Early Childhood Research Quarterly最新文献

The child-centered beliefs held by educators in early childhood education (ECE) are important in high-quality interactions between children and adults and are central to the recent policy emphasis on childcare quality. Using a national ECE workforce sample of home- and center-based centers from the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education (N=7,505), this study examined the relationships between professional development experiences and ECE educators' child-centered beliefs measured by a revised Parental Modernity Scale. We focused on the three PD models of mentoring and coaching, workshops, and college courses, and found that attending college courses was related to greater child-centered beliefs in home-based educators. Mentoring and coaching were found to effectively promote center-based educators’ beliefs. In terms of the contexts that support PD participation in home- and center-based childcare programs, our findings suggest that providing more opportunities to participate in coaching and college courses can offer effective support and thus improve ECE quality. The policy and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Mounting evidence suggests that home engagement in mathematics is related to variability in early math skill. Although prior work has investigated parental predictors of home math engagement more broadly, it remains understudied whether the same factors relate to toddlers’ home math environment, and if home math experiences are associated with toddlers’ math skills. Here we asked whether parents’ beliefs, attitudes, and experiences with math relate to their engagement in home numeracy and spatial activities with toddlers and are associated with toddlers’ developing number and spatial skills (N = 189). We find that a broad range of parent factors, including parents’ beliefs about the importance of math, math growth mindset beliefs, math anxiety, and math coursework, predicts parents’ frequency of engaging in numeracy activities with toddlers. Furthermore, home number activities predicted toddlers’ number skills. Parents’ math beliefs, attitudes, and experiences all had positive indirect effects on toddlers’ number skills through associations with number activities. However, none of these parent factors predicted home spatial activities, and we saw no association between home spatial activities and toddlers’ spatial skills. Altogether, these results suggest that even at very young ages, parent factors shape the home environment and toddlers’ early numeracy learning, but we did not detect associations for spatial skills.

This longitudinal study explored the bidirectional longitudinal relationships and sex differences in negative expressiveness among parents and internalizing/externalizing problems in their offspring. A total of 185 father-mother dyads from China participated in this study. Fathers and mothers independently completed three rounds of self-report questionnaires assessing family negative expressiveness, while mothers also reported on their offspring’s problem behaviors at the same intervals. The mean age of infants at the initial participation was 1.23 years (SD = .13). The results revealed that offspring internalizing problems at Time 1 (T1) positively predicted maternal negative expressiveness at Time 2 (T2), and maternal negative expressiveness at T1 positively predicted offspring externalizing problems at T2. Furthermore, paternal negative expressiveness at T2 mediated the relationship between early offspring externalizing problems at T1 and later internalizing problems at Time 3 (T3). The cross-lagged model also uncovered sex-specific patterns: paternal and maternal negative expressiveness predicted subsequent problem behaviors in boys, whereas problem behaviors in girls predicted paternal and maternal negative expressiveness. Notably, paternal negative expressiveness at T2 was a significant mediator for the continuity of externalizing problems in girls from T1 to T3, indicating a dynamic vicious circle with the family system. These findings highlight that the bidirectional longitudinal relationships between parents’ negative expressiveness and offspring’s problem behaviors are closely related to the sex of both parents and their offspring. Specifically, parents’ negative expressiveness exacerbated offspring’s problem behaviors (especially for boys), and offspring’s problem behaviors exacerbated parents’ negative expressiveness (especially for girls). Future interventions targeting parents’ negative expressiveness and offspring’s problem behaviors should consider the roles of sex differences among parents and infants.

Children who experience greater math talk during home math activities demonstrate higher levels of math knowledge. The current study was designed to test whether the features of storybooks affect the amount and kind of extratextual math talk parents and preschool children produce during storybook reading. Parent-child dyads (N = 50) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: implicit or explicit. The implicit condition involved a storybook with math elements embedded only in the illustrations; whereas, the explicit condition included the same set of illustrations as well as numeric and spatial words in the text. Both parents and children in the explicit condition produced more math-related utterances than those in the implicit condition. Among parents, the difference in quantity of talk was present across a range of different types of math talk. Mediation analyses showed that condition affected parent math talk via child math talk and child math talk via parent math talk. These results point to the bidirectional relation between parent and child math talk during storybook reading and the importance of the features of learning materials on that talk.

Over the past thirty years, developmental and learning sciences have started to illuminate the need for better access to anti-racist, culturally sustaining early childhood education and care programs. While physical access to programs continues to be an urgent need in the U.S., many communities of color continue to demand access to early childhood education spaces that are safe for their children to learn - programs that are working hard to root out racism and White supremacy from their policies and practices. In this study, we draw upon over 350 hours of data from teachers of young children ages 3-8 years old to offer a detailed, qualitative exploration of how racism impacts children's early learning experiences across early childhood bilingual, inclusion, and multiracial classrooms that serve majority children of color. We examine the policy implications of racism on children's access to agentic learning experiences at school. We also discuss how the findings from our study suggest guidance for programs and policies that want to increase access to agency-supportive environments for young children of color.

This study investigated links of executive functioning to gains in school readiness skills and explored the mediating role of children's behavioral engagement in the PreK classroom. We collected direct assessments of executive functioning (EF) and observations of behavioral engagement for 767 children (mean age 52.63 months) from racially/ethnically diverse, low-income backgrounds three times over the PreK year. We also measured school readiness in the domains of language, literacy, and math using direct assessments and collected teacher-report measures of socialemotional-behavioral skills and approaches to learning. Our analyses addressed the following three research questions: 1) To what extent does children's EF predict school readiness skill gains during PreK? 2) To what extent does children's behavioral engagement in PreK classrooms predict school readiness skill gains? 3) To what extent does behavioral engagement mediate the relation of EF with school readiness skill gains? We observed that EF was positively related to gains in language, math, and approaches to learning. Regarding behavioral engagement, Negative Classroom Engagement was negatively related to gains in literacy, math, social-emotionalbehavioral skills, and approaches to learning while Positive Task Engagement was positively related to gains in approaches to learning. Negative Classroom Engagement significantly mediated the effects of EF on gains in the domains of literacy, socialemotional-behavioral skills, and approaches to learning. We describe implications of these findings for promoting children's ability to learn and thrive in PreK contexts with a focus on their engagement with teachers, peers, and learning activities.

