"Pre-K Mathematics" is a supplemental mathematics program focusing on a range of mathematical concepts to help develop children's informal mathematical knowledge. The "Pre-K Mathematics" program includes teacher-led, small-group mathematics activities that are engaging and hands-on, as well as caregiver-child activities that…

Decades of research on early care and education have shown that four-year-old children who enroll in prekindergarten (pre-K) programs start kindergarten scoring higher on assessments of academic skills than those who do not. A handful of long-term follow-up studies of pre-K have also found that these programs can have lasting beneficial impacts on…

Early educational interventions, such as Head Start, have been widely recognized as an effective way to mitigate the negative effects of poverty on early learning and development (Camilli, Vargas, Ryan, & Barnett, 2010). In the past decade, there has been a strong expansion of early childhood programming, including Head Start and state-funded…

Large numbers of children of low income families in the United States arrive at kindergarten already far behind their more affluent peers on measures of school readiness. In the absence of any federal preschool policy and amidst alarm about this growing divide, universal prekindergarten (UPK) programs have been launched around the United States,…

The study examined the impact of the "Project STAR" ("Sit Together and Read") reading program on the literacy skills of preschool students. Researchers randomly assigned 85 preschool classrooms in Ohio to one of three study groups at the start of the 2004-05 or 2005-06 school years: (1) A high-dose intervention group, in which…

A sample of Austin Independent School District prekindergarten students showed growth from Fall 2014 to Spring 2015 on a nationally normed test for receptive vocabulary. These results were found for students in a Head Start program as well as those not in Head Start.

The "Read Naturally[R]" program is a supplemental reading program that aims to improve reading fluency, accuracy, and comprehension of elementary and middle school students using a combination of texts, audio CDs, and computer software. The program uses one of four products that share a common fluency-building strategy: "Read…

The "Read Naturally"[R] program is a supplemental reading program that aims to improve reading fluency, accuracy, and comprehension of elementary and middle school students using a combination of texts, audio CDs, and computer software. The program uses one of four products that share a common fluency-building strategy: "Read…

Data in this report suggest that AISD's full-day prekindergarten (pre-K) program helped reduce the number of students who were retained a grade level or were placed in special education services. The cost per student for full-day pre-K was less than the costs associated with grade-level retention or special education services.

A substantial literature documents the benefits of early childhood education and formal preschool experiences on children's school readiness, with low-income and otherwise disadvantaged children benefitting the most from these programs. However, these academic benefits often fade out as children age, and most disappear by the end of kindergarten…

Broad-stroke approaches to vocabulary teaching in preschool include effective instructional elements, yet may be too ill-structured to affect the vocabulary learning of children experiencing serious delays. Using a formative research approach, this study examines the design potential of a supplemental vocabulary instruction technique that…

In 2011-2012, AISD provided a tuition-supported pre-K program to 4-year-old students who were not eligible to enroll in the state-mandated program. Overall, pre-K students in the tuition-supported program demonstrated meaningful growth on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. [Funding for this report was provided by Title I funds. For…

This study evaluated the impact of a comprehensive reading program enhanced with sign language on the literacy and language skills of three elementary school students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Students received individual and small group comprehensive reading instruction for approximately 55 minutes per session. Reading…

We review what is known about Head Start's impacts on children and argue that the program is likely to generate benefits to participants and society as a whole that are larger than program costs. Our conclusions differ from those in some previous reviews because we use a more appropriate standard to judge program effectiveness (benefit-cost…

The "Expressive Vocabulary Test" (EVT) has recently been found culturally fair for an economically mixed sample of African American children, and others have argued that it is fairer for such participants than the "Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III" (PPVT-III). In this study, the authors sought to replicate these findings…