Background: Poverty-related disparities in school readiness are well documented (Dreyer, 2020). Increasing cognitively stimulating parenting practices can contribute greatly to addressing such disparities, and therefore represent a key modifiable target for preventive interventions beginning early in life (Brooks-Gunn & Markman, 2005).…

Research Findings: The present study examined the transition practices reported by 59 pre-kindergarten (pre-k) and 186 kindergarten teachers in the rural Southeastern United States, and asked if transition practices related to skills at the beginning and end of kindergarten for 387 children. Analyses indicated kindergarten teachers offered more…

Delayed, as opposed to immediate, gratification is generally understood to indicate adaptive development. The present study investigates performance on a choice-based delay of gratification measure and its relations with other outcomes in a sample of children of color from low-income families, who are underrepresented in delayed gratification…

"Pre-K Mathematics" is a supplemental mathematics program focusing on a range of mathematical concepts to help develop children's informal mathematical knowledge. The "Pre-K Mathematics" program includes teacher-led, small-group mathematics activities that are engaging and hands-on, as well as caregiver-child activities that…

A substantial body of research has demonstrated the efficacy of early writing interventions that target skills and composing processes; however, much less is known about the effectiveness of classroom writing instruction outside of the context of an intervention. The goal of this study was to investigate if writing instruction and student practice…

Based on a Response to Intervention framework, this study examines whether a clinical significance methodology is useful for placing children in Tier 2 interventions for school-based social-emotional learning. Data from INSIGHTS Into Children's Temperament, a Tier-1 intervention, was analyzed to assess practical considerations and limitations…

Efforts to improve the achievement gap between low-income children and their more affluent peers has led to the development of classroom interventions and curricula to increase executive functioning (EF) and social-emotional skills (SE), thought to be foundational for learning. The Second Step Early Learning (SSEL) curriculum is a commercially…

Research Findings: This study investigated how mean classroom-level shyness scores moderated the impacts of "INSIGHTS" into "Children's Temperament" on instructional support and students' math and reading skills in kindergarten and 1st-grade classrooms. "INSIGHTS" is a temperament-based social-emotional learning…

Children from low-income and ethnic minority backgrounds have demonstrated substantially lower levels of math achievement than their middle class majority peers for decades. The present study addressed two research questions: (1) when used as a supplement to typical classroom instruction and in isolation from the larger curriculum, does Building…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the relation between morphological awareness on reading comprehension is moderated by multisyllabic word reading ability in fifth-grade students ("N" = 169, 53.7% female, 65.2% minority status, 69.2% free/reduced lunch status), oversampled for poor reading skill, when controlling for…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine the potential contribution of teacher-child interactions to residualized Inhibitory Control (IC) gains over approximately a six-month period for preschoolers from predominantly low-income households. The study also explored whether the association between quality of teacher-child…

The paper reports on the adaptation of a D-KEFS test battery for Slovakia. Drawing on concrete examples, it describes and illustrates the key issues relating to the transfer of test items from one socio-cultural environment to another. The standardisation sample of the population of Slovak pupils in the fourth year of primary school included 250…

Using a large, longitudinal data set that represents 701 state-funded pre-k classrooms and over 2,900 children enrolled in 11 states, the current study examined two hypotheses: (1) children would be perceived to be better adjusted at the beginning of pre-k when rated by a same-race teacher than by a different-race teacher, and (2) children would…

This paper uses a regression discontinuity model to examine the effects on kindergarten entrance assessments of the Kalamazoo County Ready 4s (KC Ready 4s) program, a half-day pre-K program for four-year-olds in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. The results are based on test scores and other characteristics of up to 220 children participating in KC…

The purpose of this evaluation of Scholastic's "System 44" conducted by RMC Research was to expand the existing research on students with learning disabilities by conducting a randomized study of struggling readers with approximately half of the sample comprised of students with learning disabilities. Specifically, this evaluation…