Teachers' subjective understandings of their students' cognitive abilities have important implications for classroom interactions, children's access to resources and opportunities, and educational equity more broadly. Using nationally representative data and three-level hierarchical linear models, this study explored the links between teacher perceptions and children's sociodemographic backgrounds. The authors find that teachers perceive substantial racial-ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender differences in children's literacy skills. Roughly half of these disparities are explained by actual between-group differences. The remaining perceptual inaccuracies flow more from classroom characteristics than from teachers' professional or personal backgrounds (e.g., their own race or ethnicity). Specifically, holding students' social and academic backgrounds constant, the authors find that teachers in lower-socioeconomic-status and lower-achieving contexts more often underestimate their students' abilities. These results highlight the importance of recent policy efforts to avoid isolating traditionally disadvantaged children.

Sociologists suggest that children from socially advantaged families continue to learn during the summer, whereas children from disadvantaged families learn either little or lose ground.This disparity in summer learning is hypothesized to result from differential participation in educationally beneficial summer activities. In this article, we test this theory with current and nationally representative data, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort.We examine how children's socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with their learning of literacy, mathematics, and general knowledge over the summer between kindergarten and the first grade. We also explore whether social-background differences in learning are explained by differential participation rates in summer activities. Our analytic models adjust for discrepancies between the timing of assessments and the timing of schools closing for the summer and opening in the fall. Much of the observed gain results from time in school. Nonetheless, social stratification characterizes summer learning between kindergarten and the first grade, with higher-SES children learning more. However, these social-background differences are only modestly explained by the activities in which children participate during the summer months.

Over the past several decades, research has documented strong relationships between social class and children’s cognitive abilities. These initial cognitive differences, which are substantial at school entry, increase as children progress through school. Despite the robust findings associated with this research, authors have generally neglected the extent to which school absenteeism exacerbates social class differences in academic development among young children. Using growth-curve analyses within a three-level hierarchical linear modeling framework, this study employs data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) to examine the links between children’s social class, school absences, and academic growth during kindergarten and first grade. Results suggest that the effects of schooling on cognitive development are stronger for lower socioeconomic status (SES) children and that the findings associated with theories of summer learning loss are applicable to literacy development during early elementary school. Indeed, although they continue to achieve at lower absolute levels, socioeconomically disadvantaged children who have good attendance rates gain more literacy skills than their higher SES peers during kindergarten and first grade.

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Do children learn more in full-day kindergartens than half-day programs? If full-day kindergarten increases learning, are kindergartners in some schools particularly advantaged by their full-day experience? We address these questions with a nationally representative sample of over 8,000 kindergartners and 500 U.S. public schools that participated in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. More than half of kindergartners experience fullday programs, which are most commonly available to less-advantaged children. Using multilevel (HLM) methods, we show that children who attend schools that offer full-day programs learn more in literacy and mathematics than their half-day counterparts. We also explore differential effectiveness in some school settings.