Background: Early language delay is exacerbated by social disadvantage. Factors such as parents' low levels of literacy, confidence and self-perception can affect the capacity to act on advice received, critical to empowerment. Methods used to achieve successful health outcomes in socially disadvantaged clinical populations may need enhancing.…

Public libraries are a national reading service, supporting reading and literacy throughout life. As a free local resource, they are particularly powerful in supporting the development of literacy and reading skills in disadvantaged communities. Libraries have a unique and powerful role to play in raising literacy skills, vital for individuals and…

Child-directed speech (CDS), which can help children learn new words, has been rigorously studied among infants and parents in home settings. Yet, far less is known about the CDS that teachers use in classrooms with toddlers and children's responses, an important question because many toddlers, particularly in high-need communities, attend…

Data-driven decision making (DDDM) helps educators identify children not responding to intervention, individualize instruction, and monitor response to intervention in multitiered systems of support (MTSS). More prevalent in K-12 special education, MTSS practices are emerging in early childhood. In previous reports, we described the Making Online…

The early home language environment, and parents in particular, form the foundation of children's language development. In this article, Dina Kapengut and Kimberly Noble explore the intersection of neuroscience and developmental psychology to explain how language experiences in the home, and the "home learning environment" more broadly,…

Data-driven decision making (DDDM) helps educators identify children not responding to intervention, individualize instruction, and monitor response to intervention in multitiered systems of support (MTSS). More prevalent in K-12 special education, MTSS practices are emerging in early childhood. In previous reports, we described the Making Online…

While most early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs taken to scale in the United States have served socially disadvantaged 3- to 5-years-olds, Norway scaled up universal ECEC from age 1. We investigated the consequences of Norway's universal ECEC scale-up for children's early language skills, exploiting variation in ECEC coverage across…

Early childhood poverty is a prevalent social issue, both in the United States and in the wider international community. It has been well established that factors associated with poverty, including familial income and parental education level, can negatively affect children's language and cognitive development, which can result in academic…

Parents' interactions with their children can have influential effects on children's language outcomes. Special supports may be needed however, when young children live in poverty and show developmental delays early in life. This study analyzed data for a subset of children enrolled in Early Head Start (EHS) programs and participating in a…

Children's characteristics, including gender, influence their development by eliciting differential responses from their environments, and by influencing differential responses to their environments. Parenting-related stress, associated with poverty environments, negatively influences children's language, likely through its impact on parent-child…

The Early Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (Baby FACES) is a descriptive study of Early Head Start programs designed to inform policy and practice at both national and local levels. Baby FACES follows two cohorts of children through their time in Early Head Start, starting in 2009, the first wave of data collection. The Newborn…

Little research has been conducted on the effectiveness of training strategies for child care providers. The current study used an experimental intent-to-treat design to measure the impact of an established intervention, the on-site caregiver training component of the Program for Infant/Toddler Care (PITC), on child development and child care…

We investigated Early Head Start home visitors' use of evidence-based practices and the efficacy of a web-based system to support these practices. Home visitors learned to use 3 evidence-based practices: (a) frequent assessment of children's early communication for screening and progress monitoring, (b) 2 home-based language-promoting…

The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure relevant to intervention decision making and progress monitoring for infants and toddlers. With increasing recognition of the importance of quality early childhood education and intervention for all children, measurement plays an important role in documenting children's progress and outcomes of…

This Guide is specifically intended for staff in Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) programs, which are funded to provide comprehensive child development services to the children of migrant farm workers from birth through compulsory school age. The authors attempt to navigate the research on first and second language acquisition and…