Critical consciousness (CC) has emerged as a framework for understanding how low-income and racial/ethnic minority youth recognize, interpret, and work to change the experiences and systems of oppression that they face in their daily lives. Despite this, relatively little is known about how youths' experiences with economic hardship and structural…

Theory of Mind (ToM), as a relevant aspect in children's socio-cognitive development, has been widely studied. Some results have suggested that bilingual children have an advantage over their monolingual peers in development of ToM. However, there is less research regarding the predictive role of ToM in performance of oral and reading…

Students' academic achievement is the result of the interplay between person-level and contextual factors (R. R: Greene, 2014; D. E. Hunt, 1975). Students perform better when classroom characteristics support their characteristics. The authors examine whether student perceptions of two classroom characteristics (care and control) fit with two…

Scholarship and policy emphasize strengthening the early childhood education (ECE) workforce, but this work neglects a large segment of the workforce: assistant teachers. The present study responds to gaps in knowledge by examining the demographic characteristics, qualifications, professional supports, and workplace experiences of assistant…

We examined the extent to which disparities in the receipt of special education services for speech or language impairments (SLIs) on the basis of race, ethnicity, or language use by kindergarten--when the delivery of these services might be expected to be most effective- have changed over a 12-year period in the United States. Logistic regression…

With a qualitative approach drawing from four focus groups, this study explored what aspects of preschool are valued most by 30 low-income Latino/a immigrant parents with children enrolled in a state-funded preschool program in Texas. Beyond the push and pull factors of necessity, convenience, and supply, parents reported valuing the…

Are equal educational opportunities sufficient to narrow long-standing economic and racial inequalities in achievement? In this paper, I test the hypothesis that poor and minority students benefit less from effective elementary school teachers than their non-poor and White peers, thus exacerbating inequalities. I use administrative data from…

Background: Developmental education (DE) has been critiqued because of its high cost, the inconclusive evidence as to its effectiveness, and the overrepresentation of underrepresented minority students required to take it. Because Black and Hispanic students are more often referred to developmental courses and may require more levels of…

The population of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States continues to increase and there is a significant need to develop psychometrically sound early language and literacy screening measures to accurately capture children's ability in Spanish. In this paper, we describe the innovative design and calibration process of the new…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine the role that the first language (L1), Spanish, at Pre-Kindergarten plays in predicting second language (L2), English, word reading in first grade. In addition, it examines the role of conceptual vocabulary in predicting word reading in English. Method: As part of a longitudinal study of…

This study aimed to describe home literacy (HL) activities of Spanish-/English-speaking children of low-socioeconomic status backgrounds and examine the relationship between HL and performance on standardized assessments. Parents of 65 dual-language learners (DLLs) in kindergarten completed an HL questionnaire. Parents reported an average of 17…

The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which preschoolers with externalizing behavior problems (EBP) can identify behaviors indicative of callous-unemotional (CU) traits among their peers. Participants for this study included 86 preschool children (69% boys; M[subscript age] = 5.07 years) with at-risk or clinically elevated levels of…

Private and public investments in early childhood education have expanded significantly in recent years. Despite this heightened investment, we have little empirical evidence on whether children today enter school with different skills than they did in the late nineties. Using two large, nationally representative datasets, this paper documents how…

Prizes--formal systems that publicly allocate rewards for exemplary behavior--play an increasingly important role in a wide array of social settings, including education. In this paper, we evaluate a prize system designed to boost achievement at two high schools by assigning students color-coded ID cards based on a previously low-stakes test.…

Supporting the reading comprehension and content knowledge acquisition of English language learners (ELs) requires instructional practices that continue beyond developing the foundational skills of reading. In particular, the challenges ELs face highlight the importance of teaching reading comprehension practices in the middle grades through…