Over the past 20 years, the number of teacher's aides in the United States has more than doubled, potentially in response to the growth of special education programs now taking place in general education schools. Surprisingly, little research at all has focused on the role that teacher's aides may play in improving student achievement, and no…

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (N = 13,970), we examined whether two aspects of school-family connections, parental involvement and communication quality, accounted for the association between classroom composition and children's academic and socioemotional functioning following the transition to…

The authors explored how classroom gender composition moderated the relationship between having classmates with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) and peers' academic achievement in both kindergarten and Grade 1 classrooms. Given the behavioral and social-cognitive styles of girls, it was hypothesized that classrooms with a higher percentage…

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…

This study used a family-centered ecological lens to examine predictive relations among fathers' and mothers' language acculturation, parenting practices, and academic readiness in a large sample of Mexican American children in preschool (N = 880). In line with prior early childhood research, parent language acculturation was operationalized as…

This report is intended to provide a snapshot of the children in the ECLS-K:2011 cohort who were in kindergarten for the first time in the 2010-11 school year and in fourth grade 4 years later during the spring of 2015. About 88 percent of children enrolled in kindergarten in 2010-11 were in kindergarten for the first time that school year and…

Research on science achievement disparities by gender and race/ethnicity often neglects the beginning of the pipeline in the early grades. We address this limitation using nationally representative data following students from Grades 3 to 8. We find that the Black-White science test score gap (-1.07 SD in Grade 3) remains stable over these years,…

This study seeks to deconstruct the process by which home-school relationships develop. This study suggests these relationships develop as the result of "crossings" between home and school where crossings lead to foundational interactions that establish these relationships. Using data from the U.S. Department of Education's Early…