Early elementary students on the autism spectrum are at risk for poor quality student-teacher relationships (STRs), a key contributor to student outcomes. However, these students' own appraisals of their STRs are nearly absent from the literature. This study examined children's perspectives of STRs and agreement with teacher-reported STRs for a…

Using data ("n" = 3,790 with 2,119 in the 3-year-old cohort and 1,671 in the 4-year-old cohort) from 353 Head Start centers in the Head Start Impact Study, the only large-scale randomized experiment in Head Start history, this article examined the impact of Head Start on children's cognitive and parent-reported social-behavioral outcomes…

ASD symptomology and behavioral problems pose challenges for children with ASD in school. Disagreement between parents and teachers in ratings of children's behavior problems may provide clinically relevant information. We examined parent-teacher disagreement on ratings of behavior problems among children with ASD during the fall and spring of the…

Head Start is the largest publicly funded preschool program in the U.S., and one of its primary goals is to improve the school readiness of low-income children. As has been widely reported, the first randomized trial of Head Start in the program's history found some evidence that it is achieving this goal. Receiving one year of Head Start had…

ASD symptomology and behavioral problems pose challenges for children with ASD in school. Disagreement between parents and teachers in ratings of children's behavior problems may provide clinically relevant information. We examined parent-teacher disagreement on ratings of behavior problems among children with ASD during the fall and spring of the…

In the 1998 reauthorization of Head Start, Congress mandated that the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) determine, on a national level, the impact of Head Start on the children it serves. As noted by the Advisory Committee on Head Start Research, this legislative mandate required that the impact study address two main research…

The current study aimed to substantiate and extend our understanding regarding the existence and developmental pathways of 3 distinct temperament profiles--exuberant, inhibited, and average approach--in a sample of 3.5-year-old children (n = 121). The interactions between temperamental styles and specific types of effortful control, inhibitory…

Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,364), the present study supports an agentic perspective; it demonstrates that mothers' depressive symptoms in infancy predict children's poor first-grade cognitive functioning because depressive symptoms…

This longitudinal study, conducted among a sample of Finnish primary-school children, examined the proposition that a single high-quality relationship (either with a teacher or a parent) can buffer against adjustment problems. Teachers rated the externalizing problems and prosocial behaviors of 378 children in Grade 1 and again in Grade 2.…

In 1959, Campbell and Fiske introduced the use of multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) matrices in psychology, and for the past 4 decades confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) has commonly been used to analyze MTMM data. However, researchers do not always fit CFA models when MTMM data are available; when CFA modeling is used, multiple models are available…