Advanced Content Coverage at Kindergarten: Are There Trade-Offs Between Academic Achievement and Social-Emotional Skills?

Policymakers have advocated academic skills building at kindergarten as a way of improving student achievement. However, early childhood educators have concerns with this policy as gains in achievement may come at the expense of children's social-emotional skills. Using a nationally representative data set of kindergartners, we find that advanced academic content, defined as academic skills typically taught at a higher grade, was associated not only with improved math and English/language arts achievement but also with improved social-emotional outcomes. Greater exposure to advanced content was associated with better interpersonal skills, better approaches to learning, better attentional focus, and lower externalizing behaviors. The results suggest that advanced academic content can be taught without compromising children's social-emotional skills.

Using the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised in High Stakes Contexts: Does Evidence Warrant the Practice?

Increasingly, states establish different thresholds on the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R), and use these thresholds to inform high-stakes decisions. However, the validity of the ECERS-R for these purposes is not well established. The objective of this study is to identify thresholds on the ECERS-R that are associated with preschool-aged children's social and cognitive development. Applying non-parametric modeling to the nationally-representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) dataset, we found that once classrooms achieved a score of 3.4 on the overall ECERS-R composite score, there was a leveling-off effect, such that no additional improvements to children's social, cognitive, or language outcomes were observed. Additional analyses found that ECERS-R subscales that focused on teaching and caregiving processes, as opposed to the physical environment, did not show leveling-off effects. The findings suggest that the usefulness of the ECERS-R for discerning associations with children's outcome may be limited to certain score ranges or subscales.

Examining the associations between daily caregiving discontinuity and children's social-emotional outcomes.

Many child care centers temporarily move children and teachers in and out of their assigned classrooms throughout the day. Such practices create frequent discontinuity in children's experiences in child care, including discontinuity in their peer and teacher relationships. This study examined the prevalence and patterns of teacher and child movement between classrooms, the characteristics of teachers and children who were more likely to move between classrooms on a daily basis, and the associations between children's and teachers' rate of daily movement between classrooms with children's social-emotional outcomes. A moderate to high prevalence of child and teacher movement between classrooms was observed (29% and 83%, respectively). Children who were younger, considered solitary, and who had been enrolled in their classroom for shorter periods of time were less likely to transition between classrooms. Children's rate of movement was a positive predictor of teachers' perceived conflict with children in their care, and a negative predictor of teachers' perceived closeness. In addition, the more frequently teachers moved, the less children were inclined to indicate liking their teachers or centers. However, the more frequently children moved, the more likely children were to indicate liking their peers and for their peers to indicate liking them. Results are interpreted in light of additional research avenues that can inform sensible daily teacher continuity practices.

Using generalized additive modeling to empirically identify thresholds within the ITERS in relation to toddlers' cognitive development.

Research linking high-quality child care programs and children's cognitive development has contributed to the growing popularity of child care quality benchmarking efforts such as quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS). Consequently, there has been an increased interest in and a need for approaches to identifying thresholds, or cutpoints, in the child care quality measures used in these benchmarking efforts that differentiate between different levels of children's cognitive functioning. To date, research has provided little guidance to policymakers as to where these thresholds should be set. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) data set, this study explores the use of generalized additive modeling (GAM) as a method of identifying thresholds on the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS) in relation to toddlers' performance on the Mental Development subscale of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (the Bayley Mental Development Scale Short Form-Research Edition, or BMDSF-R). The present findings suggest that simple linear models do not always correctly depict the relationships between ITERS scores and BMDSF-R scores and that GAM-derived thresholds were more effective at differentiating among children's performance levels on the BMDSF-R. Additionally, the present findings suggest that there is a minimum threshold on the ITERS that must be exceeded before significant improvements in children's cognitive development can be expected. There may also be a ceiling threshold on the ITERS, such that beyond a certain level, only marginal increases in children's BMDSF-R scores are observed.

Accounting for Movement between Childcare Classrooms: Does it Change Teacher Effects Interpretations?

Child care studies that have examined links between teachers' qualifications and children's outcomes often ignore teachers' and children's transitions between classrooms at a center throughout the day and only take into account head teacher qualifications. The objective of this investigation was to examine these traditional assumptions and to compare inferences made from these traditional models to methods accounting for transitions between classrooms and multiple teachers in a classroom. The study examined the receptive language, letter-word identification, and passage comprehension skills of 307 children enrolled in 49 community-based childcare centers serving primarily low-income families in Colorado. Results suggest that nearly one-third of children and over 80% of teachers moved daily between classrooms. Findings also reveal that failure to account for daily transitions between classrooms can affect interpretations of the relationship between teacher qualifications and child outcomes, with the model accounting for movement providing significant improvements in model fit and inference.