Considerable interest is directed to promoting children's success as they transition to kindergarten. It is generally proposed that children who experience lower levels of transition difficulties at kindergarten entry achieve higher academic and social-emotional gains, although this premise has seldom been explicitly evaluated in tandem with…

ADHD is a behavioral cognitive correlate of achievement associated with lower reading performance. The externalizing and internalizing symptoms that characterize ADHD behaviors negatively impact the engagement of students experiencing reading difficulties and the ability to regulate attention and behavior during the reading acquisition process.…

Core reading instruction and interventions have differential effects based on student characteristics such as cognitive ability and pre-intervention skill level. Evidence for differential effect based on affective characteristics is scant and ambiguous; however, students with problem behavior are more often non-responsive to core reading…

The present study tested the learning avoidance model by examining the degree to which learning avoidance in various afterschool settings mediated the negative association between math anxiety and math achievement. Participants consisted of 207 third to sixth graders. Using a path model, findings showed that students' math anxiety was negatively…

Epidemiologic research suggests a gap between prevalence estimates of students with emotional or behavioral problems and the actual number of students identified under the federal category of emotional disturbance (ED). To better understand issues related to the identification gap, we investigated the academic and behavioral functioning,…

We examined whether media use measured using time diaries is related to preschoolers' academic and social/behavioral skills. Children (N = 179) completed direct assessments of academic skills in the fall and spring, and teachers reported on social and behavioral skills. Parents/caregivers completed a 24-hr time diary in the spring, from which…

Research Findings: Peer play interactions are important contexts for supporting early learning both at home and at school for preschool children from low-income backgrounds. The current study used structural equation modeling to examine whether teacher-reported learning behaviors in the classroom mediated the relationship between parent-reported…

As the field moves toward adaptive and individualized behavior intervention, it is important to identify and consider relevant student characteristics as potential levers (i.e., critical factors) for improving intervention effectiveness. Motivated by previous findings suggesting that behavioral profiles and teachers' perceptions of students with…

Executive function and learning behaviour play an important role in children's academic outcomes by helping them maintain attention, work cooperatively, and stay focused, especially for those from lower family socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. This study explored whether these learning-related skills were associated with children's…

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…

Attention is correlated with reading, but the extent to which behavioral ratings and sustained attention relate to reading skills is unclear. We assessed 245 fourth and fifth grade struggling readers (mean age = 10.3 years) on behavioral ratings of attention, sustained attention, and reading over a school year. Contributions of behavioral ratings…

Guided by an ecological model, we tested whether teacher-child interaction quality buffered the negative associations between challenging behavior within preschool classroom contexts and language and literacy skills. Associations were examined for a sample of children enrolled an urban Head Start program (N = 304 children across 53 classrooms).…

This study compared the relative contribution of earliest assessment of preschool children's context-specific problem behaviors with subsequent observations of those behaviors for the prediction of later academic and sociobehavioral performance in first grade. Using a nationally representative sample of low-income children from the Head Start…

Research Findings: The present study examined the extent to which instructional practices, including curriculum, in pre-K through third grade are vertically aligned. Attention was directed to teachers' grouping practices, academic content, and pedagogical methods given their importance for students' learning. Variable- and person-centered analyses…

Research Findings: This study examines the development of problem behavior in classroom contexts characterized by peer interaction among a nationally representative sample (N = 3,827) of U.S. low-income children from preschool entry to first grade. Latent growth mixture modeling was employed to identify unobserved subpopulations (latent classes)…