3 research outputs found
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Parental Time or Money: What Matters More for Children's School Success?
Previous research suggests that the home environment explains up to one half of the association between poverty and low cognitive skills. Building on this research, this study provides a more nuanced analysis of the family processes through which socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with children's academic outcomes by: 1) including maternal education and family income as predictors of parenting and children's academic skills, and 2) separating the home environment into parental investments of time and materials. Data are drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K; n=20,582). Structural equation modeling is used to examine the extent to which these parental investments mediate associations between markers of SES and children's reading and math achievement. Models also test for moderation of the productivity of parental investments. Results indicate that SES is associated with children's school success via a pathway in which maternal education influences the extent to which parents invest in learning materials for their children, and these learning materials in turn foster development of early literacy and numeracy skills. Parental time has an unexpected negative association with children's achievement, which is explained in supplemental models. Family income and maternal education also moderate the productivity of parental investments, such that the negative effect of time and the positive effect of materials are magnified in more advantaged households. Findings suggest that the following interventions may be worthwhile policy priorities: 1) support for low-SES mothers' pursuit of further education, and/or 2) provision of learning materials for children in disadvantaged families
Impact of California's Transitional Kindergarten Program, 2013-14
Transitional kindergarten (TK)—the first year of a two-year kindergarten program for California children who turn 5 between September 2 and December 2—is intended to better prepare young five-year-olds for kindergarten and ensure a strong start to their educational career. To determine whether this goal is being achieved, American Institutes for Research (AIR) is conducting an evaluation of the impact of TK in California. The goal of this study is to measure the success of the program by determining the impact of TK on students' readiness for kindergarten in several areas. Using a rigorous regression discontinuity (RD) research design,1 we compared language, literacy, mathematics, executive function, and social-emotional skills at kindergarten entry for students who attended TK and for students who did not attend TK. Overall, we found that TK had a positive impact on students' kindergarten readiness in several domains, controlling for students' age differences. These effects are over and above the experiences children in the comparison group had the year before kindergarten, which for more than 80 percent was some type of preschool program