Research Findings: The home literacy environment and other early learning settings such as preschool play a role in children's language and literacy outcomes, yet research suggests that Latino, Spanish-speaking families are less likely than other families to participate in family literacy activities. This study explored the relations among…

Publicly funded prekindergartens are programs that most states use to promote school readiness, especially of 4-year-old children at risk for academic problems due to poverty. Despite large public expenditures, these programs have not been widely evaluated. We examined 240 randomly selected pre-kindergarten programs in six states with mature…

In the past decade in the United States, pre-kindergarten programs for four year olds have expanded rapidly as a potentially powerful intervention intended to promote school readiness for children at-risk for future school failure. This paper describes in detail multi-dimensional profiles of observed quality across 692 classrooms in 11 states…

This study describes the meaning of program quality for a representative group of parents of children enrolled in public prekindergarten programs. Educators often conceptualized quality in terms of structural or process indicators; parents most often cited teacher experience and relationship to children. Families, like educators, emphasized…

This study draws from the National Center for Early Development and Learning's Multi-State Pre-Kindergarten Study to examine the extent to which program, classroom, and teacher attributes of the program ecology predict observed quality and teacher-child interactions in a sample of 238 classrooms representing 6 states' pre-kindergarten programs.…