Most U.S. educational reforms have narrowly focused on how to improve the ways in which students use language, and most specifically English. But in the last two decades, it is something called "academic language" that has permeated all education discourse. Here we discuss the development of the construct of academic language and the…

The present study examined whether teacher-child closeness and conflict across kindergarten and first grade varied by gender and disruptive behavior at kindergarten entry within a sample of 324 predominantly Black children from low-income, urban households. Three main findings emerged from the analyses. First, contrary to findings from previous…

In this article, I examine intersectionally-minoritised immigrant children's transitions from community-based pre-kindergartens to elementary schools (kindergartens) in the most segregated school system in the US. Attending to issues of blockage and fragmentation inherent to transitions, I analyse transition supports, interpreting and critiquing…

The present study examined the association between a state's Language Instructional Educational Program (LIEP) policy and Latino children's early childhood mathematical achievement. Using a nationally representative sample of Latino children (n=3,820) from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten 2010-2011 cohort (ECLS-K: 2011), the…

Background: Making mathematics connections between home and school can have a positive impact on students' mathematics learning. This is particularly important for students whose experiences and perspectives are underrepresented in school curricula. Although there is evidence for how crucial it is to make connections between mathematics…

While U.S. public education is experiencing an increase in student body size and diversity, there is also an increase in racial and socioeconomic isolation. Participation rates among White students are decreasing as rates among Latine and Asian American and Pacific Islander students increase, and Black student participation rates hold steady.…

Despite the increasing number of U.S. born Latinos, placing heritage and native speakers in the Spanish curriculum is still a challenge (MacGregor-Mendoza & Moreno, 2020). The present article: (1) addresses the unique needs of heritage speakers in the Spanish curriculum; (2) problematizes traditional grammar-based placement exams; and (3)…

The purpose of this study was to explore the use of code-switching in the narratives of dual-language Latino preschoolers, specifically by examining its incidence, types, functions, and grammaticality. Previous work has investigated code-switching in younger children and in older children and adults, but relatively little work has investigated…

When identifying parental socialization processes influencing children's reading achievement, building self-regulation is a potential underlying mechanism. Yet socialization (i.e., warmth, stress) of self-regulation may vary based on the sociocultural context of ethnic minority families. Using the ECLS-K: 2011 (N = 17,020; M[subscript Age] = 73.43…

This article uses a translanguaging framework, together with critical case sampling and qualitative analysis, to explore how six students approached literacy in an integrated dual-language (DL) program in a low-income, working-class, predominantly African American school. Students' translanguaging practices encompassed a broad repertoire of…

The two-way immersion dual language education program design includes the use of language labels to identify students as either the English speaker or the speaker of a language other than English. This paper examines four focal student and two teacher interviews to consider the ways in which the idea of a 'language expert' transpired during…

This study examined the development of emerging self-regulation (SR) skills across the preschool years and relations to academic achievement in kindergarten and first grade. SR skills of 403 low-income African American and Latino children were measured at 2&1/2, 3&1/2, and 5 years (kindergarten). Reading and math skills were measured at 5…

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…

Background: Women and under-represented minority (URM) students continue to be under-represented in STEM and earn the lowest proportion of undergraduate engineering degrees. We employed a mixed methods research approach grounded in social capital theory to investigate "when" they first consider pursuing engineering as a college degree…

This exploratory, descriptive study examined trends associated with Kalamazoo Promise (KPromise) student stop out, reenrollment, and persistence to a credential upon reenrollment. For the 2006-2017 cohorts, 78% were retained from first to second year. Inferential models suggested that first-year stop out was mainly correlated to students' high…