This brief focuses on Colombia which, like most countries globally, closed its schools in March of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As throughout most of Latin America, Colombian schools remained closed for over a year, and they only began to gradually reopen in July 2021. The brief explores the pandemic's impact on student learning by analyzing…

There is near consensus that early childhood education and care (ECEC) is essential to children's early development. A common corollary is that early learning will be pivotal to helping redress inequities in educational outcomes. We examine whether this is true among rural communities in the Indian states of Assam, Rajasthan, and Telangana.…

Early language competence is a reliable and powerful predictor of children's success in school, and word gaps linked to socioeconomic status disparities have cascading effects on academic outcomes. While early research -- such as the work of Hart and Risley (1995) -- focused on gaps in vocabulary, growing evidence reveals wide gaps in syntax as…

There has been a rapid global expansion of English instruction in the early grades in public school curricula. Particularly in so-called developing countries, the increase of and its shift from exclusively private to public education is linked to the idea that acquiring English promotes personal, social, and economic development. The author takes…

The present study was designed to determine whether conservation of number, weight, volume, area, and mass could be learned and retained by disadvantaged preschool children when taught by an inexperienced classroom teacher. An instructional sequence of 10-minute lessons was presented on alternate days over a 3 1/2 week period by preservice…