This article draws out the implications for school and classroom practices of an emerging consensus about the science of learning and development, outlined in a recent synthesis of the research. Situating the review in a developmental systems framework, we synthesize evidence from the learning sciences and several branches of educational research…

A social justice analysis of the circumstances of African-American boys and young men (AAB) reveals a pervasive pattern of negative stereotypes, disparate treatment, and resource deprivation that augur poorly for their development. Developmental science has yielded many insights about the deleterious sequelae of racism and economic disadvantage,…

Positive development models shift focus for intervention from avoiding problems, deficits, or psychopathology to promoting skills, assets, and psychological well-being as the critical interests in development and intervention. The field can be characterized as multiple parallel lines of empirical inquiry from four frameworks: Social Competence,…

A person-oriented approach examined the extent to which patterns of school readiness across social and cognitive domains in 944 typically-developing 54-month-old children forecast academic achievement, social-emotional development, risk taking, and executive functioning at age 15. Prior work identified six distinct profiles of school readiness at…

The relations between fathers' and mothers' home literacy involvement at 24 months and children's cognitive and social emotional development in preschool were examined using a large sample of African American and Caucasian families ("N" = 5190) from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). Hierarchical…

Utilizing a developmental-ecological framework, the purpose of this study was to understand the unique impact of multiple maternal risks across time on ethnically diverse, low-income, preschool children's cognitive skills, pro-social behaviors, and behavior problems. Additionally, this study sought to understand the variability of maternal risks…

In this article, we argue that policymakers in America should reference a coherent, comprehensive, and child-centered framework for children. That is, based on an extensive review of the empirical literature on the first two decades of life, we conclude that policies should address the needs of young people throughout the first two decades of…

This study examined associations between quality of social and physical environments in preschools and children's development of academic, language, and literacy skills, and the extent to which preschool quality moderated the associations between child risk and development. Participants were a diverse sample of 540 four-year-old children in…

The current study examines the social and behavioral development of school-age children with different histories of overweight onset. Eight thousand children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) participated. Three groups of children were identified for analysis: (1) those who were persistently overweight from…

We present findings based on several of our recent studies that have shown that father engagement has significant effects on children's cognition and language at 24 and 36 months and their social and emotional development at 24, 36 months, and pre-Kindergarten. These studies are guided by the Dynamics of Paternal Influences on Children over the…

School readiness assessment is a prominent feature of early childhood education. Because the construct of readiness is multifaceted, we examined children's patterns on multiple indicators previously found to be both theoretically and empirically linked to school readiness: social skill, interactions with parents, problem behavior, and performance…