The Texas Literacy Initiative (TLI) was first implemented in Austin Independent School District during the 2012-2013 school. This report summarizes Spring 2014 survey responses from coaches/specialists at TLI campuses.

This article begins with a review of research providing evidence that social-emotional competence is a key component of school readiness and that the foundations for social-emotional competence are laid down in the earliest years. We go on to review effective practices and specific interventions that have been found to strengthen children's…

Prenatally and in infants and toddlers, the brain is being constructed as a foundation for all later learning. Positive early experiences contribute to the formation of a brain that is capable, early in infancy, of utilizing and strengthening the basic processes of learning. Throughout a lifetime, a person will repeatedly use these approaches to…

Contrary to the concept of school readiness as achieving a particular set of attributes considered essential for educational success, this article is grounded in the assumption that all children are ready to learn, but what they are expected to learn varies widely from one cultural setting and historic period to another. The authors challenge the…

This testimony was presented before the Committe of the Whole Council of the District of Columbia on February 16, 2012. Experts in child development have long known that the earliest years of a child's life are a critical period of development across a range of domains: physical, socio-emotional, behavioral, and cognitive (Shonkoff and Phillips,…

Head Start programs are required to set aside at least 10% of program slots for children with disabilities, but the percentage of children with disabilities served varies depending on the criteria used and source of the information. This study used the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) 2000 data for a nationally representative…

In recent years, executive functioning (EF) has received increasing attention from researchers and practitioners focusing on how EF predicts important outcomes such as success at school and in life. For example, EF has been described as the single best predictor of school readiness (Blair & Razza, 2007). Moreover, EF has been implicated in…

Few children have had the chance to travel alone anywhere, certainly not to the store or the playground. Few have the opportunity to get even a dash of street smarts: to practice getting themselves out of even a minor jam, to develop wayfinding skills, to navigate their neighborhood and choreograph their day--all valuable components of school…

The purpose of this article is to provide information on the benefits and challenges of using virtual hearing resource services for a specific kindergarten readiness program--the Preschoolers Esteem and Emotional Readiness (PEER) program for families and their children who are deaf and hard of hearing throughout the province of British Columbia…

The Texas Education Agency's (TEA's) 2018 Annual Report is intended to shine light on the agency's commitment to ensuring that every one of the more than five million public school students in Texas is prepared for success in college, a career or the military. In the report, TEA shares success stories of schools who are meeting the needs of their…

Every year, the World Bank's World Development Report (WDR) features a topic of central importance to global development. The 2018 WDR--"Learning to Realize Education's Promise"--is the first ever devoted entirely to education. And the time is right: education has long been critical to human welfare, but it is even more so in a time of…

International comparisons strongly influence national policy agendas in the early years. However, an appreciation of details and national context and differences is imperative to promote democracy. From the perspective of a Danish social pedagogue lecturing in Early Childhood Studies in England, the author presents a cross-national comparison to…

The author empirically tests the conceptual model of academic socialization, which suggests that parental cognitions about schooling influence parenting practices and child outcomes during the transition to school (Taylor, Clayton, & Rowley, 2004). More specifically, the author examines associations among parents' conceptions of school…

The aim of this research is to examine the effect of The Play supported Program designed for 60-72 month-old disadvantaged children on their readiness levels. The sample of the research has consisted of an experimental group and a control group, each having twenty 60-72 months old children (10 girls and 10 boys) at Göztepe Semiha Sakir Children's…

"Shared book reading" (also known as "interactive shared book reading") encompasses practices that adults can use when reading with children, which are intended to enhance young children's language and literacy skills. During "shared book reading," an adult reads a book to an individual child or a group of children…