The purpose of this correlational study was to investigate the effectiveness of attending a full-day pre-kindergarten program on the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA) scores of students who attended the Full-day program and students who did not attend the full-day program. The population of students in this study was 260 from three different…

The articles contained in this three-article dissertation carefully document characteristics of early childhood (EC) classrooms that could be beneficial to early learning and success. These articles use multiple regression, descriptive statistics, and multi-level modeling in their methodology and make recommendations for policy in the field of…

The prevalence of educator shortages has long been a topic of research and policy discussions in Illinois. Across multiple years, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) and Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools (IARSS) have collected data and reported on the magnitude, severity, and impact of shortages statewide. Prior…

Background: Publicly funded four-year-old preschool (or 4K) programs have expanded over the past several decades (Friedman-Krauss et al. 2021). Many high-quality preschool programs lead to gains in academic and social skills for students (Cascio and Schanzenbach 2013; Gormley and Gayer 2005; Weiland and Yoshikawa 2013; Wong et al. 2008),…

The curriculum states that Swedish school-age educare (SAEC) should offer students a meaningful leisure time and stimulate their development and learning through SAEC teaching, which is defined as a combination of care, development, and learning. In recent decades SAEC has relocated from a social to an educational arena with a different…

Nursery practitioners often highlight the difference between the children who attend morning sessions and those who attend afternoon sessions, with the feeling that the morning session children are more receptive and show greater improvement in their development than those who attend in the afternoon, but no specific data OR evidence has been…

How preschool teachers and children spend their time in preschool sets the stage for child engagement and learning. To describe characteristics of environments and activities and to compare child engagement in indoor and outdoor free play, systematic observations of children and teachers were performed in 78 Swedish preschool units. Results showed…

Montessori teachers in public schools navigate a system daily that often does not align with their pedagogy, and district policies push them to stray from high-fidelity implementation. Using Weick's sensemaking theory and literature on Montessori teacher identity, I contend that Montessori teachers' identity plays a crucial role in how, or if,…

The purpose of this quantitative comparative quasi-experimental study was to compare the perceptions of work-life balance and turnover intentions of four-day and five-day rural Oklahoma classroom teachers. Four-day school districts have become increasingly popular across the United States as a way to reduce operational expenses, with 92 four-day…

Early educational interventions, such as Head Start, have been widely recognized as an effective way to mitigate the negative effects of poverty on early learning and development (Camilli, Vargas, Ryan, & Barnett, 2010). In the past decade, there has been a strong expansion of early childhood programming, including Head Start and state-funded…

Research on the effects of nursery school attendance still presents divergent results: a possible explanation is that the effects of child care on development outcomes can be modulated by individual characteristics, such as gender or temperament. In the present study, gender differences in nursery adaptation (evaluated by social skills and…

ADHD is one of the most prevalent neurodevelopmental disorders, and the numbers only continue to rise. Ontario has implemented play-based FDK in the last decade, thus it is imperative that the perceived effectiveness of the program for children with ADHD is studied. In conducting this study, the researchers present and interprets educators'…

In Texas, public-funded pre-kindergarten is important because it provides the most vulnerable children with the opportunity to develop school readiness, so they can learn core competencies in kindergarten relevant to academic readiness for first grade. The Texas Legislature was back in session in spring 2019 and, not surprisingly, a bill was filed…

High-quality early childhood education makes a difference: It increases academic attainment and pro-social behavior, positively affects health, and allows more parents to reap the benefits of work. Conservatives care about early education, but liberals have made headway with universal public pre-kindergarten (pre-K), an expensive proposition that…

The purpose of this research was to examine the extent to which preschools satisfy the natural need for physical activity of a young child in the summer holidays and during the school year. The measurement of physical activity of children and its level was performed with the use of Actigraph accelerometers and the Steps per Minute test. The sample…