Within the United States, there are a variety of early education models and curricula aimed at promoting young children's pre-academic, social, and behavioral skills. This study, using data from the Miami School Readiness Project (Winsler et al., 2008, 2012), examined the school readiness gains of low-income Latino (n = 7,045) and Black (n =…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the cross-language transfer of the emergent literacy skills of preschoolers who were Spanish-speaking language-minority children in the context of an experimental intervention study. Ninety-four children were randomly assigned either to a control condition (HighScope Preschool Curriculum) or to receive…

The purpose of the present study was to determine if numeral knowledge--the ability to identify Arabic numerals and connect Arabic numerals to their respective quantities--mediates the relation between informal and formal mathematical knowledge. A total of 206 3- to 5-year-old preschool children were assessed on 6 informal mathematics tasks and 2…

Prior models suggest that math attitudes and ability might strengthen each other over time in a reciprocal fashion (Ma, 1997). The current study investigated the relationship between math interest and skill both concurrently and over time in a preschool sample. Analyses of concurrent relationships indicated that high levels of interest were…

This study is a population-based investigation of children's school readiness with a national sample of low-income children, utilizing data from the Family and Children's Experiences Survey (FACES; 2000-2003). Guided by a developmental ecological framework, we posed 3 research questions: (a) How do children's early school readiness skills in the…

The present study reports the development of a theoretically motivated measure that provides estimates of a preschooler's ability to recall auditory text, to make text-based inferences, to access knowledge from long-term memory, and to integrate this accessed knowledge with new information from auditory text. This new preschooler component…

There is increasing interest in the role of phonological awareness across languages. However, the role of phonological awareness in various languages may differ by features of the languages as well as by features of the speakers. The current meta-analysis catalogs these relations and examines factors that may have influenced how closely related…

Review of current federal and state standards indicates little consensus or empirical justification regarding appropriate goals, often referred to as benchmarks, for preschool letter-name learning. The present study investigated the diagnostic efficiency of various letter-naming benchmarks using a longitudinal database of 371 children who attended…

Guided by an ecological theoretical model, the authors used a series of multilevel models to examine associations among children's individual problem behavior, the classroom behavioral context, and school readiness outcomes for a cohort of low-income children (N = 3,861) enrolled in 229 urban Head Start classrooms. Associations were examined…

We examined whether a theoretically based number board game could be translated into a practical classroom activity that improves Head Start children's numerical knowledge. Playing the number board game as a small group learning activity promoted low-income children's number line estimation, magnitude comparison, numeral identification, and…

This study describes the dimensionality and continuum of Spanish phonological awareness (PA) skills in 3- to 6-year-old children. A 3 x 4 factorial design crossed word structure of test items (word, syllable, phoneme) with task (blending multiple-choice, blending free-response, elision multiple-choice, elision free-response) to assess 12 PA…

Children from immigrant, low-income families in the Netherlands start school with a limited vocabulary in the language of instruction; therefore, this places them at risk for developing reading difficulties. Exposure to books is assumed to reduce their 2nd language (L2) vocabulary disadvantage. In this experiment, we examined the effects of video…

This study compared traditional and multimedia-enhanced read-aloud vocabulary instruction and investigated whether the effects differed for English-language learners (ELLs) and non-English-language learners (non-ELLs). Results indicate that although there was no added benefit of multimedia-enhanced instruction for non-ELLs, there was a positive…

The development of reading-related phonological processing abilities represents an important developmental milestone in the process of learning to read. In this cross-sectional study, confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the structure of phonological processing abilities in 129 younger preschoolers (M = 40.88 months, SD = 4.65) and 304…

The authors examined the development of oral language and decoding skills from preschool to early elementary school and their relation to beginning reading comprehension using a cross-sequential design. Four- and 6-year-old children were tested on oral language and decoding skills and were retested 2 years later. In all age groups, oral language…