This study examined parents' and teachers' social constructions of disability, school readiness, and the transition to kindergarten process for children with disabilities who participated in a self-contained preschool special education (SPED) class, called a special day class (SDC). The 12 participants included parents of children with…

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…

Pre-kindergarten (pre-k) is thought to have both direct and indirect effects on children's outcomes in early elementary school. Direct pre-k effects consistently include moderate to large gains in academic skills and sometimes include increases in problem behaviors that affect acquisition of skills in school. Indirect pre-k effects assume that…

This transnational comparative study between Costa Rica and the United States provides an in-depth understanding of the similarities and differences of the early literacy practices of educators in the Pre-Kindergarten to Kindergarten classroom settings. Drawing upon Costa Rica's curricular approach to Early Childhood Education, based upon the…

Tempe PRE was designed as a high-quality preschool program to create more opportunity for children in Tempe. In the 2021-2022 school year, NORC at the University of Chicago conducted an evaluation of Tempe PRE to understand how the program was being implemented and its effects on children and families. They also collected students' outcome data…

Decades of research suggest that both Head Start and public pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs boost low-income preschoolers' kindergarten skills. What is not yet well understood is whether there are relative advantages of transitioning from Head Start after 1 year into a school-based public pre-k program for the year immediately before…

Background: Personalized learning (PL), conceptualized as an education innovation that tailors learning to meet diverse student needs, has drawn increased attention from different fields of study, such as education, learning sciences, and computer science. Regardless, there is a lack of a comprehensive understanding of PL instructional designs…

At the heart of the most successful pre-K and early elementary programs is professional learning -- and at the heart of the professional learning is coaching. Even though early childhood is a unique period of development, the success of early learning coaches offers valuable lessons for professional learning across grade levels and settings. It…

In this article, the authors introduce the "Pre-K-12 Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education II (GAISE II): A Framework for Statistics and Data Science Education" report. This report, which was published by the American Statistical Association (ASA) and endorsed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics…

There is a growing emphasis on accountability in the management of preschool education across the world. It has become common practice in many countries to evaluate kindergartens to monitor and ensure their quality. The Chinese government has been implementing the policy of evaluating kindergartens for 30 years. It mainly involves assessing…

The interrelationships between math and behavioral skill development prior to school entry are not well understood, yet have important implications for understanding how to best prepare young children for kindergarten. This study addresses this gap by utilizing a sample of 1,750 children (53% male; 47% White, 16% Black, 16% Hispanic, 8% Asian, and…

Student-teacher relationship quality (STRQ) influences a variety of student outcomes, including academic, social, and behavioral functioning (McGrath & Van Bergen, 2015). Less is known about the importance of STRQ for preschool students with disabilities. Many studies are conducted with school-aged, typically developing students (Ansari et…

This report profiles five public PreK-12 learning education agencies across the U.S. that participated in the Digital Promise Center for Inclusive Innovation Teacher of Color Recruitment and Retention cohort and utilized the Inclusive Innovation model to create and launch locally contextualized programs designed by teachers of color.

This is the second in a series of briefs examining student access to Houston Independent School District (HISD) pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs. The current study examined strategies for increasing access to pre-k in HISD, including the intended and unintended consequences of zoning pre-k using existing elementary school zones. We found that…

A child's ability to fingerpoint accurately to words while reading aloud a memorized text showcases his/her development of concept of word in text. This ability demonstrates the extent to which key early literacy skills are integrated (e.g., alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness). Research indicates that attaining a concept of word in text is…