The Sustainable Development Goals mandate that by 2030, all children should have access to quality early child development opportunities, healthcare and pre-primary education. Yet validated measures of ECD in low and middle income countries (LMICs) are rare. To address this gap, a Systematic Review (SR) of measures available to profile the…

Building on extensive feedback from the field as well as vigorous new research on how best to support infant and toddler development and learning, the authors have revised and updated the widely used "Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale." ITERS-3 is the next-generation assessment tool for use in center-based child care programs for…

Research linking high-quality child care programs and children's cognitive development has contributed to the growing popularity of child care quality benchmarking efforts such as quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS). Consequently, there has been an increased interest in and a need for approaches to identifying thresholds, or cutpoints,…

In countries with universal access to early childhood education and care (ECEC), child participation is high across a range of socioeconomic groups. However, ECEC quality is often varying, and many children spend much time in ECEC settings that are not necessarily high quality. In this observational study, we therefore examined the relationship…

Growing evidence has linked center-based early care and education settings to improvements in children's cognitive skills. Additional research is needed to more carefully delineate when and for whom these associations are most pronounced. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (N ˜ 6,350; Flanagan & West, 2004),…

Recent research and policy regarding the advantages of early years provision has focused largely on the enhancement and development of cognitive skills for preschoolers. This study, based in the United Kingdom, focuses on a range of cognitive and social skills and identifies beneficial characteristics of a government pilot scheme for 2-year-olds…

The associations between trajectories of child care quality from ages 2 to 4 years and children's cognitive performance at 4 years ("n" = 250) were tested. Distinct quality trajectories were identified: low and high ascending Teaching and Interactions trajectory; low and high Provision for Learning trajectory. Membership in the high…