Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort (2010-2011), this study is the first to investigate predictors of kindergarten science achievement and growth across elementary school--English language proficiency (ELP), executive functioning, math and reading achievement, parent-engaged science and math activities, and classroom…

Spanking and parental verbal aggression are potentially toxic stressors that can negatively affect children's academic achievement by disrupting mental skills like executive function. Yet little empirical evidence has been provided for this mediating pathway. This study used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort of…

Background/Context: The age at which children can enter kindergarten continues to be discussed in both educational research and practice, and the debate for whether to increase kindergarten entry age remains active on both sides. A critical oversight has been the lack of attention paid towards entry age for those students who begin school with a…

The problem of disproportionality in special education is complex and requires an investigation of multiple factors related to racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, school context, and family characteristics. Researchers have debated whether language minority (LM) students are under or overrepresented in special education, but…

Despite the overwhelming focus on the overall average treatment effect in the methodological and statistical literature, in many cases the efficacy of an educational program or intervention might vary based on unit background characteristics. The identification of subgroups for which an educational intervention is particularly effective or, on the…

The aim of this study was to estimate the within-child associations of in-school arts education and achievement in reading and mathematics, using four waves of data (kindergarten, 1st-grade, 3rd-grade, and 5th-grade) from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Fixed effects techniques were applied to adjust for the confounding effects of all…

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011) is the third in a series of longitudinal studies of young children conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. The ECLS-K:2011 collected information about the early…

School-average achievement is often reported to have positive effects on individual achievement (peer spillover effect). However, it is well established that school-average achievement has negative effects on academic self-concept (big-fish-little-pond effect [BFLPE]) and that academic self-concept and achievement are positively correlated and…

Background: Ability grouping has resurged in U.S. schools despite long-standing debates over its consequences for educational equity. Proponents argue that it is the best response to variation in academic skills because it allows teachers to customize the content and pace of instruction to students' diverse needs. Critics answer that this practice…

This study uses the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort to examine the influence that teachers and classrooms have on children's short- and long-term reading achievement trajectories throughout the elementary school years. The analytic sample in the 1st grade is 16,604 children nested within 5,029 teachers, the 3rd-grade sample…

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort of 1998 (n = 15,070), this study used propensity scores to examine the short- and long-term academic and psychosocial benefits of preschool education for a diverse sample of middle-class children. Compared with children who attended informal care at age 4, preschool…

We apply "value-added" models to estimate the effects of teachers on an outcome they cannot plausibly affect: student height. When fitting the relatively simple models that are widely used in educational practice to New York City data, we find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and…

This study examined children's trajectories of mathematics and reading achievements from kindergarten to eighth grade along with the gender differences in these trajectories. A total of 8503 participants drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) formed the sample of the study. The results of the latent growth…

We examined whether the early learning environment predicts children's 5th grade skills in 2,204 families from ethnically diverse, low-income backgrounds; tested the mediating roles of children's pre-kindergarten school-related skills and later learning environment; and asked whether lagged associations generalize across White, Black, Hispanic…

The present study used multiple regression analyses to examine the relationships between fifth-grade social skills and eighth-grade academic achievement. Data were drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K). Results indicated no relationship between positive or negative social behavior in fifth grade…