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Early childhood education
The Early Intervention and Early Childhood Special Education Workforce: Descriptive Evidence on Demographics and Turnover from Oregon
Early intervention (EI) and early childhood special education (ECSE) services for children with disabilities have expanded substantially across the U.S. over the past few decades, necessitating efforts to recruit and retain a qualified workforce to meet their needs. Despite widespread reports of… more →
Influence of Within-Class Age Differences on Adolescents’ Eating Behaviors
Topics: Student Well-BeingThis study examines within-class age differences as a novel determinant of adolescents’ dietary behaviors, isolating it from confounders such as absolute age, season of birth, and country-specific school entry rules. Using a multi-country dataset of over 600,000 European students, we find that… more →
The Effects of Early Childhood Science Educational Interventions on Children’s Science Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Classroom-Based Studies
Topics: Student LearningThe importance of providing children with more robust opportunities to access high-quality science instruction is a widely recognized challenge. Unfortunately, science instruction is often neglected in the earliest school grades, meaning that many young children face opportunity gaps to learning… more →
Teaching Computational Thinking to Children in Head Start Classrooms: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial
Topics: Student LearningDespite efforts to broaden participation in computer science and its related fields, there exist stark disparities in participation in computer related fields by gender, race/ethnicity, and socio-economic status. One approach to combat these disparities is to expose children to computing… more →
Impacts of Michigan Transitional Kindergarten Through Third Grade
Topics: Student LearningTransitional Kindergarten (TK) is a relatively new model of early childhood education, with little evidence on whether and how it affects children’s development. This study provides new evidence using data from Michigan, which has the nation’s second-largest TK program. Using survey data (N=171… more →
Impacts of Oversubscribed Boston Pre-K Programs through Middle School
Christina Weiland, Tiffany Wu, Rebecca Unterman, Anna Shapiro, Shekinah Lightner, Thomas Staines, Annie Taylor.Topics: Student LearningIn this pre-registered study, we explored the impacts of Boston Pre-K on children’s educational trajectories, school progress/engagement, and academic achievement in late elementary and middle school using lotteries for oversubscribed schools in 2007-2011 (N=3,092 students; 24% of all applicants… more →
Peer Victimization Among English Learners: Examining the Role of Dual-Language and English-Only Programs
Topics: Student Well-BeingThis study examines the relationship between English Learner (EL) classification, language program type, and peer victimization using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study- Kindergarten Class of 2011. Leveraging a sample of 9,562 children, this study… more →
Creating Short Forms of Early Childhood Development Measures: A Framework for Quantifying Statistical, Conceptual, and Practical Tradeoffs in Direct Assessment
Direct assessments of early childhood development (ECD) are a cornerstone of research in developmental psychology and are increasingly used to evaluate programs and policies in lower- and middle-income countries. Despite strong psychometric properties, these assessments are too expensive and… more →
Variations in Pre-Primary Education Infrastructure Within and Across Administrative Sectors in Rwanda
Topics: Families and CommunitiesThis study examines disparities in structural quality across Rwanda’s pre-primary modalities—centre-based, community-based, and home-based—operating under a single policy framework. Using data from 4,875 settings across 91 administrative sectors in seven districts, we applied multilevel models… more →
Does Early Childhood Education mitigate the birthdate effect? A regression discontinuity analysis of administrative data
Pablo Araya Cortés, Cristian Macías Domínguez, Luis Pires Jiménez, Rosa Santero Sánchez, Ismael Sanz Labrador.Topics: Student Well-BeingThis article examines the impact of within-class age differences on educational outcomes, using students' birth months in Madrid's primary schools as a natural experiment. Employing a regression discontinuity design, we analyze third-grade students to investigate these age-related effects.… more →
Early Childhood Education and Maltreated Children’s Behavioral and Cognitive Outcomes: Quasi-experimental Evidence from the National Survey of Childhood and Adolescent Well-Being II
Topics: Student Well-BeingPrior evidence shows that early childhood education (ECE) can serve as a protective factor that boosts maltreated children’s school readiness outcomes. Yet, less is known about ECE’s relationship to other developmental domains critical to their wellbeing including their adaptive behaviors and… more →
Policy Impacts of Reimbursement Rate Reform: Evidence from the Child Care and Development Fund
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThe Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) subsidizes child care costs for families with low-incomes. Reimbursements for cost-subsidized care are paid to child care providers but are extremely low compared with market rates and actual cost of care. We examine how the 2014 congressional… more →
Causal Mechanisms of Relative Age Effects on Adolescent Risky Behaviours
Topics: Student Well-BeingAge differences between classmates are attracting growing attention in academic research and public policy, yet their underlying mechanisms remain understudied. We examine how relative age affects adolescents’ risky behaviors across Europe. Using Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC)… more →
Leveraging Modern Machine Learning to Improve Early Warning Systems and Reduce Chronic Absenteeism in Early Childhood
Topics: MethodsThis study focuses on improving the predictive power of early warning systems (EWSs) to decrease chronic absenteeism in early childhood. Using a demographically diverse sample of students followed from PreK to third grade in Boston Public Schools (N=6,698), we demonstrate how and why two modern… more →
Using Meta-Analytic Data to Examine Fadeout and Persistence of Intervention Impacts on Constrained and Unconstrained Skills
Mindy L. Rosengarten, Emma R. Hart, Drew H. Bailey, Meghan P. McCormick, Benjamin J. Lovett, Tyler W. Watts.Topics: MethodsRecent reviews of the educational intervention literature have noted patterns of intervention impact fadeout on cognitive skills, whereby skill trajectories between children in the intervention and control group converge in the years following the end of the intervention. Some early childhood… more →
Human Capital at Home: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in the Philippines
Topics: Families and CommunitiesChildren spend most of their time at home in their early years, yet efforts to promote human capital at home in many low- and middle-income settings remain limited. We conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate an intervention which encourages parents and caregivers to foster human… more →
Changes in Kindergarten Redshirting During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Topics: Student Well-BeingThis study examined the impact of COVID-19 on academic "redshirting" in kindergarten, the practice of holding a child back for a year and enrolling them in kindergarten at age 6, using student-level data on all Delaware kindergarten students from fall 2014 through fall 2022. The rate of… more →
The Effects of Public Pre-K for 3-year-olds on Early Elementary School Outcomes: Evidence from the DC Centralized Lottery
Topics: Student LearningThis study examines the effects of universal public pre-kindergarten for 3-year-olds (Pre-K3) on later public education outcomes, including enrollment, school mobility, special education status, and in-grade retention from kindergarten through second grade. While universal pre-kindergarten… more →
A Matter of Time? Measuring Effects of Public Schooling Expansions on Families’ Constraints
Topics: Families and CommunitiesAs women increasingly entered the labor force throughout the late 20th century, the challenges of balancing work and family came to the forefront. We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children—through duration expansions to the kindergarten day—to… more →
Is Authorized Capacity a Good Measure of Child Care Providers’ Current Capacity? New evidence from Virginia
Demand for child care in the United States outpaces supply. Understanding access issues is critical for addressing them and supporting children, families, and the economy. However, the most widely available proxy for child care supply—authorized capacity—likely overestimates care availability.… more →