High-quality, stable early care and education can have long-lasting benefits for both children and society. The COVID-19 pandemic has reaffirmed the importance of the role early educators play as an essential source of support that anchors communities. It also has exposed the underlying fragility and economic vulnerability of the early care and…

Many early care and education (ECE) institutions--including Head Start, state quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS), and school district pre-K programs--use classroom quality observations in their quality improvement or monitoring processes. As many states expand their ECE programs, they grapple with questions about how best to use data…

Having a qualified, stable, and healthy workforce is a critical component of a thriving early care and education (ECE) system. However, ECE educators--especially those who are women of color--have long encountered low wages and a lack of benefits, coupled with a physically demanding and stressful work environment. Burnout and teacher turnover are…

An important element of effective early care and education programming is instructional systems, such as curricula, instructional materials, and professional development (PD). These systems can help teachers to create meaningful learning experiences for young children that allow them to thrive. However, implementing a new curriculum or PD requires…

The Assessment-to-Instruction (A2i) Professional Support System has been shown to be effective in improving literacy proficiency among young readers by combining data-driven technology with professional development (PD) activities to help teachers provide personalized literacy instruction. To identify efficient ways to expand the reach of A2i,…

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that when students' social and emotional well-being are poor, their engagement in instruction is profoundly affected. That revelation and the national mobilization for social justice sparked in 2020 have heightened public awareness is heightened that inequitable structures and policies--in school and out--have been…

Educational practices that prove effective often involve a substantial investment of training and support time. Unfortunately, that is the very characteristic that makes it difficult and costly to expand the programs on a large scale. A key challenge when scaling up is to maintain high levels of effectiveness at an affordable cost.…

Early math has been shown to predict not only longer-term math achievement, but also future reading achievement, high school completion, and college attendance. Yet effects from early math programs often fade out as children move into more varied instructional contexts in elementary school. This fade-out suggests the need for an alignment of math…

Early childhood interventions can be highly cost effective when positive impacts are sustained into adulthood. Yet while many recent preschool interventions have been found to have short-term effects on young children's language, literacy, mathematics, executive function, and social-emotional development, studies show that impacts on cognitive and…

To succeed in today's economy, students need both proficiency in the "three Rs" (reading, writing and arithmetic) and strong applied skills. Communication skills, team work, and critical thinking have long been at the top of employers' lists of applied skills they seek in employees. States are responding to employers' needs by putting in…

When the pandemic forced schools across the country to close their doors in March 2020, many district and school leaders worked quickly to plan for and address students' "unfinished learning." How would they support students who had been exposed to content, but had not yet had a chance to master it? Research supports two ways schools can…

An investment in early childhood education pays off when the benefits continue into adulthood. Although many recent preschool interventions have had positive, short-term effects on young children's language, literacy, mathematics, executive function, and social-emotional development, studies show that related gains in cognitive and academic skills…

The early twenty-first century has seen increased attention to developing young children's social-emotional skills and competencies in preschool programs, including Head Start--the largest federally funded early-childhood education program in the United States. At the same time, there has been greater recognition of the importance of adapting…

Improving the quality of teaching and instruction takes time and planning and may be costly and require intensive work. This is particularly true when trying to make improvements among multiple preschool sites, because preschool systems often lack a cohesive infrastructure for supporting high-quality implementation of curricula and teacher…

The concept of project-based learning (PBL) has garnered wide support among a number of K-12 education policy advocates and funders. This working paper builds on and updates a seminal literature review of PBL published in 2000. Focused primarily on articles and studies that have emerged in the 17 years since then, the working paper discusses the…