To provide a landscape of mathematics activities children experience in U.S. preschool and kindergarten classrooms, we observed time children spent in mathematics activities (and — as a contrast — literacy) in 101 geographically diverse early childhood classrooms in seven U.S. states. We also observed what mathematics content, grouping strategies, and management formats teachers engaged during classroom mathematics activities. Each observation lasted approximately 2 hours; collectively these observations focused on 930 children observed one to three times during the 2018/2019 or 2019/2020 school year. Averaging across individuals’ data within classrooms, we found that mathematics and literacy activities comprised 5% and 45% of time observed in preschool classrooms, respectively; and 25% and 42% of time observed in kindergarten classrooms, respectively. At both grades, when mathematics activities occurred, they were proportionally more often teacher-led rather than child-led. These findings raise concerns about the paucity of mathematics and over-reliance on developmentally inappropriate teacher-managed mathematics instruction in early childhood classrooms, especially preschools. Amount of time in math did not vary by preschool auspice, but time in literacy and the proportion of math time devoted to specific math content did: In Head Start classrooms we observed lowest percentage of time in literacy (and the highest percentage of time in non-instruction) compared to all other auspices. Across auspices, numeracy was the predominant math content area overall, but especially in Head Start classrooms. Thus, some aspects of early mathematics may differ with program auspice, suggesting that recommendations to increase and improve early mathematics activities may need to consider auspice characteristics.

High-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) enables families to participate in paid employment and promotes positive outcomes for children. Maintaining a stable ECEC workforce is critical to these endeavours. However, the retention of qualified early childhood educators is a pervasive problem globally. While much has been written about reasons for leaving the sector, there has been less attention to the ‘intention to leave’ stage. This study used a mixed-methods approach to explore how work culture and climate and work-related wellbeing support early childhood professionals’ decisions to stay in or leave the profession, and whether there are significant differences between educators’ and centre directors’ intention to leave. Quantitative findings of survey responses from 713 early childhood professionals suggest that one in three respondents intended to leave the profession, more than half of these within five years. Emotional exhaustion predicted intention to leave in both groups. For centre directors, higher personal accomplishment and older age also predicted higher likelihood of intending to leave. For educators, lower satisfaction with pay and benefits and lower qualification level predicted intention to leave. Qualitative findings highlighted participants’ (n = 97) reasons for intention to leave the sector: feeling undervalued, increased demands with inadequate support, and workforce issues. Understanding these factors may assist in designing interventions to prevent intention turning into a decision to leave, and therefore improve workforce stability. This is especially timely in the Australian context, when attention to supporting the ECEC workforce is high on the political agenda, and real structural and organisational change is possible.

Documenting how federal and state child care policies increase equitable access to high-quality early care and education (ECE) for families with low- and moderate-incomes remains a challenge in part due to overlaps in policy enactment. This study used an interrupted time series analysis (ITSA) to describe changes to providers’ participation in Maryland's child care subsidy program following implementation of a constellation of child care policies enacted between January 5, 2015, and March 2, 2020 (i.e., prior to the COVID-19 pandemic). Findings indicate a marked increase in the percentage of licensed family child care (FCC) and center-based providers serving children with a subsidy following increases in household income eligibility levels and provider reimbursement rates in 2018. Provider participation rates varied by neighborhood income level, with participation expanding more in neighborhoods with lower poverty density relative to their starting level in 2015. Changes in child participation rates by income eligibility mirrored changes in state subsidy policy: children residing in income-eligible households above 200 % federal poverty level represented 4.4 % of the child sample in 2018, 13 % in 2019, and 18 % in 2020. The proportion of children with a subsidy who used higher-rated ECE increased significantly between January 2018 and January 2020 for all racial/ethnic groups, income eligibility levels, and urbanicity categories. The majority (62 %) of children who stayed in the subsidy program between 2018 and 2019 stayed with their same provider, many of which obtained their first rating or increased their quality rating during this time frame in accordance with a new requirement for providers to participate in the state's quality rating system to receive a subsidy reimbursement. Implications for future research, policy, and practice are discussed.

Mixed-delivery prekindergarten (Pre-K) systems with slots in both public schools and community-based organization (CBO) settings are common in the U.S. Historically, policies and investments in many of these systems have placed CBOs and, by extension the children who attend them, at a disadvantage relative to public school programs and peers. In this descriptive study, we used secondary data to explore setting inequities in five large-scale Pre-K mixed-delivery systems (Boston, New York City, Seattle, New Jersey, and West Virginia), all of which had taken explicit steps to improve equity across settings. Our public school sample included 2,247 children in 367 classrooms in 146 schools and our CBO sample consisted of 1,700 children in 220 classrooms in 109 centers. We found evidence of substantial sorting of children and teachers by setting. Where we found differences in quality and children's gains, these tended to favor public schools. However, localities with fewer policy differences by setting showed fewer such setting differences. Findings suggest that advancing the goals of equitable, high-quality Pre-K access and narrowing opportunity gaps before kindergarten entry may require more research and policy attention to mixed-delivery setting policy equity.