This study examined development of academic, language, and social skills among 4-year-olds in publicly supported prekindergarten (pre-K) programs in relation to 3 methods of measuring pre-K quality, which are as follows: (a) adherence to 9 standards of quality related to program infrastructure and design, (b) observations of the overall quality of classroom environments, and (c) observations of teachers' emotional and instructional interactions with children in classrooms. Participants were 2,439 children enrolled in 671 pre-K classrooms in 11 states. Adjusting for prior skill levels, child and family characteristics, program characteristics, and state, teachers' instructional interactions predicted academic and language skills and teachers' emotional interactions predicted teacher-reported social skills. Findings suggest that policies, program development, and professional development efforts that improve teacher-child interactions can facilitate children's school readiness.

The Morris water maze task was originally designed to assess the rat's ability to learn to navigate to a specific location in a relatively large spatial environment. This article describes new measures that provide information about the spatial distribution of the rat's search during both training and probe trial performance. The basic new measure optimizes the use of computer tracking to identify the rat's position with respect to the target location. This proximity measure was found to be highly sensitive to age-related impairment in an assessment of young and aged male Long-Evans rats. Also described is the development of a learning index that provides a continuous, graded measure of the severity of age-related impairment in the task. An index of this type should be useful in correlational analyses with other neurobiological or behavioral measures for the study of individual differences in functional/biological decline in aging.A test of spatial learning introduced over a decade ago by Richard Morris (Morris, 1981;Morris, Garrud, Rawlins, & O'Keefe, 1982) has become widely used in neurobiological studies of limbic-cortical function and in the characterization of cognitive decline in aged rats. Originally devised as a test of "place" learning, the water maze task permits a number of variations that have made it useful for isolating cognitive deficits apart from nonspecific impairments in sensorimotor function. The purpose of the present article is to describe some new methods for behavioral analysis that were developed to supplement those measures commonly used for the water maze. As a framework for presenting the new methods, the following introduction provides a brief discussion of the traditional analysis of performance in this task. Measures Traditionally Used for Behavioral Analysis in the Water MazeThe Morris maze apparatus consists of a large, circular pool filled with water that has been made opaque through the addition of powdered milk or some other substance. In the typical "hidden-platform" version of the task, rats are trained to find a camouflaged escape platform Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michela, Gallagher, Department of Psychology, CB# 3270, Davie Hall, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3270. HHS Public AccessAuthor manuscript Behav Neurosci. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2017 October 13. Author ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript that is positioned just below the water surface. The location of this platform remains constant from trial to trial. Because there are no local cues that mark the position of the platform, the rat's ability to locate it efficiently depends on the rat's use of a configuration of extramaze cues surrounding the pool. Indeed, rats can learn to swim directly to the escape platform within relatively few training trials from any of a number of start locations at the perimeter of the pool. Learning is reflected in shorter latencies to escape and by decreases in the length of the path that the rat tra...

Effects of early child care on children's functioning from 4(1/2) years through the end of 6th grade (M age=12.0 years) were examined in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n=1,364). The results indicated that although parenting was a stronger and more consistent predictor of children's development than early child-care experience, higher quality care predicted higher vocabulary scores and more exposure to center care predicted more teacher-reported externalizing problems. Discussion focuses on mechanisms responsible for these effects, the potential collective consequences of small child-care effects, and the importance of the ongoing follow-up at age 15.

The cognitive and socioemotional development of 733 children was examined longitudinally from ages 4 to 8 years as a function of the quality of their preschool experiences in community child-care centers, after adjusting for family selection factors related to child-care quality and development. These results provide evidence that child-care quality has a modest long-term effect on children's patterns of cognitive and socioemotional development at least through kindergarten, and in some cases, through second grade. Differential effects on children's development were found for two aspects of child-care quality. Observed classroom practices were related to children's language and academic skills, whereas the closeness of the teacher-child relationship was related to both cognitive and social skills, with the strongest effects for the latter. Moderating influences of family characteristics were observed for some outcomes, indicating stronger positive effects of child-care quality for children from more at-risk backgrounds. These findings contribute further evidence of the long-term influences of the quality of child-care environments on children's cognitive and social skills through the elementary school years and are consistent with a bioecological model of development that considers the multiple environmental contexts that the child experiences.

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