This paper assesses the impact of welfare reform's parental work requirements on low-income children's cognitive and social-emotional development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the work requirement rules--namely, age-of-youngest-child exemptions--as a source of quasi-experimental variation in first-year maternal…

In observational studies, selection bias will be completely removed only if the selection mechanism is ignorable, namely, all confounders of treatment selection and potential outcomes are reliably measured. Ideally, well-grounded substantive theories about the selection process and outcome-generating model are used to generate the sample of…

Background/Context: Past research has examined many factors that contribute to the black-white achievement gap. While researchers have shown that teacher perceptions of students' academic ability is an important contributing factor to the gap, little research has explored the extent to which teacher perceptions of students' academic ability are…

Children participating in kindergarten programming across the United States are expected to perform at a higher level than ever before. Many of these children are unprepared and developmentally unready for the academic tasks that await them. Researchers have shown that an older age at the start of kindergarten is a predictor of academic…

Recently, researchers have begun to employ rigorous statistical methods and developmentally-informed theories to evaluate outcomes for students retained in non-kindergarten early elementary school. However, the majority of this research focuses on academic outcomes. Gaps remain regarding retention's effects on psychosocial outcomes important to…

Background/Context: Researchers, policymakers, and practitioners undoubtedly concur that missing school deteriorates student outcomes. And yet, in evaluating the deleterious effects of missing in-school time, empirical research has almost exclusively focused on absences, and the scant amount of empirical literature on tardiness has focused on…

Recent federal, state, and district policies that have mainstreamed English language learner (ELL) students into general, English-only elementary school classrooms have raised questions among educational stakeholders about the widespread effects of these policies. Most research has focused on the outcomes of ELL students; almost nothing is known…

The authors explored how classroom gender composition moderated the relationship between having classmates with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) and peers' academic achievement in both kindergarten and Grade 1 classrooms. Given the behavioral and social-cognitive styles of girls, it was hypothesized that classrooms with a higher percentage…

This study examined the effect of participation in the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters program on the school readiness of children born to teenage mothers versus children born to traditional-age mothers participating in the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters program. A 45-item survey was collected from the…

Using a nationally representative sample of kindergarteners and first graders, this study asks if native-language test translations help English language learners (ELLs) demonstrate their mathematics skills. ELLs frequently encounter testing hurdles because they are not proficient in English, the predominant language of assessments. Low scores on…