Pushing the boundaries of education research: A multidimensional approach to characterizing preschool neighborhoods and their relations with child outcomes.

Abstract

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.

Examining the association between neighborhood conditions and school readiness across low and highly segregated school attendance boundaries

“…Results of this study showed consistent evidence that students living in higher-resourced neighborhoods had higher school readiness skills at the start of kindergarten than those in lowerresourced neighborhoods. These results reinforce existing literature relating neighborhood conditions to academic outcomes (Vaden-Kiernan et al, 2010;McCoy et al, 2015) and expand on newer research investigating neighborhoods and early childhood outcomes (Wei et al, 2021;McCoy et al, 2022). Further, while prior research has shown a strong association between children's family income level and children's school readiness skills at kindergarten entry (Isaacs, 2012;Reardon and Portilla, 2016;Latham, 2018), the current study found that utilizing a more comprehensive measure of neighborhood conditions matters for school readiness, as well.…”

“…Recent research has also found that neighborhoods can provide protective factors for low-income preschoolers. For example, high-resource neighborhoods were associated with gains in children's executive function skills (McCoy et al, 2022), especially in lower income but higherresourced neighborhoods (Wei et al, 2021). These findings suggest that neighborhoods are a key context to explore in considering children's developing school readiness skills.…”

“…As children age, schools become a central feature of their community, existing within neighborhoods defined by attendance boundary zones. While prior research has defined neighborhoods 10.3389/feduc.2022.932558 Frontiers in Education 05 frontiersin.org using census tracts (McCoy et al, 2015(McCoy et al, , 2022Wei et al, 2021) or block groups (Dupéré et al, 2010), attendance boundaries provide a direct relationship between schools and the surrounding geographic area. School attendance boundary zones are drawn within school districts to determine which public school children attend based on where they live.…”

Assessing School Communities Using Google Street View: A Virtual Systematic Social Observation Approach

“…To date, only a handful of studies have explored preschool neighborhood structural characteristics (e.g., McCoy et al, 2015, 2021; Vaden-Kiernan et al, 2010; W. Wei et al, 2021), and even fewer have studied physical characteristics.…”

Neighborhood influences on the development of self-regulation among children of color living in historically disinvested neighborhoods: Moderators and mediating mechanisms

“…Composite indices of disadvantage have also been used to demonstrate links to children’s stress physiology ( Finegood et al, 2017 ) and to differences in functioning of brain regions underlying self-regulatory processes ( Gard et al, 2021 ). On the one hand, composite indices or profiles capturing co-occurring risks can be highly useful for comparing across different neighborhoods because they condense the complex exposures encompassed by neighborhoods ( Messer et al, 2006 ; McCoy et al, 2022 ). On the other hand, however, understanding the ways in which specific aspects of the built and social environments may influence children’s self-regulation can serve to highlight new opportunities for enriching neighborhood contexts to support the development of self-regulation.…”