During the COVID-19 global pandemic, early intervention (EI) practitioners experienced an unexpected shift to providing tele-intervention services to support children and families using virtual platforms. Because this shift occurred across the field, it is important to understand the perspectives of those who experienced it under exceptional…

Despite the relative increase in early care and education (ECE) investment over recent decades, access to infant and toddler care continues to be a hurdle for countless families across the nation. While access is a multifaceted issue, main contributors include a lack of available slots and the high cost of providing care to infants and toddlers.…

This article explores the many ways in which states can and are addressing racial equity in problem solving and policymaking. The authors explore national data that make the case for addressing bias and advancing equity in state policy; share strategies and best practices for engaging families and communities; and provide examples of policies that…

Adults use social-group membership to make inductive inferences about the properties of novel individuals, and this tendency is well established by the preschool years. Recent evidence suggests that infants attend to features associated with social groups and use social-group membership to interpret an agents' actions. The current study sought to…

Children learn what words mean from hearing words used across a variety of contexts. Understanding how different contextual distributions relate to the words young children say is critical because context robustly affects basic learning and memory processes. This study examined children's everyday experiences using naturalistic video recordings to…

Only about 10 percent of eligible infants and toddlers with developmental delays nationwide receive early intervention services, which are widely agreed to reduce delays and lessen the adverse effects of risk factors and disabilities on learning and development. California serves fewer children than the national average. Challenges arise from…

Using a large sample of longitudinal assessment data from children in publicly funded infant/toddler care, preschool, and kindergarten (analytic N = 453,468), this study modeled language and literacy trajectories from early infancy through kindergarten for dual language learners (DLLs) from homes representing many different languages and their…

Research shows relationships fuel early brain development and provide the foundation for lifelong health and success. Yet we also know that parenting a very young child places enormous physical and emotional demands on adults. Some families may not have what they need, or know where to turn for support if they want it, even when it is within reach…

Research Findings: The quality of group care infants and toddlers experience relates to their concurrent and later development. Recent quality improvement initiatives point to the need for ecologically valid measures that assess the multifaceted nature of child care quality. In this article, we present the psychometric properties of an infant and…

California continues to fall below national averages in identifying and serving infants, toddlers, and preschoolers with developmental disabilities. The transition between infant/toddler services, administered by the Department of Developmental Services, and preschool services for 3- to 5-year-olds, administered by the Department of Education, is…

Young infants can learn statistical regularities and patterns in sequences of events. Studies have demonstrated a relationship between early sequence learning skills and later development of cognitive and language skills. We investigated the relation between infants' visual response speed to novel event sequences, and their later receptive and…

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) submits this report to the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions pursuant to section 649(l)(3) of the Head Start Act (the Act). This report contains findings based on data collected on the U.S. Department of…

Early care and education (ECE) programs for children prior to kindergarten in California are provided through a mixed delivery system that includes licensed home- and center-based programs as well as school settings. The requirements, experience, and supports for educators vary widely across settings, depending more on funding sources and…

Too often in California, children (especially children of color, foster youth, and those growing up in poverty) lack the components critical for a healthy early life. For example, as few as 3% of families that might benefit from voluntary home visiting have access to home visiting programs, 32% of children entering foster care are under the age of…

This resource was prepared in response to a request for information from a Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) State about which RTT-ELC States are using the Pyramid Model for Supporting Social Emotional Competence in Infants and Young Children. The State also requested information about other projects States have designed to…