Although early childhood programs are encouraged to facilitate meaningful home-school collaboration, use of family feedback to inform programmatic decisions may be underutilized in practice. In a birth-five childcare program in the Northeastern United States, families rated level of satisfaction with and shared open-ended comments on eight aspects…

Background: Traditional measures of school readiness are labour-intensive and do not assess family support. Aims: The current study used the newly developed Brief Early Skills and Support Index (BESSI: Hughes, Daly, Foley, White and Devine 2015) to examine 6-month longitudinal stability and change in teachers' ratings of young children's school…

John Hattie's Visible Learning research has been read, dissected, and implemented by educators and leaders around the world. Whether it's the effect sizes or the influences that challenge the thinking of the status quo, the Visible Learning research has taken a place in many educational conversations. Over the last three years, the author of this…

Growing evidence suggests that Positive Youth Development (PYD), a holistic approach to developing assets and competencies, can help prepare young people for success in adulthood, including success in the workplace. At its core, PYD focuses on creating a supportive, developmentally appropriate learning setting by emphasizing positive…

This case study analyzes the impact that parental advocacy has on the academic success of students with a disability attending an urban elementary school and the factors that enable or inhibit parental advocacy. The Individual with Disabilities Education Act (2004) (IDEA) established the legal guidelines for the protection of students with…

This report describes the early childhood degree programs offered in Mississippi, focusing on variations in program content, age-group focus, student field-based learning, and faculty characteristics, as well as the extent to which Mississippi ECE higher education programs are incorporating early math, family engagement, and working with dual…

Over the last two decades, a rising number of families with preschool age children speak a language other than English at home (Espinosa, 2010). Known as Dual Language Learners, or DLLs, they are likely to enter kindergarten already academically behind. This gap persists throughout high school, resulting in vastly different academic and life…

The call for more expansive access to bilingual education is grounded in a comprehensive synthesis of evidence on the benefits of bilingual education, bilingualism, and biliteracy for students and the larger social fabric. Many studies find that access to bilingual education programs has a medium to large positive impact on students' academic…

Research shows that family involvement in learning activities at school improves students' academic performance and social cohesion. This study analyses the impact of involving families through interactive groups, dialogic literary gatherings and tutored library in a Mexican primary school in a highly underprivileged urban area, within the…

Communities of color have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, exposing the influence of decades of policies that have under-resourced and marginalized these communities. The history of segregation and inadequate funding in education has been exacerbated by the pandemic, compounding the educational…

Out-of-school time (OST) programs can play an important role in fostering the development of literacy skills among children and youth. To investigate the variety of literacy skill-building strategies OST programs use, researchers from the National Institute on Out-of-School Time (NIOST) examined the practices of 31 programs in Massachusetts. This…

This brief is one in a series aimed at providing K-12 education decision makers and advocates with an evidence base to ground discussions about how to best serve students during and following the novel coronavirus pandemic. For children meeting academic benchmarks before the shutdown, slowdowns through September will not be catastrophic. However,…

The Big Lift™ (Big Lift), a collective impact initiative extending from preschool through third grade in San Mateo County, California, aims to boost reading proficiency and kindergarten readiness through four programmatic pillars: High-Quality Preschool, Summer Learning, Attendance, and Family Engagement. In this report, the authors present…

Although many youths participate in afterschool programs, the research is unclear about which aspects of afterschool program quality contribute most to positive outcomes. This article examines the relationship among quality and outcomes of 21st Century Community Learning Centers (CLCCs) afterschool programs, as perceived by 3,388 stakeholders from…

Morning interprofessional rounds (MIRs) are used in critical care medicine to improve team-based care and patient outcomes. Given existing evidence of conflict between and dissatisfaction among rounds participants, this study sought to better understand how the operational realities of care delivery in the intensive care unit (ICU) impact the…