Nationwide, a range of factors, including the rollback of campus diversity programs and affirmative action admissions, barriers to students accessing basic needs support, and ongoing gaps in Title IX protections, present opportunities for policymakers to ensure all students can thrive in postsecondary educational settings. Promoting educational…

California made a historic commitment to early childhood education in 2021 by providing universal prekindergarten (UPK) for all 4-year-olds by 2025-26 and expanding access for income-eligible 3-year-olds. California's UPK initiative includes multiple early learning programs, including transitional kindergarten (TK), the California State Preschool…

Early intervention services are an important federally funded program for families with children under three years of age who may be diagnosed with or are at risk of developmental delay or disability. The program's impacts can be profound: Early intervention helps strengthen cognitive, motor, and language skills; reduces the likelihood of…

Introduction: Growing up in poverty increases children's exposure to adversities that undermine healthy development, impeding growth in the social-emotional and language skills that support adaptive coping and promote mental health (Yoshikawa et al., 2012). Head Start promotes preschool gains but benefits fade as children proceed into elementary…

Challenges in collecting comprehensive health surveillance data on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are numerous. A number of important issues and strategies are discussed in the articles contained in this special issue of "Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities." In this article, we focus on the…

The 13th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation's (QRMC)'s Presidential charter directed the QRMC to "survey the usage of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, as well as any other supplemental sources of income or support you deem significant, by military members on active service and their families, and consider…

Decades of research suggest that both Head Start and public pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs boost low-income preschoolers' kindergarten skills. What is not yet well understood is whether there are relative advantages of transitioning from Head Start after 1 year into a school-based public pre-k program for the year immediately before…

Preschoolers can learn vocabulary from educational videos, but children from low-income backgrounds often do not learn as effectively as their higher income peers. We investigated whether adding attention-directing cues to media (Study 1) and slowing the pacing of media (Study 2) supported vocabulary learning for preschoolers from low-income…

Research Findings: A constellation of social positions of difference can contribute to substantial variation among children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. Using data from the "Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey" 2009 cohort, the present study identified intersectional typologies of cultural…

To understand the broader societal context for supporting the healthy development and well-being of infants and toddlers, the following excerpt from the "State of Babies Yearbook: 2022 Executive Summary" presents key findings on the status of America's families with young children. As of August 2022, the reconciliation bill proposed in…

College access programs provide middle and high school students with essential skills to prepare them for a successful transition to postsecondary education. TRIO Talent Search (TS)and Upward Bound (UB) are federally funded programs established to strengthen the likelihood that students from underserved groups will graduate high school and pursue…

Only 11% of students who are Pell-eligible and the first in their family to attend college graduate with a bachelor's degree. Upward Bound is a federal-funded project that seeks to: (1) improve the motivation and skills of disadvantaged students; and (2) increase students' likelihood of success at two- and four-year institutions. The study sought…

In the present study, we investigated the relative impact of age- versus schooling-related growth in school readiness skills using four modeling approaches that leverage natural variation in longitudinal data collected within the preschool year. Our goal was to demonstrate the applicability of different analytic techniques that do not rely on…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify which student groups Black students perceive as needing food assistance, to explore how Black students' perceptions of students in need impacts their decision to utilize the on-campus food pantry at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), and to identify the circumstances that…

In the present study, we investigated the relative impact of age- versus schooling-related growth in school readiness skills using four modeling approaches that leverage natural variation in longitudinal data collected within the preschool year. Our goal was to demonstrate the applicability of different analytic techniques that do not rely on…