Children's early literacy skills (ELS) are closely related to literacy learning and reading comprehension performance. Children who cannot acquire early literacy skills face significant difficulties in doing so in the following years. Although it is widely known that children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) perform less well in early…

The current study aims to examine the way in which teachers' and children's perceptions about their relationships influence children's emergent literacy skills. Participants were 913 children and 114 kindergarten teachers within 72 preschool centers from Greece. The measures used were the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS), the Child…

Both recent evidence and research-based early mathematics curricula indicate that repeating patterns--predictable sequences that follow a rule--are a topic of major importance for mathematics development. The purpose of the current study was to help build a theory for how early repeating patterning knowledge contributes to early math development,…

The mechanisms by which high quality, two-generation early childhood services promote healthy child development remain unclear. This research examined how participation in Early Head Start (EHS), a U.S. two-generation programme for children under 3, was associated with healthy child development to age 5 through parenting processes. Using four time…

Classroom organization is an important facet of prekindergarten quality but is typically measured at a "global level" and as a "single construct." Little is known about how experiences of different facets of classroom organization--namely, exposure to teacher organizational strategies--vary across "individual…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…

English language development is a critical component for young children's school readiness. In this study, we examined the effect of "Read it again-Pre-K!" (Justice and McGinty in Read it again!-Prek: a preschool curriculum supplement to promote language and literacy foundations, Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy,…

This research examines the influence of educator and child expectations on children's self-regulation, early reading, and vocabulary outcomes over two time points. Thirty educators (15 early childhood educators [ECEs] and 15 teachers) and 149 kindergarten children participated in the research. The educators participated in an expectation ranking…

Using nationally representative data from the Family and Child Experiences Survey 2009 Cohort (n = 2,798), this study examined patterns of absenteeism and their consequences through the transition to kindergarten. Overall, children were less likely to be absent in kindergarten than from Head Start at ages 3 and 4. Absenteeism was fairly stable…

The purpose of this experimental study was to examine the contribution of phoneme awareness training and orthography to the learning of new vocabulary words by partial alphabetic phase readers. Hypotheses included: Preschoolers taught to phonemically segment words with letters would outperform those trained without letters on an invented spelling…

We examined the predictive value of early spelling for later reading performance by analyzing data from 970 U.S. children whose spelling was assessed in the summer following the completion of kindergarten (M age = 6 years; 3 months). The word reading performance of most of the children was then tested after the completion of Grade 1 (age 7;5),…

ASD symptomology and behavioral problems pose challenges for children with ASD in school. Disagreement between parents and teachers in ratings of children's behavior problems may provide clinically relevant information. We examined parent-teacher disagreement on ratings of behavior problems among children with ASD during the fall and spring of the…

Reading comprehension is a complex task which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the Simple View of Reading, this complexity can be captured as the product of two sets of skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension. The Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension and provides a good framework to…

ASD symptomology and behavioral problems pose challenges for children with ASD in school. Disagreement between parents and teachers in ratings of children's behavior problems may provide clinically relevant information. We examined parent-teacher disagreement on ratings of behavior problems among children with ASD during the fall and spring of the…

Beginning with the 2015-2016 school year, the West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) partnered with the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) and Marshall University to conduct a five-year study of the quality of the West Virginia Universal Pre-K (WV Pre-K) program. The study was designed to examine the effectiveness of the…