Disruptive events such as economic recessions, natural disasters, job loss, and divorce are highly prevalent among American families. These events can have a long-lasting impact when experienced during childhood, potentially altering academic achievement, socioemotional well-being, health and development, and later life socioeconomic status. Much…

Many developmental theories have not been sufficiently evaluated using designs that control for unobserved familial confounds. Our long-term goal is to determine the causal structure underlying associations between early environmental conditions and later psychosocial and health outcomes. Our overall objective in this study was to further evaluate…

Being school-ready when transitioning to the primary school system has been associated with favourable outcomes during schooling and adult life. While children living in socio-economically disadvantaged areas may be at a higher risk of being less school-ready, research in the area has highlighted that not all children experience such a delay. This…

Background: The acquired skill set prior to school entry has emerged as an important issue in research and policy internationally. Much evidence exists advocating the importance of early numeracy and literacy skills in later academic achievement and economic outcomes of students. Aim: The goal of this study was to determine the association between…

Using a UK representative sample from the Millennium Cohort Study, the present study examined the unique and cumulative contribution of children's characteristics and attitudes to school, home learning environment and family's socio-economic background to children's language and literacy at the end of Key Stage 1 (age seven-years-old).…

In the last three decades, several strands of research have produced compelling evidence justifying a focus on the family with a particular emphasis on early years in order to raise literacy standards. Partners in Literacy is an evidence-based model which is built on these key research findings, these are: (1) Families and parents are critical to…

The Home Environment Review was administered to the parents of sixty-seven Head Start children. In addition, the Caldwell Preschool Inventory was given to the children. A relationship was found between the child's achievement in school and the quality of his home environment. (Author)

Multivariate sets of predictor variables including both cognitive and social variables, different types of preschool experiences, and family environment variables were used to predict the first-grade reading achievement of 144 first-grade boys and girls. Measures for the predictor variables had been taken at school entry and at the end of the…

Described in this symposium report are results from three studies exploring the relationship of home environments in infancy or early childhood to school performance. All studies used the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) and drew their data from the files of the Houston Parent-Child Development Center, a 2-year…

Investigates in two longitudinal, observational studies among 3-year-old children the extent to which early experience, caregiver intervention and language mastery activities are more predictive of IQ and other measures of intellectual competence than are child-initiated activities and nonlanguage-oriented experiences. (Author/RH)

Teachers rated social competence and academic achievement of Bermudian children exposed to various amounts and qualities of day care. Found that quality of care was important to children's intellectual and social development while in day care but not after one to four years of primary schooling. Family background, not day care, predicted primary…

Measures of preschool cognition and indicators of family socioeconomic status predicted school enrollment for children in four Guatemalan villages. For children who went to school, socioeconomic status and preschool abilities were associated with age-at-entry, and with the number of grades passed and the maximum grade attained through age seven.…

This study examined the associations between the early family environment, older siblings' early characteristics, and later sibling relationships. Participating were 37 families with infants and preschool-age older siblings who were observed in the laboratory at 3 time points and followed-up 3 years later. Findings indicated that parents' early…

A model was developed to relate home, school, and extracurricular experiences (from preschool through high school) to the reading achievement of high school seniors. Variables representing each of these factors were measured using "The Reading Biographer," an instrument that had been evaluated in a national follow-up study of 3,959 high…

Family and child care experiences from birth to 54 months, achievement and social competence at entry to school, maternal sensitivity at first grade, and qualities of first-grade classrooms were used to predict academic and cognitive functioning at first grade for 832 children enrolled in the National Institute of Child Health and Human…