Despite calls to expand early childhood education (ECE) in the United States, questions remain regarding its medium- and long-term impacts on educational outcomes. We use meta-analysis of 22 high-quality experimental and quasi-experimental studies conducted between 1960 and 2016 to find that on average, participation in ECE leads to statistically significant reductions in special education placement (d = 0.33 SD, 8.1 percentage points) and grade retention (d = 0.26 SD, 8.3 percentage points) and increases in high school graduation rates (d = 0.24 SD, 11.4 percentage points). These results support ECE’s utility for reducing education-related expenditures and promoting child well-being.

Prior work has conceptualized children's executive function and self-regulation skills as relatively stable across short periods of time. Grounded in long-standing contextual theories of human development, this study introduces a new observational tool for measuring children's regulatory skills across different naturally occurring situations within early childhood classrooms. Using 460 observations of 91 children (M age = 5.54 years) in 16 socio-demographically diverse Prekindergarten and Kindergarten classrooms, we found that this tool-the Regulation-Related Skills Measure (RRSM)-reliably captured observed dimensions of young children's attention control and inhibitorycontrol, but failed to appropriately represent more "internal" regulatory processes (e.g., working memory). Associations between the RRSM and other measures of children's executive function and self-regulation (i.e., direct assessments, adult reports) were low to moderate (r = 0.03 to 0.44), suggesting these tools are likely to be complementary in that they provide overlapping but ultimately distinct information regarding children's regulatory performance. Finally, results suggested substantial withinchild variation in regulatory behaviors across different situations within the classroom, with the same children demonstrating consistently stronger attention control and inhibitory control during transitions than during either teacher-or student-directed activities. These findings underscore the situationally-dependent nature of children's self-regulatory performance, with implications for both theory and practice. Future research is needed to replicate these findings in more diverse, representative samples of children.

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