Nearly one in four students residing in the United States is from an immigrant family and these children's school readiness is related to their parent's nativity and other sociodemographic characteristics. Social-emotional skills are an important conduit for academic development, yet these relations have not been explored for children from…

This study examined the relationship of teachers' ratings of students' 21st century skills (i.e., persistence, curiosity, externalizing and internalizing affect, and cognition) via the Human Behavior Rating Scale: Brief (HBRS: Brief; Eaves & Woods-Groves, 2011) with student performance. Midwestern K-11 teachers (n = 96) rated students (n =…

Because several studies have investigated student outcomes in schools implementing Response to Intervention (RtI), relatively little research has investigated the impact of implementation on students' long-term achievement outcomes (i.e., several years after exposure). The purpose of this study was to describe one elementary school's RtI…

Theory of mind describes the ability to engage in perspective-taking, understand intentions, and predict actions and emotions. Theory of mind typically achieves major developmental milestones around age of 5, coinciding with the transition to kindergarten, and is associated with a verbal ability (receptive and expressive vocabulary), executive…

Recent studies report the cumulative prevalence of behavioral disorders among school-age children to be second only to anxiety disorders. Unfortunately, by the time behavior has been identified as needing special education services, patterns of disruptive and externalizing behavior have often become unremitting. If at-risk behavior can be reliably…

Spelling has been identified as a key transcription skill that emerges during the elementary years as students learn how to write and subsequently develop fluency with writing, making the assessment of spelling a critical component of evaluation systems within schools. This includes the use of curriculum-based measures of writing (CBM-W). This…

Repeated reading (RR) is a common fluency intervention, but recent studies comparing RR to continuous reading (CR; i.e., wide reading) found no significant differences in effects. This prompts the question of whether the mechanism that improves skills is repeatedly reading portions of connected text, or simply reading connected text. The current…

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…

Spaced practice, or the distribution of practice opportunities across time, is a well-known and effective practice for improving retention. However, spaced practice is not effectively implemented in schools, perhaps as a result of a lack of educationally relevant research in the area. We conducted an educationally relevant investigation of the…

This pilot study used a quasiexperimental design to evaluate the Whole Inclusive School Empowerment (WISE) project providing educational psychology services to kindergartens to support students with diverse learning needs. There were eight intervention kindergartens that received WISE educational psychology services and eight control kindergartens…

Executive functions (EFs) develop rapidly in preschoolers and lay an important foundation for school readiness. One potential method of supporting EF development is through mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs). Whereas studies with older children and adults have supported this approach, research with young children has been more limited. In the…

This study examined the latent developmental patterns for classroom learning behaviors among children from underresourced families. Based on standardized teacher observations, a large sample (N = 2,152) of children was assessed for manifestations of Competence Motivation and Attentional Persistence twice annually through Head Start, kindergarten,…

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…

Leading research argues the distinct importance of earliest detection of childhood behavior problems and the value of discovering subsequent change patterns as children transition through the early education years. This study examined the relative contributions of earliest assessments of children's problem behaviors as compared to the changes in…

This study aimed to investigate the characteristics of preschoolers' home and classroom literacy environments and the relationships between receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness, and concepts about print (CAP) development. The participants were 168 parents and their children from five private preschools in a large suburban…