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1. Do Preschool Peers Create a Sustaining Environment in Kindergarten? Evidence from the ECLS-K:2011

   https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584251318306  

   Shea, Zhiling Meng; Zhang, Qing; Jenkins, Jade Marcus; Watts, Tyler W (January 2025, AERA Open)

   Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten Cohort 2011, we examine (i) whether more preschool attendees in a kindergarten classroom relate to higher academic and social skills for children who did not go to preschool, (ii) whether more preschool attendees in the classroom moderate the benefits of preschool attendance (child N = 11,360; class N = 2,460; 67% White; 51% males; M_age= 5.6 years), and (iii) whether more preschool attendees in the classroom relate to teachers’ perceptions of children’s skills and their instructional content. In contrast to prior analyses using the 1998 cohort of the ECLS-K, we found no evidence of an association between the classroom percentage of preschool-attending peers and children’s academic, executive function, and behavioral and prosocial skills. However, we found that the percentage of preschool peers was associated with teachers’ perceptions of children’s reading skills and teachers’ instructional time spent on advanced reading content. 

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2. Executive functioning deficits increase kindergarten children’s risk for reading and mathematics difficulties in first grade

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2016.01.004  

   Morgan, P. L. (July 2017, Contemporary educational psychology)

   Whether executive functioning deficits result in children experiencing learning difficulties is presently unclear. Yet evidence for these hypothesized causal relations has many implications for early intervention design and delivery. We used a multi-year panel design, multiple criterion and predictor variable measures, extensive statistical control for potential confounds including autoregressive prior histories of both reading and mathematics difficulties, and additional epidemiological methods to preliminarily examine these hypothesized relations. Results from multivariate logistic regression analyses of a nationally representative and longitudinal sample of 18,080 children (i.e., the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten Cohort of 2011, or ECLS-K: 2011) indicated that working memory and, separately, cognitive flexibility deficits uniquely increased kindergarten children’s risk of experiencing reading as well as mathematics difficulties in first grade. The risks associated with working memory deficits were particularly strong. Experimentally-evaluated, multi-component interventions designed to help young children with reading or mathematics difficulties may also need to remediate early deficits in executive function, particularly in working memory. 

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3. Bilingual advantages in executive functioning: Evidence from a low-income sample

   https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237211024220  

   Grote, Kandice_S; Scott, Rose_M; Gilger, Jeffrey (July 2021, First Language)

   Recent research suggests that bilinguals might exhibit advantages in several areas of executive function, including working memory, inhibitory control, and attentional control. However, few studies have examined potential bilingual advantages within lower socioeconomic status (SES) populations. Here we addressed this gap in the literature by investigating whether low-SES Spanish–English bilingual preschoolers exhibited advantages in executive function relative to two monolingual control groups (English, Spanish). Across three experiments, bilingual children exhibited superior performance on two different measures of visual–spatial memory, as well as measures of inhibitory and attentional control. These results suggest that bilinguals exhibit broad advantages in executive function during the preschool years, and these advantages are evident within a disadvantaged, low-SES population. 

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4. Executive function deficits in kindergarten predict repeated academic difficulties across elementary school

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.06.009  

   Morgan, P. L.; Farkas, G.; Wang, Y.; Hillemeier, M. M..; Maczuga, S. (January 2019, Early childhood research quarterly)

   We investigated whether and to what extent deficits in executive functions (EF) increase kindergarten children’s risk for repeated academic difficulties across elementary school. We did so by using growth mixture modeling to analyze the first- through third-grade achievement growth trajectories in mathematics, reading, and science of a large (N = 11,010) sample of children participating in the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort of 2011 (ECLS-K: 2011). The modeling yielded four growth trajectory classes in mathematics, reading, and science. We observed an at-risk trajectory class in each academic domain using a standardized scale. Children in the at-risk class initially averaged very low levels of achievement (i.e., about two standard deviations below the mean) in first grade. Their trajectories remained very low or declined further by third grade. Trajectories for other classes were also generally flat but started and remained at higher levels of standardized achievement. Deficits in EF, particularly in working memory, increased kindergarten children’s risk of experiencing repeated mathematics, reading, and science difficulties across elementary school. These predictive relations replicated across three academic domains following statistical control for domain-specific and -general autoregressors as well as socio-demographic characteristics. 

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5. Examining Heterogeneity in the Impacts of Socio-Emotional Curricula in Preschool: A Quantile Treatment Effect Approach

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.624320  

   Shea, Zhiling Meng; Jenkins, Jade Marcus (October 2021, Frontiers in Psychology)

   We examine treatment effect heterogeneity using data from the Head Start CARES study, in which a sample of preschool centers was randomly assigned to either one of three curricula interventions targeting socio-emotional (SE) skills (i.e., emotional knowledge, problem-solving skills, and executive functions) or to continue using their “business-as-usual” curriculum. Most existing research estimates only mean differences between treatment and control groups, and uses simple subgroup analyses to assess treatment heterogeneity, which may overlook important variation in treatment effects across the ex post outcome distribution. We use quantile treatment effects analyses to understand the impacts of these curricular interventions at various parts of the outcome distribution, from the 1st percentile to the 99th percentile, to understand who benefits most from SE curricula interventions. Results show positive impacts of the curricula interventions on emotional knowledge and problem-solving skills, but not equally across the full skill distribution. Children in the upper half of the emotional knowledge distribution and at the higher end of the problem-solving skills distribution gain more from the curricula. As in the study’s original mean-comparison analyses, we find no impacts on children’s executive function skills at any point in the skills distribution. Our findings add to the growing literature on the differential effects of curricula interventions for preschool programs operating at scale. Importantly, it provides the first evidence for the effects of SE curricula interventions on SE outcomes across children’s outcome skill levels. We discuss implications for early education programs for children with different school readiness skills. 

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