Half of kindergarten teachers split children into higher and lower ability groups for reading or math. In national data, we predicted kindergarten ability group placement using linear and ordinal logistic regression with classroom fixed effects. In fall, test scores were the best predictors of group placement, but there was bias favoring girls,…

Curriculum experts have long argued that adopting content-rich language arts curricula would help to remedy the knowledge deficit. Another approach is simply to devote more classroom time to subjects like science and social studies. It is an open question whether more time spent on such content-rich subjects in elementary school classrooms might…

We apply "value-added" models to estimate the effects of teachers on an outcome they cannot plausibly affect: student height. When fitting the relatively simple models that are widely used in educational practice to New York City data, we find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and…

The present study used a large sample of mostly non-resident fathers (74%) to determine whether father-school involvement (e.g. attending parent-teacher conferences) predicted better academic and social emotional skills after controlling for the influence of mother-school involvement, the quality of children's home learning environment, and…

Self-regulation is a critical component of school readiness and success. Practices for supporting self-regulation may be advanced by a better understanding of factors characterizing children at risk for challenges and contextual mechanisms associated with desirable developmental trajectories. The current study leverages a large national data set…

Growing evidence suggests that contrary to popular belief, schools mostly do not generate achievement gaps in cognitive skills but, rather, reflect the inequalities that already exist. In the case of socioeconomic status, exposure to school often reduces gaps. Surprisingly little is known, however, about whether this pattern extends to gender gaps…

Improving the reading ability of young students could hardly be a more urgent priority for our elementary schools. Two thirds of American fourth and eighth graders are not able to read proficiently--and the outcomes are far worse for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2019 showed that only…

Our goals in this study were to examine (a) the degree to which teacher perceptions of children's behavior in kindergarten (averaged across fall and spring for each child) predict retention by Grade 5 and (b) whether these relationships are moderated by student race, gender, or socioeconomic status (SES). Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal…

Background: Student attention is a stable predictor of academic performance, with lower levels of attention associated with poorer grades. Claims about students' attention may better reflect social processes than student deficits. School social workers may be especially situated to address the interaction of child and classroom factors impeding…

We used pupil-level data from the National Pupil Database in England to conduct a longitudinal analysis of the identification of moderate learning difficulties (MLD) and social, emotional, and mental health difficulties (SEMH) among 550,000 pupils ages 5 to 11 years. Survival analysis was used to determine the hazard ratios (HRs) for time to first…

Children's approaches to learning (AtL) has been identified in research and policy as a key domain of children's school readiness. However, relatively little is known about the child and family factors that shape early AtL, how it varies in the general population, or how it develops and changes through the early years of schooling. This…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the influence of social-emotional competence (SEC) and various other student- and school-level variables on the academic achievement of kindergarteners. Data were collected on a nationally representative cohort of kindergarteners as part of the United States Department of Education's Early…