Data from the NICHD [National Institute of Child Health and Human Development] Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 1,307) were used to estimate the additive and multiplicative benefits of high quality child care between birth to 54 months of age and high quality elementary school education between first and fifth grade. Results…

Although high-quality early care and education (ECE) is widely accepted as one of the most effective means for promoting early learning and development, many ECE programs have limited impact perhaps because of issues with how ECE quality is defined and measured. This study seeks to expand definitions of ECE quality by asking which preschool ECE…

Parent-mediated intervention can enhance parents' competence in supporting parent-child social interactions. Research and current policy have highlighted the importance of building family capacity in supporting parents to help children with autism develop social communication abilities. Parents who experienced parent-mediated interventions have…

Although publicly-funded prekindergarten (pre-k) programs have been designed to promote children's school readiness, programs have tended to support early literacy skills to a greater degree than early language skills. Given the importance of both language and literacy skills for children's reading acquisition and academic achievement, the present…

We examined individual differences and predictions of children's patterns in behavioral, emotional and attentional efforts toward challenging puzzle tasks at 24 and 35 months using data from a large longitudinal rural representative sample. Using latent transition analysis, we found four distinct task-oriented patterns in problem-solving tasks…

Over the past few decades, instructional policy supports -- encompassing standards, curricula, and assessments -- have featured centrally in the education reform movement. So, too, have efforts to align them. In this article, we conduct interviews with local educators with responsibility for early education about the alignment of instructional…

This study tested whether individual executive function (EF) tasks were better characterized as formative or reflective indicators of the latent construct of EF. EF data that were collected as part of the Family Life Project (FLP), a prospective longitudinal study of families who were recruited at the birth of a new child (N = 1,292), when…

This study evaluates how teacher report measures align with different conceptualizations of children's social-emotional development. Leveraging seven teacher report measures of social competence and behavioral regulation in a predominantly low-income, population-based rural sample of four-year-old children (n = 828), model fit and validity were…