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The aim of this paper is to address two research questions related to the policy goal of having all children ready to learn at kindergarten entry. First, to what extent are children's socioemotional skills and behavior higher when they experience higher quality preschools? Second, are the effects of preschool center quality on these school readiness skills different by demographic (i.e. race/ethnicity, gender, maternal education) or child characteristics (i.e. child's initial cognitive/achievement skills, attention, problem behaviors)? All data included in these secondary data analyses were collected in preschool center-based care. While policymakers justifiably attach considerable weight to experimental evaluations of child care programs, there is much to be learned from rigorous analyses of longitudinal data that are more representative of the population. This paper applies meta-analytic techniques to summarize results from original analyses of four longitudinal data sets to estimate variation in preschool. In summary, the consistency of these generally null results and the precision with which they are estimated across the different databases, multiple outcomes, and multiple child care quality measures suggests the following: (1) there are no significant preschool center quality main effects on socioemotional child outcomes, (2) there is generally an absence of "differential" preschool center quality effects on these socioemotional school readiness outcomes for subgroups of children defined by demographic or child characteristics, and (3) preschool center quality may not be adequately measured in currently available databases. (Contains 14 tables.)

There are many types of programs for Spanish speaking students in the US, with varying methods and goals. Some preliminary work suggests that bilingual classrooms may differ widely in instruction, even under the same program labels. However, there are few studies which have compared the extent to which various bilingual program models differ in actual instruction delivered. Directly measuring instructional practice however, is difficult and costly, involving the influence of time, raters, content, and programs (Raudenbush, 2008). The purpose of the current paper is to estimate the relative influence of these important sources of variance in classroom observations completed in a large quasi-experiment of bilingual education. (Contains 6 tables.)

Few elementary school teachers command a science background sufficient to offer children early and sustained opportunities to develop an understanding of science concepts, and facility with scientific modes of reasoning. This four-year, NSF-funded study was designed to investigate how and to what extent particular combinations of science content and pedagogical learning experiences for teachers in grades 4-5 produce an impact on teachers' knowledge for teaching and on their students' learning. In this paper, the authors report results from the first phase of this work, which addressed the fundamental questions of whether the professional development courses did, in fact, lead to teacher and student knowledge gains, and what the effects were for the three course models that were tested, in relation to the control group and to one another. (Contains 10 tables.)