Measuring the quality of classroom-based interactive shared book reading within the early childhood classroom represents a specific dimension of teacher-child interactions that is of great interest to researchers. This interest reflects decades of research demonstrating the benefit of reading to young children in both the home and the classroom.…

Computerized assessments and digital games have become more prevalent in childhood, necessitating a systematic investigation of the effects of gamified executive function assessments on performance and engagement. This study examined the feasibility of incorporating gamification and a machine learning algorithm that adapts task difficulty to…

Classroom-level quality measures are widely used in early education settings but may mask important variation in learning experiences across children in the same classroom. This study investigates this possibility using detailed data from an observational measure of individual children's learning experiences--Individualizing Student Instruction…

The ability to maintain attentive state over a period of time (i.e., Selective Sustained Attention) is important for higher-order cognition but challenging to assess in preschool-age children. The TrackIt task was developed to address this challenge and has been argued to be sensitive to age-related differences in selective sustained attention in…

Measures of self-regulation may not capture adequate variability in children with low levels of self-regulation. This can limit a measure's ability to accurately demonstrate relations with other variables. The present study addressed this issue with a revised version of the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task (HTKS-R), which includes a new downward…

In the present study, we investigated the relative impact of age- versus schooling-related growth in school readiness skills using four modeling approaches that leverage natural variation in longitudinal data collected within the preschool year. Our goal was to demonstrate the applicability of different analytic techniques that do not rely on…

The Canadian Little Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire (Little DCDQ-CA) is a parent-report screening instrument that identifies 3- to 4-year-old children who may be at risk for Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). We tested the criterion validity of the Little DCDQ-CA in a sample of preschool-aged children in the United States…

This article describes the development and administration of a survey to identify early childhood educators' successes and barriers when delivering remote instruction (e.g., online whole or small group instruction) during the COVID-19 pandemic to children 2-5 years old. The survey was developed using procedures outlined by the commonly accepted…

Spanish speakers in the United States are a steadily increasing population, up by 233% since 1980. Given the growing population of dual language learners (DLLs) and the large numbers of Spanish-speaking children enrolled in pre-kindergarten programs, addressing the educational needs of preschool-aged DLLs has become a national imperative.…

This study reports an independent investigation of the psychometric properties of Desired Results Developmental Profile (DRDP), a teacher-rated measure of school readiness for preschool-aged children. In a sample of 2,031 low-income, 3- to 5-year-old children attending Head Start, we tested three measurement models: a higher order one-factor…

Purpose: To effectively implement a response to intervention approach, there is a need for timely and specific information about student learning in response to treatment to ensure that treatment decisions are appropriate. This exploratory study examined responsivity to a supplemental, Tier 2 vocabulary intervention delivered to preschool children…

Expanding on the extant body of research on content validity, this study applied the tenets of content validity research to the development of an expository book reading intervention focused on science for preschool students with language impairment. This example case explains how, guided by content validity research in healthcare interventions,…

In this feasibility study, we present a newly developed observational system, Optimizing Learning Opportunities for Students (OLOS). OLOS is designed to elucidate the learning opportunities afforded to individual children within early childhood classrooms and as they transition to formal schooling (kindergarten through third grade). OLOS records…

In this article, we describe the development and investigation of the social validity of Parents Plus, a parent-implemented intervention for preschool children with developmental language disorder. Parents Plus is a fully online intervention that is delivered through three components: (a) training delivered through an app that educates parents on…

Despite research demonstrating the importance of language comprehension to later reading abilities, curriculum based measures to assess language comprehension abilities in preschoolers remain lacking. The Assessment of Story Comprehension (ASC) features brief, child-relevant stories and a series of literal and inferential questions with a focus on…