Showing papers in "Early Childhood Research Quarterly in 2012"

TL;DR: In this paper, the influence of the quality of home and preschool learning environments on the development of early numeracy skills in Germany was examined, drawing on a sample of 532 children in 97 preschools.

TL;DR: The authors found that, on average, family involvement at school and parents' educational expectations were associated with gains in reading and math achievement in kindergarten, and found that children's home and school are the most influential contexts in which learning and development occur, especially during early childhood.

TL;DR: The authors investigated the influence of home numeracy experiences on early numeracy skills in kindergarten after controlling for cognitive and linguistic precursors, and found that the importance of parent-child numeracy activities and parents’ numeracy expectations was significant.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate mothers' and fathers' reports of their own as well as their partner's parenting styles, and assess how mothers and fathers’ parenting styles uniquely and jointly predicted toddlers' externalizing, internalizing, and adaptive behaviors.

TL;DR: Growth curve analyses indicated that, compared to native English speakers, ELLs were rated by teachers more favorably on approaches to learning, self control, and externalizing behaviors in kindergarten and generally continued to grow in a positive direction on these social/behavioral outcomes at a steeper rate compared to their native English-speaking peers, holding other factors constant.

TL;DR: How multiple indicators of chaos over children's first three years of life, in a representative sample of children living in low wealth rural communities, were related to child expressive and receptive language at 36 months is understood.

TL;DR: This study examined sources of variability in preschool children's positive and negative engagement with teachers, peers, and tasks, and how that variability was related to both classroom activity settings (e.g., teacher-structured time, outdoor time, transitions) and child factors (age, gender).

TL;DR: The authors investigated the extent to which a commonly used assessment of teacher-child interactions, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), demonstrated similar psychometric properties in classrooms serving ethnically and linguistically diverse children as it does in other classrooms.

TL;DR: This article investigated the effect of professional development on preschool teachers' conversational responsivity in the classroom, defined as teachers' use of strategies to promote children's participation in extended conversational exchanges (communicationfacilitating strategies) and exposure to advanced linguistic models (language-developing strategies), and the resultant impact on proximal child language outcomes.

TL;DR: Consideration of teachers' structuring of daily routines represents a valuable way to understand nuances in the provision of learning experiences for young children in the context of current views about developmentally appropriate practice and school readiness.

TL;DR: Results showed no evidence that children who were taught mathematics using the curriculum performed differently than control children who received the typical district mathematics instruction on measures of letter recognition, and on two of the oral language subtests, sentence length and inferential reasoning (emotive content).

TL;DR: This article examined the extent to which executive function mediated associations of socioeconomic status (SES) and home-environment quality with academic readiness (math, letter and word identification, and knowledge of story-and-print concepts).

TL;DR: Children's self-reported feelings about school moderated several relationships, consistent with the idea that positivefeelings about school may be a protective factor against co-occurring academic and social problems.

TL;DR: This paper examined the extent to which individual differences in mothers' mental representations of their children (mind-mindedness) were related to parenting stress and observed parenting behavior and found that mothers who used more positive mental state descriptors were rated as more sensitive during interaction.

TL;DR: In this paper, the proximal role of home learning environment and specific math activities mediated the relation between family socioeconomics and first grade girls' arithmetic and spatial skills, while spatial activities were not proximal predictors of spatial skills.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors applied hierarchical linear modeling to identify the amount of score variation attributable to assessors rather than children, and found that large portions of the variability in teacher-administered assessments have nothing to do with children's unique performances.

TL;DR: This article examined the relationship among proportion of instruction in Spanish, observed classroom quality, and preschool-aged children's academic skills, finding that Spanish-speaking children's reading and math scores were higher in classrooms with more responsive and sensitive teachers.

TL;DR: This paper developed and validated an observation measure designed to assess classroom quality in inclusive preschool programs, the Inclusive Classroom Profile (ICP), which has good inter-rater agreement, is internally consistent, and shows a good factor structure.

TL;DR: In this article, the effects of student experimentation with physical manipulation and virtual manipulation on kindergarten students' understanding of concepts related to the use of a beam balance as a means to compare and differentiate materials according to their mass.

TL;DR: Gentner et al. as discussed by the authors investigated whether specific input helps 3-1/2-year-olds discover that the last word in a count represents its cardinal value (i.e., the cardinal word principle).

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared twenty preschool teachers' extratextual talk across read-aloud sessions with a storybook and an information book, and found that teachers used significantly greater numbers of extatextual utterances during the information book read aloud compared to the storybook read aloud after accounting for differences in duration.

TL;DR: Examination of the efficacy of two different approaches to teaching designed to facilitate children's learning about science concepts and vocabulary related to objects’ floating and sinking and scientific problem-solving skills provided evidence that young children learned science concept and vocabulary better when either responsive teaching or the combination of responsive teaching and explicit instruction was used.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used the Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) data from 1997 to investigate the degree to which child, family, classroom, teacher, and Head Start program characteristics are related to children's school readiness and continued development over the four-year-old Head Start year.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the relationship between preschool experiences and the early academic achievement of rural Chinese children and found that children with developmentally appropriate preschool experiences had higher school readiness scores than other children.

TL;DR: In this article, the validity of an emotion-related parenting construct, indicated by six key emotionrelated socialization behaviors (ERSBs) occurring in daily, developmentally salient parenting in a low-income sample of mothers (N ǫ = 123) of toddlers, and examined the relationship between the ERSB construct and toddlers' self-regulation.

TL;DR: Results indicated that data could be collected reliably and that teachers’ provision of opportunities for independent student practice was stable across the school year, and potential uses of the instrument for providing teachers with feedback on their literacy instruction and for extending the knowledge base on effective literacy instructional practices are discussed.

TL;DR: Results indicated that having longer names did not translate into an advantage on the alphabet knowledge and spelling tasks, and name writing proficiency, not length of name appears to be associated with preschool children's developing emergent literacy skills.

TL;DR: This article investigated the differential and persistent effects of a state-funded pre-K program, the Virginia Preschool Initiative (VPI), and found that attending a VPI-funded program was beneficially associated with a lower likelihood of repeating kindergarten and improved probabilities of meeting or exceeding minimum literacy competencies.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors report on the success of rater calibration across 2093 raters trained by the Office of Head Start (OHS) in 2008-2009 on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), and for a subsample of 704 raters, characteristics that predict their calibration.

TL;DR: Investigating associations between family involvement in school-based activities and children's literacy in their preferred language (English or Spanish) during early elementary school found increased family involvement predicted better literacy skills at third grade, particularly for children who struggled early.