Research

One of our favorite reads here at Early Ed Watch is AFT's American Educator--a great quarterly magazine on education that, if you're not currently reading, you should be.

Tomorrow afternoon in Bergamo, Italy, I will be moderating a breakout session on Design for Savings at the Boulder Bergamo Forum on Access to Financial Services: Expanding the Rural Frontier. The organizers have set up a Wiki to allow those who couldn't make it to Bergamo to still participate in the session.

Last month the Institute of Education Sciences released a major new study that evaluates the impact of 14 common pre-kindergarten curricula on pre-k students’ learning and pre-k classroom quality. Results suggest that some pre-k curricula are more effective than others in improving children’s literacy and math skills.

A new study by economists David Deming and Susan Dynarski suggests that the trend towards delaying children's entrance into kindergarten (commonly known as kindergarten redshirting) may be partially to blame for the stagnation in higher education attainment for American

I don't often agree with Richard Whitmire*, but I do enjoy reading his new-ish blog, "Why Boys Fail?" Richard is smarter, more honest, and more data-driven than most other proponents of the current "boy crisis" storyline, and to the extent that the boy crisis has a kernel of truth to it--and it does, particularly for poor and minority boys--he's one of the more thoughtful people investigating that.

Cato's Adam Schaeffer, responding to a post I wrote two week ago, has more--lots more--to say about pre-k effectiveness (or, from his point of view, the lack thereof). Before we start talking about the evidence on pre-k more generally, though—which is the real bone of contention here, right?—let’s close out the debate that started this: Do trends in Oklahoma’s NAEP scores since the early 1990s indicate that the state’s pre-k program is ineffective? My answer is still “no.”

Early Ed Watch is at Head Start's 9th National Research Conference this morning, and as long as our wifi connection holds up, we'll be bringing you live coverage of what we hear and learn here.

Researchers in the Netherlands studied the impact of mental health home visitors on depressed mothers and their infants:

More evidence on the importance of teacher-child interactions to early education quality:

Two new studies released this week aim to help policymakers make sound choices about early education investments.