In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a mandatory shift from in-person instruction to online learning for many young children. Teachers needed to adjust to virtual teaching, children were isolated from their peers, and parents played a bigger role in learning during the pandemic. In 2021, the shift back to in-person learning occurred. Research has…

Teachers' ratings of conflict and closeness as well as observed emotional support are known predictors of children's social functioning. Consistency in emotional support represents an emerging line of research. The goal of the present study is to understand whether the relation between the consistency of teachers' emotional support and children's…

The Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) program, authorized by Congress in 2011, is designed to improve the quality of early learning and development programs for children from birth through age 5. This discretionary grant program is administered jointly by the U.S. Departments of Education (ED) and Health and Human Services…

The Early Learning Challenge (ELC) program awarded more than $1 billion in four-year grants to 20 States to implement comprehensive and cohesive high-quality early learning systems that support young children with high needs and their families. A key lever in making these improvements was the enhancement of States' Quality Rating and Improvement…

Reflecting the growing momentum in support of quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs) as a key strategy to improve early care and education quality, significant amounts of public dollars have been devoted to their development and implementation. In this brief, the authors report on their investigation of both quality rating and improvement…

The Scale-Up Pre-K Mathematics project, was conducted at a customary program-wide level of scale in Head Start and state-funded preschool programs in California and Kentucky/Indiana. The objectives of this randomized field trial were twofold: (1) to determine whether the intervention, the Pre-K Mathematics curriculum, continues to be effective…

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…

State-funded pre-Kindergarten is a growing phenomenon in the United States. The majority of 4-year-olds now spend time every weekday in care outside of their home and many of these children are being served in preschool classrooms funded with state education dollars. The public strongly supports such programs and there is generally bipartisan…