Using 6 longitudinal data sets, the authors estimate links between three key elements of school readiness--school-entry academic, attention, and socioemotional skills--and later school reading and math achievement. In an effort to isolate the effects of these school-entry skills, the authors ensured that most of their regression models control for cognitive, attention, and socioemotional skills measured prior to school entry, as well as a host of family background measures. Across all 6 studies, the strongest predictors of later achievement are school-entry math, reading, and attention skills. A meta-analysis of the results shows that early math skills have the greatest predictive power, followed by reading and then attention skills. By contrast, measures of socioemotional behaviors, including internalizing and externalizing problems and social skills, were generally insignificant predictors of later academic performance, even among children with relatively high levels of problem behavior. Patterns of association were similar for boys and girls and for children from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds.

Replications and robustness checks are key elements of the scientific method and a staple in many disciplines. However, leading journals in developmental psychology rarely include explicit replications of prior research conducted by different investigators, and few require authors to establish in their articles or online appendices that their key results are robust across estimation methods, data sets, and demographic subgroups. This article makes the case for prioritizing both explicit replications and, especially, within-study robustness checks in developmental psychology. It provides evidence on variation in effect sizes in developmental studies and documents strikingly different replication and robustness-checking practices in a sample of journals in developmental psychology and a sister behavioral science-applied economics. Our goal is not to show that any one behavioral science has a monopoly on best practices, but rather to show how journals from a related discipline address vital concerns of replication and generalizability shared by all social and behavioral sciences. We provide recommendations for promoting graduate training in replication and robustness-checking methods and for editorial policies that encourage these practices. Although some of our recommendations may shift the form and substance of developmental research articles, we argue that they would generate considerable scientific benefits for the field. (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). Just before the school year began, each of the school's 18 teachers was given the names of about five students who, based on a test administered several months before, were alleged to be "academic spurters"-children with exceptional academic promise. In fact these children had been chosen at random from the much larger set of tested students. An IQ test administered at the end of the academic year showed that, among other results, first and second graders in the "spurter" group had larger intellectual gains than did their peers. Teachers described these spurters as having a better chance of being successful in later life and as being happier, more curious, and more interesting than were other children. These results, published in the 1968 book Pygmalion in the Classroom, were widely discussed and bitterly disputed and inspired changes in classroom practice. KeywordsReplication studies quickly appeared, some of which attempted to exactly reproduce the original Pygmalion study conditions, while others explored the robustness of the original results to variations in the context in which the original experiment was conducted. Some of these studies replicated the original Pygmalion effects, while others did not. In 1984, the 18 high-quality published studies on this topic were subjected to a meta-analysis (Raudenbush, 1984). The results showed a clear pattern in which studies that misled teachers before they had much contact with students produced much larger effects (d ϭ ϩ0.23), on average, than cognitive dissonance-invoking studies that tried to mislead teachers aft...

We use observations from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) to compare structural and process characteristics of child care centers, family child care homes (nonrelative care in a home setting) and care by relatives for 2, 3-and 4 ½-year-old children. Type of care differences in structural and caregiver characteristics were consistent across ages: centers had higher child-to-adult ratios and bigger groups; centers had caregivers with better education, more training in early childhood, and less traditional beliefs about child rearing. Children in centers experienced more cognitive stimulation, less frequent language interactions with adults, less frequent negative interactions with adults, and less television viewing than did those in other types of care. In centers and family child care homes compared to relative settings, children engaged in more positive and negative interactions with peers and spent more time in transition and unoccupied. Curvilinear associations were found between structural features of care and family income, particularly for caregiver education and training. In contrast, process measures of caregiving rose monotonically with family income. Children from high-income families experienced more sensitive care, more cognitive stimulation, and fewer negative interactions with adults than did those from low-income families. We interpret the findings by linking the structural features and caregiver training to the cognitive and social processes observed in different types of care. Future research designed to understand the influences of child care on children's behavior might benefit from using this more nuanced description of child care experiences.Child care quality is a well-documented predictor of children's intellectual and social development, but recent evidence indicates that type of care may be important independently of "global" ratings of quality. A recurrent finding in the literature is that children who participate in center-based arrangements-including Head Start-during their infant and preschool years perform better on cognitive and language development and show better preacademic skills than children who spend an equivalent amount of time in child care homes or relative care of comparable quality (Garces, Thomas, & Currie, 2002; NICHD Early Child Care Research Network [ECCRN], 2000a; NICHD ECCRN & Duncan, 2003).The relations of type of care to children's social behavior are more uncertain. Two longitudinal studies of large, national samples have shown that children with more center care experience were rated by caregivers and elementary school teachers as having more behavior problems and less self control than those who had not experienced center care (Magnuson, Ruhm, & Waldfogel, 2007; NICHD 2002;2003a). Most longitudinal investigations of children from Contact author Chantelle Dowsett, Human Development & Family Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station/A2700, Austin, TX 78712; 512-471-3141; E-mail: dowsettcj@mail.utexa...

