Increasing school-based parental involvement--which has links to improved student outcomes like academic achievement--is a core area of focus in many preschool programs. Yet, little research to date has examined what the association is between attending preschool and school-based parental involvement in early elementary school. This study…

This causal-comparative study analyzed third grade reading scores from the National Center for Education Statistics, Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) K-2011, by one of five school types, and four U.S. geographical regions. Forty-one of 50 states were represented. The problem studied is the unexplained elementary reading performance…

The present study reports associations between features of directly observed classroom processes and school readiness skills across the academic year for 1498 children enrolled in publicly funded pre-K programs in a large and diverse county. In models adjusting for a range of child and family covariates, evidence was detected for the separate, and…

Student mobility--the event of students moving into and out of schools--is prevalent and has established negative relationships with both academic and non-cognitive outcomes for mobile students and the classrooms and schools that serve them. Despite this, there is a dearth of research examining student mobility, and, in particular, only a sparse…

Executive function skills are a set of cognitive processes that help individuals to engage in goal-directed behavior and have been linked to benefits in academic achievement and other learning-related outcomes. Recently, there has been interest in understanding how attending center-based preschool may relate to the development of executive…

Background: Observation Studies, Unmeasured Confounding, and Sensitivity Analysis: An important part of educational research is identifying important, potentially causal, factors that influence children's learning from observational studies. However, it is well-known that discovering such factors from observational studies can be biased due to…

Over the years, Catholic schools have been particularly committed to the formation of sound character, including the acquisition of self-discipline. Researchers at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute wanted to know whether students in Catholic school actually exhibit more self-discipline than their peers--and if so, what those schools can teach other…

Policymakers have advocated academic skills building at kindergarten as a way of improving student achievement. However, early childhood educators have concerns with this policy as gains in achievement may come at the expense of children's social-emotional skills. Using a nationally representative data set of kindergartners, we find that advanced…

We apply "value-added" models to estimate the effects of teachers on an outcome they cannot plausibly affect: student height. When fitting the relatively simple models that are widely used in educational practice to New York City data, we find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and…

As a growing number of states require kindergarten entry assessments, more state and district administrators are becoming interested in how their peers use these assessments around the country. Given this interest, state administrators participating in Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast & Islands Early Childhood Education Research…

This "Stated Briefly" report is a companion piece that summarizes the results of another report of the same name. Child development research on the importance of early experiences for later life outcomes has underscored the need for effective early childhood education. With the aim of providing high-quality education, many kindergarten…

Gaps in educational achievement between high- and low-income children are growing. Administrative data sets maintained by states and districts lack information about income but do indicate whether a student is eligible for subsidized school meals. We leverage the longitudinal structure of these data sets to develop a new measure of economic…

Leveraging data from two nationally representative cohorts from the ECLS-K (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten), we examine the types of transition practices that schools use to ease children's adjustment to formal schooling. The transition to kindergarten is a critical juncture in a child's life that entails a host of social,…

Despite growing interest in the importance of nonacademic skills for student success, very few studies have examined the extent to which schools and teachers are associated with gains in these outcomes. This descriptive study adds to the nascent literature by examining the amount of school- and teacher-associated variation in kindergarten…

Recent accounts suggest that accountability pressures have trickled down into the early elementary grades and that kindergarten today is characterized by a heightened focus on academic skills and a reduction in opportunities for play. This paper compares public school kindergarten classrooms between 1998 and 2010 using two large, nationally…