“…In contrast, academic skills tended to be composed of a set of skills, each of which may develop in a graded pattern with a mastery of new skills, along with improvement of existing skills, and may be more directly relevant for learning through immediate and targeted stimulations (Entwisle & Alexander, 1990;Pungello, Kuperschmidt, Burchinal, & Patterson, 1996). This may explain current and previous findings of the significant impact of contemporaneous home environments on academic skills (e.g., Bradley & Caldwell, 1987;Evans, Shaw, & Bell, 2000;Storch & Whitehurst, 2001).…”