Multilingualism is an international fact of life and increasing in the United States. Multilingual families are exceedingly diverse, and policies relevant to them should take this into account. The quantity and quality of a child's exposure to responsive conversation spoken by fluent adults predicts both monolingual and multilingual language and…

This Bulletin discusses the National Survey of Children's Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV), the most comprehensive nationwide survey of the incidence and prevalence of children's exposure to violence to date, sponsored by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

PIRLS is the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. This rigorous international survey compares the reading attainment and attitudes to reading of over 200,000 9- and 10-year-old children in 41 countries. It is the only international study to provide information on the reading habits of primary-aged children: the survey collects…

In this presentation, made to the White House Conference on Character and Community, the author advocates creating a preventive intervention system for chronic violence; that scientific research supports this system; that it is cost-beneficial to do so; and that it is necessary in order to help the next generation become productive citizens. He…

Over the past 30 years, the rate of childhood obesity has more than doubled for preschool children aged 2 to 5 years and adolescents aged 12 to 19 years, and it has more than tripled for children 6 to 11 years of age (Institute of Medicine, 2005). At present, approximately 9 million children over 6 years are considered obese (Institute of…

With over half the nation's infants and toddlers in regular, non-parental child care, the quality of that care is a priority concern for policymakers. Many studies show that high-quality child care supports the positive social, emotional, and cognitive development of young children. The research summarized in this policy brief identifies factors…

Japanese children's performance in school is a product of a social consensus favoring attention to children's learning, a set of cultural values focusing on the commitment of effort, and a psychological milieu in the family which encourages achievement in a safe and nurturant atmosphere. This paper treats especially this latter environment, that…

"The Metropolitan Life Survey of the American Teacher, 1999: Violence in America's Public Schools: Five Years Later" revisits issues addressed in a 1993 study (ED397190), and compares findings of the two studies on the issue of school violence from the perspectives of students, teachers, and law enforcement officers across the country,…

This report presents an overview of the most current data on the overall well-being of Connecticut's youth, offered to promote a shared sense of accountability in the state, to guide current funding and programmatic decisions, and to set a baseline against which to measure the impact of those decisions. This statistical portrait is based on widely…