This correlation study investigated the relationship between pre-kindergarten absenteeism and early literacy assessment scores of kindergarten students, focusing on gender, parents' education level, and school setting. The population consisted of 220 pre-kindergarten students from the Midlands region of South Carolina who attended a Title I and a…

Each year, SC TEACHER administers the SC Teacher Exit Survey to public K-12 classroom teachers who are not renewing their teaching contracts. The survey is designed to offer insights into how working conditions and other factors relate to teachers' decisions to either teach in another school district or leave the classroom. This report highlights…

This article describes the challenge of engaging educators in professional development (PD) that is timely and relevant to their work, and effective in stimulating instructional changes to improve student learning. The authors highlight the competing needs and goals for PD that create tensions among the external accountability demands, school…

Teacher attrition is endemic in education, creating teacher quantity and quality gaps across schools that are often stratified by region and racialized nuance (Cowan et al., 2016; Scafidi et al., 2017). This reality is starkly reflected in South Carolina. Not too long ago, on May 1, 2019, a sea of approximately 10,000 people, dressed in red,…

Since the early part of the 20th century, researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology and education have studied the ill-effect of noise on the social, physiological, and psychological aspects of the human psyche. In order for academic progress to take place, it is important for all teachers to select instructional methods and accommodations…

This implementation research report describes the local programs, home visiting staff, and families who participated in the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE), a national evaluation of the federal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program launched in 2011. This national evaluation is…

Members of the NAEYC Technology and Young Children Interest Forum look at technology use in a classroom at a university demonstration preschool/kindergarten. This example illustrates the integration of a variety of current and emerging technologies into a project-based curriculum.

South Carolina recently implemented a new initiative to improve the quality of pre- kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms in primary schools. This article describes the initiative and examines evidence that such an effort can have a positive effect on early childhood program quality. Data from both classroom observations using the ECERS-R…