This longitudinal study examined the influence of prekindergarten teacher characteristics and classroom instructional processes during mathematical activities on the growth of mathematics learning scores in prekindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade. Participants attended state-funded and Head Start prekindergarten programs. Mathematical…

Research Findings: The current study analyzed the relation between the amount of mathematical input that preschool children hear (i.e., math talk) from their mothers in their homes and their early math ability a year later. Forty mother-child dyads recorded their naturalistic exchanges in their homes using an enhanced audio-recording device (the…

By adapting a self-administered assessment of coparenting, we sought to provide a new tool, the Cocaring Relationship Questionnaire, to measure parent-teacher, or cocaring relationships, and provide additional construct validity for the multidimensional concept of cocaring. Next, recognizing the importance of parental involvement for young…

Young children are able to benefit from early science teaching but many preschool teachers have not had opportunities to deepen their own understanding of science or to develop their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in relation to specific science topics and concepts. This study presents the results of efficacy research on Foundations of…

Research Findings: The current study examined the impact of daily classroom computer use on the cognitive development of preschool children in 14 urban Head Start classrooms. The sample consisted of 208 predominantly African American low-income children with a mean age of 48.8 months. A quasi-experimental design was used in which 7 classrooms had…

The present study used hierarchical linear modeling to examine predictors of students' emotional and behavioral difficulties in preschool classrooms. Specifically, the study examined (a) the link between teachers' perceptions of their own emotional intelligence and students' emotional and behavioral difficulties, (b) the link between teachers'…

Research Findings: The present study examined the amount of exposure to math activities that children of low socioeconomic status (SES) encounter in private community-based preschool classrooms and whether greater time in these activities predicted higher math skills. Three cohorts of 4- to 5-year-old children were recruited from 30 private…

Research Findings: The primary purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between social play and involvement in the outdoor preschool environment. The study included 173 children ranging in age from 3 to 6 years (M[subscript age] = 3.95, SD = 0.82) and attending 19 preschools in the Basque Country (Spain). A total of 51 teachers…

Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

Research Findings: Continuity of care is a recommended practice in child care intended to promote secure and supportive relationships between infants and toddlers and their caregivers. Toddlers (N = 115) between 12 and 24 months were observed in 30 continuity and 29 noncontinuity classrooms. The average duration of care for toddlers with…

Research Findings: The purpose of the present study was to examine the extent to which the quality of teacher-child interactions and teachers' self-reported curriculum emphases are related to children's reading skill development during their 1st school year. To accomplish this, we assessed the reading skills of 1,029 Finnish children (M…

Research Findings: This study examines lexical- and sentence-level dimensions of academic language to describe teachers' natural use of academic language and its association with vocabulary growth in 489 at-risk 4-year-olds enrolled in Head Start preschool classrooms. Using transcripts derived from video recordings of book-reading sessions in 52…

Research Findings: This study examined the potential impacts of ongoing participation (twice weekly for 30 weeks) in teacher-child managed whole-group language and literacy instruction on prekindergarten children's social interaction with classmates. Teacher-child managed whole-group instruction that provides children with opportunities to engage…

Research Findings: The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the relationship between classroom age composition and preschoolers' vocabulary gains over an academic year and also to examine whether these relations were moderated by classroom quality. In this study (N = 130 children in 16 classrooms representing a subset of all children…

Research Findings: Recent research has explored relations between classroom quality and child executive function (EF), but little is known about how teachers' well-being, including stress, relates to child EF--a crucial component of self-regulation. We hypothesized that teacher stress is negatively or curvilinearly related to child EF and…