The authors used data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2; SRI International, 2000) to examine the aspects of self-determination assessed in NLTS2 and measurement equivalence and latent differences across the 12 disability categories recognized in the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA; 2004). NLTS2 included a direct assessment with items representing 3 of the 4 essential characteristics of self-determination—autonomy, self-realization, and psychological empowerment. The authors established measurement equivalence, but significant latent differences occurred across specific disability groups. Students with high-incidence disabilities (learning disabilities, emotional disturbances, speech or language impairments, and other health impairments) showed similar latent means and variances, as did students with sensory disabilities (visual and hearing impairments) and cognitive disabilities (autism, multiple disabilities, and deaf-blindness). Students with intellectual disability, traumatic brain injury, and orthopedic impairments could not be collapsed with any other group. Across the 6 collapsed disability groups, significant differences existed in the latent variances and limited mean level differences.

We apply instrumental variables (IV) techniques to a pooled data set of employment-focused experiments to examine the relation between type of preschool childcare and subsequent externalizing problem behavior for a large sample of low-income children. To assess the potential usefulness of this approach for addressing biases that can confound causal inferences in child care research, we compare instrumental variables results with those obtained using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. We find that our OLS estimates concur with prior studies showing small positive associations between center-based care and later externalizing behavior. By contrast, our IV estimates indicate that preschool-aged children with center care experience are rated by mothers and teachers as having fewer externalizing problems on entering elementary school than their peers who were not in child care as preschoolers. Findings are discussed in relation to the literature on associations between different types of community-based child care and children’s social behavior, particularly within low-income populations. Moreover, we use this study to highlight the relative strengths and weaknesses of each analytic method for addressing causal questions in developmental research.

National Longitudinal Transition Study-2. Specifically, the impact of race/ethnicity was examined with six disability groups established in previous research: high incidence disabilities (learning disabilities, emotional disturbances, speech language impairments, and other health impairments), sensory disabilities (visual and hearing impairments), cognitive disabilities (autism, multiple disabilities, and deaf-blindness); intellectual disability, traumatic brain injury, and orthopedic impairments. Measurement equivalence was established across groups, but significant differences in the latent means, variances, and covariances were found suggesting a complex pattern of differences based on race/ethnicity within disability groups. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

No abstract

Despite widespread interest in children's adjustment problems, existing research does not provide conclusive evidence regarding the direction of the associations of achievement with classroom attention problems and disruptive behavior over the course of elementary school. Using a nationally representative sample of 16,260 kindergarteners, this study examined the temporal sequence of achievement, classroom attention problems, and disruptive behavior, focusing on how changes in skills and problems unfold across key periods between kindergarten and fifth grade. Results indicate that improvements in attention during the earliest years of schooling predict achievement gains through third grade. However, changes in disruptive behavior do not predict subsequent changes in achievement. Evidence linking changes in achievement to changes in classroom attention problems and disruptive behavior was less consistent. These findings point to the need to develop and examine early interventions that can improve attention skills as a mechanism for improving children's academic trajectories in elementary school.