This brief examines kindergarten readiness and attendance in kindergarten for children enrolled in publicly provided early education programs as well as similar children who entered kindergarten without enrolling in these programs. Key findings detail the effects for children if they were enrolled for at least 90 calendar days as a three- or…

Previous Experience Sampling Method (ESM) studies demonstrate that adolescents' daily emotional states are heavily influenced by their immediate social context. However, despite adolescence being a risk period for exposure to daily stressors, research has yet to examine the influence of peers on adolescents' emotional responses to stressors…

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…

Students who come from low-income backgrounds tend to be underidentified and underserved in gifted education. Early interventions with learners of high potential from underserved groups, including exposure to challenging curriculum and summer opportunities, are important for nurturing these students' talents and preparing them for advanced…

Purpose: Children from disadvantaged settings are at risk for delays in their object-control (OC) skills. Fundamental motor skill interventions, such as the Successful Kinesthetic Instruction for Preschoolers (SKIP) Program, are highly successful when led by motor development experts. However, few preschools employ such experts. This study…

Research has shown that the school-based engagement of Latino families is lower compared with other racial and ethnic groups. One possible barrier to school-based engagement of this heterogeneous group of families might be the lack of cultural match between families and schools. Addressing this under-researched area, the current study examined…

Research Findings: The present study examined the degree to which the association between interactive peer play and academic skills was dependent upon the level of classroom quality for a representative sample of culturally and linguistically diverse urban Head Start children (N = 304 children across 53 classrooms). Peer play interactions within…

Use of multivariate analysis (e.g., multivariate analysis of variance) is common when normally distributed outcomes are collected in intervention research. However, when mixed responses--a set of normal and binary outcomes--are collected, standard multivariate analyses are no longer suitable. While mixed responses are often obtained in…

This study examined teachers' language use across the school year in 6th grade urban middle-school classrooms (n = 24) and investigated the influence of this classroom-based linguistic input on the reading comprehension skills of the students (n = 851; 599 language minority learners and 252 English-only) in the participating classrooms. Analysis…

Research Findings: This study explored the role Head Start teachers' (n = 355) depressive symptoms play in their interactions with children and in children's (n = 2,203) social-emotional development, specifically changes in children's problem behaviors and social skills as reported by parents and teachers during the preschool year. Results of the…

Guided by an ecological theoretical model, the authors used a series of multilevel models to examine associations among children's individual problem behavior, the classroom behavioral context, and school readiness outcomes for a cohort of low-income children (N = 3,861) enrolled in 229 urban Head Start classrooms. Associations were examined…

Stanford University's Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) conducted a randomized-treatment experiment during the 2006-2007 school year to test the efficacy, for Title I students, of the technological and individualized EPGY Kindergarten through Grade 5 Mathematics Course Sequence, modified for the Title I schools. Restricting attention to…

This study integrated Bayesian hierarchical modeling and receiver operating characteristic analysis (BROCA) to evaluate how interest strength (IS) and interest differentiation (ID) predicted low–socioeconomic status (SES) youth's interest-major congruence (IMC). Using large-scale Kuder Career Search online-assessment data, this study fit three…

Research Findings: This study compared the effects of content-based shared book-reading instruction versus an explicit vocabulary-only condition on the vocabulary development of preschool dual language learners (DLLs). Using shared book reading as the mode of instruction, we randomly assigned 48 bilingual preschool teachers and 281…

Background: Access to Advanced Placement (AP) courses is stratified by class and race. Researchers have identified how schools serving disadvantaged students suffer from various kinds of resource deprivations, concluding that interventions are needed to equalize access to AP courses. On the other hand, the theory of Effectively Maintained…