In many low- and middle-income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a nation's official language, may not fully reflect a…

Research Findings: This study evaluated the impact of a self-monitoring intervention on preschool teachers' use of language and on children's language growth. Nineteen classrooms from Santiago de Chile participated (10 intervention, 9 control). Twice a week, intervention teachers filled out a checklist to monitor the language stimulation they…

Previous research has demonstrated that being bilingual from birth is advantageous for the development of skills of social cognition, executive functioning, and metalinguistic awareness due to bilingual children's extensive experience of processing and manipulating two linguistic systems. The present study investigated whether these cognitive…

This is the full report, and a separate research brief also was published. Austin Independent School District (AISD) served 5,450 pre-K students in 2009-2010. Approximately 70% of sampled English-speaking pre-K students and 74% of sampled Spanish-speaking pre-K students had faster than the expected growth rate on an assessment of receptive…

Austin Independent School District provided full-day prekindergarten to 5,196 4-year-olds in 2008-2009 at 66 schools. Seventy percent or more of students made measureable gains on a test of receptive vocabulary, and average gains showed growth about two times greater than that expected for 4-year-olds after a 7-month period.