Background: Public preschool can provide opportunities for earlier detection of child health problems and receipt of special needs services. This is especially important for children from low-income households who disproportionately face cost barriers to obtaining health screenings and services. Objective: This study explores the possibility that…

This article explores the critical role of phonological awareness (PA) in early reading development, with a focus on young multilingual children. PA, the ability to detect and manipulate sounds in spoken words, is essential for literacy acquisition and is highly responsive to instruction. The article delves into the complexity of PA, its…

Population-based research can identify eligibility patterns across e disabilities and cultures, and the Head Start ECLKC gathers relatively controlled data of students in the United States (U.S.) and Puerto Rico, providing an opportunity to directly compare cultures. We compared preschool diagnostic eligibility categories in the U.S. and Puerto…

Using two paired datasets from the Head Start Program Information Report and Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) Study, this study explored disparities in program rates of screening, referral, and identification for early intervention between MSHS and Head Start programs, as well as associations between MSHS teacher ratings of children's…

Best practices in early childhood include using measures to identify children's social-emotional and behavioral needs within routine, naturalistic preschool contexts. Aligned with best practices, we examined the combined utility of two contextual measures, a teacher report and a direct observation of classroom behavior, in the context of…

Purpose: We investigated and compared the outcomes from two standardized, norm-referenced screening assessments of language (i.e., Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool--Second Edition [CELFP-2], Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation--Screening Test [DELV-ST]) with African American preschoolers whose spoken dialect differed…