This study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS pre-K from 2012-2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups. The largest differences in enrollment emerged with respect to race and…

Acadience Reading (AR) is a screener for early detection of reading problems in elementary students. Limited research exists, however, on its technical adequacy for evaluation of English Learners (ELs). In this study, we tested the long-term predictive validity and diagnostic accuracies of AR and examined the differences between native…

Recent work examining science test performance in the earliest grades of school has demonstrated that science test score gaps by race/ethnicity are apparent as early as kindergarten and that, in a number of cases, the racial/ethnic test score gaps in science are significantly larger than the corresponding gaps in reading or mathematics. This study…

The purpose of this study was to identify an indicator that the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) could use to measure the percentage of entering kindergarteners who are on-track to read on grade level by the end of grade 3. To develop the indicator, this study examined relationships between student scores on SDP's different assessments that…

The Houston Independent School District (HISD) has provided prekindergarten classes for Houston area four-year old students since the 1985-1986 academic year. The focus of the program has been beginning literacy and oral language development that support individual needs as well as the language and cultural backgrounds of children. The central…

Prior research has documented that classroom-level variables have a significant effect on student outcomes; however, previous findings have typically focused on average student outcomes and have only recently begun to use hierarchical linear modeling techniques. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of classroom-level variables on the…

This study investigates the extent to which the quality of the relationships between African American children and their mothers and teachers in kindergarten predict academic and social development during elementary school years using the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. The…

Research shows that language-minority students both do poorly on standardized tests, and receive low academic ratings from their teachers (August & Hakuta, 1998). Explanations for the low performance, however, are limited. This is at least partially due to the fact that language-minority status is intimately entangled with issues related to…