were 59 parents or…

Background: The majority of youth with mental health needs do not receive therapy services to treat their disorder, and unmet need is particularly high among racial and ethnic minorities and economically disadvantaged families in the population at large. Investigating whether these patterns emerge within systems of care can reveal opportunities to…

Low-income children, particularly those with special needs, may have limited access to high-quality early care experiences. Childcare subsidies are intended to increase families' access to quality care, but little is known about subsidy use by children with special needs. Using a nationally representative sample of 4,000 young children who…

Higher education programs for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) offer opportunities to engage in college experiences including access to typical college courses. The purpose of the present study was to examine data from federally funded programs in order to describe and identify predictors of inclusive course…

Background/Context: Early childhood education joined the standards movement in 2002 with the Good Start, Grow Smart initiative (Brown, 2007), with advocates arguing that standards were a tool for creating more continuity and coherence in PreK systems (Bowman, 2006; Kagan 2012). Critics posed concerns about a perceived poor fit between…