How Do California Preschool Quality Ratings Relate to Children's Development?

Abstract

High-quality early learning has the potential to narrow disparities in children’s learning and development prior to kindergarten entry, particularly for children from families with low incomes and children who are multilingual learners. This study investigates the relationship between preschool quality and children’s learning and development from fall to spring of 1 school year through the analysis of child- and program-level data from approximately 70,000 children in California preschool programs. It suggests that attending a higher-quality-rated program is associated with greater learning and development than attending a lower-quality-rated program.

Language and literacy trajectories for dual language learners (DLLs) with different home languages: Linguistic distance and implications for practice.

“…Research demonstrates that high-quality ECE programs can support early learning and development for all children and may provide even greater benefits for children classified as DLLs (Sussman et al, 2022;Yazejian et al, 2015;Yoshikawa et al, 2013). However, a clear and consistent finding in the literature is that children classified as DLLs do not have the same access to high-quality programs as their monolingual peers (NASEM, 2017).…”

“…The widths were set by the item parameters that account for knowledge and skills that emerge earlier or later in development and the time in-between the emergence of developmental skills and behaviors. Sussman et al (2021) used a classification accuracy approach to examine the agreement between a child's developmental level and each of their item levels for the five major DRDP domains. In a sample of 1.5 million assessments (with some children observed more than once), the authors found an average of 69% agreement between the developmental (domain) level and the item level.…”