The purpose of the current investigation is to analyze existing research examining the impact of play therapy on the development of language skills in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As rates of ASD diagnoses continue to increase, families and educators are faced with making critical decisions regarding the selection and…

Purpose: Most educational assessments tend to be constructed in a close-ended format, which is easier to score consistently and more affordable. However, recent work has leveraged computation text methods from the information sciences to make open-ended measurement more effective and reliable for older students. This study asks whether such text…

Late identification of children with ASD remains a concern. Due to limited research in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) such as South Africa (SA), the early management of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) should be further explored. The aim was to describe the demographic characteristics and early management of ASD that may influence…

The purpose of this study is to examine the bidirectional relationship between children's language development and challenging behaviors as well as the moderating roles of gender and race/ethnicity. We conducted a number of structural equation modeling analyses with a national representative sample (N = 2,462) of Head Start children from the 2014…

The present study examined boys' race in moderating the association between teacher-child relationship quality, measured by closeness and conflict, and boys' language gains and conduct problems change scores during Pre-K. The study was conducted using data from the National Center for Early Development and Learning's (NCEDL) Multi-State Study of…

This paper uses meta-analytic techniques to estimate the separate effects of the starting age, program duration, and persistence of impacts of early childhood education programs on children's cognitive and achievement outcomes. It concentrates on studies published before the wide scale penetration of state-pre-K programs. Specifically, data are…

Economic hardship is changing our students' brain structures at a genetic level, producing psychological, behavioral, and cognitive issues that dramatically impact learning, behavior, physical health, and emotional stability. But there is hope. This groundbreaking book by one of the nation's top experts in brain science and resilience offers…

The quality of early care and education affects a wide range of children's experiences and developmental outcomes. Family Child Care (FCC) is no exception, and attention to increasing the quality of Family Child Care is needed. The purpose of the current study was to examine an experimental case of intensive Professional Development (PD) in FCC…

Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff (2007) reported that exposure to Baby Einstein videos was negatively associated with language development. The current study uses the Zimmerman et al. (2007) data set to replicate and extend the original analyses. Caregivers of 392 children aged 6 to 16 months and 358 children aged 17 to 27 months reported on…

We examined the impact of television viewing at ages 3 and 4 on vocabulary and at age 5 on executive functioning in the context of home learning environment and parental scaffolding. Children (N = 263) were seen in the lab when they were 3 years old and then again at ages 4 and 5. Parents completed measures assessing child television viewing and…

Each year, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) releases a list of scientific advances that represent significant progress in the field. The "2019 IACC Summary of Advances" provides short, plain language summaries of the top research breakthroughs selected by the IACC from a pool of research articles nominated by the…

Relations between classroom behavior problems early in the preschool year and elementary school literacy and language outcomes were examined for an entire cohort of four-year-old Head Start children (N=2682). A cross-classified random effects model was used that controlled for the variance in literacy outcomes attributed to: (a) child-level…

This study examined the effects of an intensive shared book-reading intervention on the vocabulary development of preschool children who were at risk for vocabulary delay. The participants were 125 children, who the researchers stratified by classroom and randomly assigned to one of two shared book-reading conditions (i.e., the experimental, Words…

This study explored the experiences of young black African preschoolers as well as their parents' perceptions towards their mother tongue. It investigated the factors that influence black African parents to prefer English over their indigenous language. The paper also explores how aspects such as cultural and social capital affect parental choice…

Research Findings: Grounded in the investment model and informed by the integrative theory of the study of minority children, this study used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort data set, a nationally representative sample of young children, to investigate whether the association between socioeconomic status (family income and…