Highlights• Neighborhoods in nine US cities exhibit heterogeneity in socioeconomic status (SES) and resources.• Classroom instructional support is one mechanism through which neighborhoods matter for development.• Neighborhood resources matter for child development via levels of classroom quality.• Instructional quality is highest in neighborhoods with higher levels of both SES and resources.

With more low-income children in the United States participating in center-based early childhood education programs than ever before, understanding the features of preschool classrooms that promote positive and equitable outcomes for children is of increasing concern to education researchers. Relatively little empirical work, however, has considered the role that characteristics outside of preschool walls might play in shaping low-income children’s learning and development early in life. This study uses novel administrative data to characterize the institutional resources, indicators of social organization, and structural determinants of development for the neighborhoods surrounding 195 preschools across nine U.S. cities. Using latent profile analysis, preschool neighborhoods were grouped into four profiles reflecting different combinations of community characteristics. These neighborhood profiles predicted low-income preschoolers’ (N = 1,230; M age = 4.18 years) language/literacy, executive function, and approaches to learning at the end of the 2009 or 2010 academic year, with particularly positive outcomes in communities characterized by high physical disorder and unaffordability, as well as in those marked by high community resources and physical order and low residential mobility. Findings highlight the multidimensional realities of low-income children’s preschool community environments and offer new directions for characterizing educational contexts.

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Two-Thirds of all four-year-old children in the United States attend early childhood education (ECE) programs, and this number is expected to rise in the coming years (U.S. Department of Education, 2017). As ECE programs expand across the country, there is a growing recognition of the need to measure and improve quality across the diverse ECE landscape, including Head Start, state pre-kindergarten (prek), and community-based programs, to improve child outcomes. The major system that monitors center-based ECE programs in the United States is state-level Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS). This paper explores how to maximize the effectiveness of QRIS for promoting child outcomes by improving the conceptualization and measurement of family engagement, which is one of the most common measures of quality within QRIS.Galvanized through the Race-to-the-Top Early Learning Challenge, QRIS attempt to improve the performance of individual programs by: (a) assessing ECE programs using a number of quality measures, (b) disseminating program ratings to the local public, and (c) offering improvement supports tied to programs' rating performance. The guiding framework behind QRIS is that top-rated programs represent higher levels of quality, which should mean that higher ratings are associated with greater gains in children's development and learning-a primary goal of early childhood Almost every state-level Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) in the country includes family engagement as an indicator of early childhood education quality. Yet, most QRIS measure family engagement using a uniform, narrow set of parent involvement activities at the center. We propose an alternative approach that emphasizes a range of direct services for parents, including: (1) parenting classes, (2) family support services, (3) social capital activities, and (4) human capital services. In our proposed rating systems, states would assess how well centers address the highest ranked needs of families and employ evidence-based practices across one or more of the center-selected direct parent service categories. We explore the feasibility of this approach through a qualitative study (n = 14 centers) and case examples. We discuss how this new rating system could be used to monitor quality and as a tool for program improvement to support child development.

Developmental science demonstrates that younger children (ages 4 to 8) are capable of making meaning of their contexts and the self. Yet, younger children's meaning making is largely absent from intervention and implementation research on early childhood policies. This absence is notable given the rise in investment in early childhood policies and the need to understand how to maximize and sustain their impacts. In the current study, we consider how better measurement of children's meaning making of a current policy-related intervention could provide an important and new tool to inform the design, structure, and content of early childhood policies We describe the following three major advances in psychological science and technology that make it the opportune time to consider measuring younger children's meaning making: (a) general recognition that younger children can make about their environmental contexts and the self, (b) evidence on the validity of assessment paradigms (i.e., the Berkeley Puppet Interview) to assess younger children's meaning making, and (c) emerging evidence that technological advances can support the measurement of complex processes at scale. We then describe our process for developing a novel measurement tool, which pairs a tablet-based assessment paradigm (the Childhood Assessment Tool-Electronic (CHAT-E)) with a newly developed content-specific scale, to study how kindergarten students make meaning of college savings accounts within an intervention/ implementation study. We provide lessons learned and implications for research conducted at the intersection of psychology, implementation science, and child policy. What is the significance of this article for the general public?This study proposes the importance of including children's voices within intervention/implementation research to inform the design and structure of early childhood policies. In particular, psychological innovations in assessing younger children coupled with advances in technology have led to increased opportunities to better understand how children make meaning of the context of early childhood interventions/policies (e.g., college savings accounts) and children's understanding of these contexts in relation to themselves.Terri J.

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