Autistic adults in need of long-term services and supports spend months on waiting lists before receiving such services through Medicaid. Data from a state-wide survey of adults and their caregivers on a waiting list for autism waivers suggest that the majority have unmet needs for functional skills services (63.6%), employment or vocation…

Income-based childcare programs provide children access to developmentally appropriate and vocabulary-rich literacy experiences. For this study, participating U.S. Head Start Centers requested families complete a weekly home literacy log to encourage vocabulary-rich shared book reading activities in the home. Using participant characteristics,…

Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), the Propel Schools charter network, and the Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS) want to better identify students at risk for academic problems in the near term. The stakeholders partnered with the Regional Education Laboratory Mid-Atlantic to develop an approach for identifying at-risk students…

This short-term longitudinal study examined how economically-impoverished children's moral reasoning predicts specific aggressive subtypes. Children (N = 106, M[subscript age] = 52.78 months, 51% boys, ethnically diverse backgrounds) from urban Head Start programs completed a structured story-interview pertaining to moral reasoning and judgement…

This report provides information for administrators, researchers, and student support staff in local education agencies who are interested in identifying students who are likely to have near-term academic problems such as absenteeism, suspensions, poor grades, and low performance on state tests. The report describes an approach for developing a…

Adolescents in residential care have an increased risk of developing psychosocial problems, however, not all adolescents are equally vulnerable. This study aims to provide a review and methodological evaluation of current studies, which focus on protective and risk factors associated with the psychosocial adjustment of adolescents in residential…

The document are the appendixes for the full report, "Using Data from Schools and Child Welfare Agencies to Predict Near-Term Academic Risks." The study team collected and linked five academic years of student-level administrative data from Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), Propel Schools, and the Allegheny County Department of Human…

Background: Workers supporting adults with intellectual disabilities experience significant stress in their essential role during COVID-19. The purpose of this study was to describe the experience of these workers and determine predictors of emotional distress. Methods: Eight hundred and thirty-eight workers supporting adults with intellectual…

Public preschool boosts academic skills in kindergarten, but little is known about whether that boost lasts to third grade because many studies stop directly assessing children after kindergarten. The current study tests for sustained associations between preschool attendance and an array of repeatedly measured, directly assessed language and math…

Background: Early care and education (ECE) quality has been a topic of discussion for several decades (Burchinal, 2018; Mashburn et al., 2008; NICHD ECCRN, 2002). The structure-process-child outcomes theory proposes that structural features (e.g., teacher education, class size) of quality predict process quality (e.g., teacher-child interactions),…

The aim of this study was to analyze the influence of economic capital, culture capital, social capital, social security, and living conditions on children's cognitive ability. However, most studies only focus on the impact of family socio-economic status/culture capital on children's cognitive ability by ordinary least squares regression…

Background: The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) framework supports the "whole child" across 10 domains. This study assessed state law and district policy WSCC coverage. Methods: Primary legal research was used to compile relevant district policies and state laws for a stratified random sample of 368 public school…

Research Findings: Preschool teachers' relationships with children are a critical component of classroom quality. We draw from a sample of N = 2,114 children attending Head Start to examine child-centered profiles of experiences across two dimensions of classroom interaction quality that are often considered separately: individual teacher-child…

Research Findings: Better understanding the correlates of teacher stress is critical to develop effective, targeted prevention and intervention efforts to decrease early childhood educator stress and ultimately improve outcomes for educators and young children. Previous studies of early childhood educator stress have mostly focused on teacher…

Research Findings: This study examined associations between observed emotion-focused teaching practices and preschool children's emotion expression, emotion-related behaviors, and learning behaviors. Four centers located in large midwestern and mid-Atlantic metropolitan areas participated in the study. Of these, one center was a Head Start…