We examined associations between the quality of kindergarten teachers' mathematics instruction and their students' achievement and motivation in mathematics. Using a sample of 20 kindergarten teachers and their 285 students, we rated five video-recorded mathematics lessons per teacher throughout the spring semester with the Mathematical Quality of…

The transition to kindergarten is foundational for children's future school performance and families' relationships with the educational system. Despite its well-documented benefits, few studies have explored family engagement across the pre-Kindergarten (pre-K) to kindergarten transition nor considered the role of geographic context during this…

Emotion recognition (ER) involves understanding what others are feeling by interpreting nonverbal behavior, including facial expressions. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the psychometric properties of a web-based social ER assessment designed for children in kindergarten through third grade. Data were collected from two separate samples…

As states and districts expand access to publicly funded PreK programs, researchers and policymakers have been grappling with experimental evidence demonstrating that the benefits of PreK on academic skills are not likely to last into early elementary school. A leading hypothesis to explain this phenomenon is that PreK and the elementary grades…

Objectives: Parent engagement in early learning has historically been defined quite broadly and it is unclear whether those designing, implementing, evaluating, or participating in parent engagement initiatives conceptualize parent engagement in the same way. Lack of consensus could contribute to poor quality of parent-school partnerships and…

The purpose of the study was to assess early literacy skills and examine the presence and stability of challenging behaviors across the critical threshold of the kindergarten school year. Students' (n = 337) literacy performance (letter sound fluency, word attack, and phonological awareness) and challenging behaviors (teacher ratings of…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

Students who demonstrate mathematics difficulties in the early grades are at risk for poor educational outcomes. Fortunately, strategic early mathematics intervention programs can improve academic outcomes for students with mathematics difficulties, and instructional technology has demonstrated promise in delivering targeted and individualized…

The UPSTART Summer program is a federally funded i3 validation project that uses a computer-based program to maintain and develop the literacy skills of elementary school students in rural Utah during the summer months when school is out of session. Researchers used a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the impact of the program in forestalling…

This study summarizes state-level policies surrounding school readiness assessment. A search was conducted to collect and code school readiness policies to document key components of assessment practices in each state, such as if the assessments were mandated or recommended, timing of assessment, measures used, domains of functioning assessed, and…

Although basing instruction on a learning trajectory (LT) is often recommended, there is little direct evidence to support the premise of a "LT approach"--that to be maximally meaningful, engaging, and effective, instruction is best presented one LT level beyond a child's present level of thinking. The present report serves to address…

Research has demonstrated strong relations between spatial skill and mathematics across ages and in both typical and atypical populations, suggesting that a significant proportion of variance in mathematics performance can be explained by variance in spatial skill. Why do these relations exist and how do they develop? Studies of dimensionality in…

Opportunities for practice play a critical role in learning complex behaviors. In the context of explicit mathematics instruction, practice facilitates systematic opportunities for students with mathematics difficulties (MD) to learn new mathematics content and apply such knowledge and skills to novel mathematics problems. This study explored…

A growing body of research suggests that the effects of core mathematics instruction on student mathematics outcomes may not be uniform across different skill levels in mathematics. This study investigated the extent to which observed components of explicit mathematics instruction explained why students' initial mathematics achievement was…

Group size and treatment intensity are understudied topics in mathematics intervention research. This study examined whether the treatment intensity and overall intervention effects of an empirically-validated Tier 2 mathematics intervention varied between intervention groups with 2:1 and 5:1 student-teacher ratios. Student practice opportunities…