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Despite global demand, the large-scale effects of social-emotional learning (SEL) programming in developing countries remain underexplored. Using a randomized control trial, this study examined the effectiveness of a school-wide SEL intervention-Programa Compasso (PC)-among 3,018 sociodemographically diverse, Portuguese-speaking children (Mage = 9.85 years) attending 90 public primary schools across Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2017. Average impacts of PC on children's executive function, emotion knowledge, and behavior problems after one school year were null. Moderation analyses did, however, reveal evidence for positive impacts of PC on children's labeling of emotional expressions and inhibitory control within low-homicide communities (d = 0.15 SDs), and null effects on these same outcomes in high-violence areas. Implementation and cultural considerations are discussed.

Reflecting a burgeoning political interest in supporting young children around the world, global demand for reliable, valid, and scalable assessments of early childhood development (ECD) is on the rise. One of the more popular sets of tools for measuring the ECD of children under age 3 is the Caregiver Reported Early Development Instruments (CREDI), which includes both a long form for research and evaluation and a short form for population-level monitoring. In this commentary, we describe the goals and limitations of the CREDI, research to support its use as a population-level ECD instrument, as well as the major gaps in its evidence base. We also discuss how the work of Alderman and colleagues (in this issue) addresses some of these outstanding gaps, highlighting several critical areas for future research.

Theoretical models assume that parental knowledge about child development and caregiving motivates parental stimulation, shaping child development. Evidence supporting these models is scarce in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This study tests the relations between maternal knowledge, stimulation, and child development in a Colombian sample of 1,277 low-income mothers and their children under the age of five. Mothers showed diverse knowledge about child development and caregiving. Moreover, maternal knowledge when children were 9-26 months old indirectly predicted growth in children's cognitive, receptive language, and gross motor skills at ages 27-46 months, partially through maternal engagement in stimulating activities with the child.

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 inhibitory control, 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 within-child 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.

This study explores children's early academic and self-regulatory skills as potential pathways through which a preschool enrichment program-the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP)-may contribute to low-income children's long-term outcomes (N = 466; Mage at baseline = 4.10 years). We find that CSRP's impact on high school grades may be partially explained by early gains in vocabulary and math skills. Although impacts on high school executive function (EF) were more equivocal, our results suggest that early improvements in math skills attributable to the intervention may, in turn, predict long-term gains in EF skills. These results complement the existing literature on preschool fade out, while also shedding light on the cross-domain relations between academic and self-regulatory skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence exposure can negatively impact early childhood development (ECD), yet limited research exists in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This study aimed to determine what effective integration of ECD plus violence prevention (ECD+VP) can look like in LMICs. Seventeen key informants were selected using purposive sampling, representing U.N. agencies, donors, implementers and research organisations. Using open coding of semi-structured interviews, the authors identify five priority areas for promoting an integrated ECD+VP agenda: (i) parenting and parent child relationships, (ii) family systems, (iii) development in an ecological context, (iv) system strengthening and integration, and (v) building and translating evidence.

The present longitudinal study tested the roles of early childhood executive control (EC) as well as exposure to poverty-related adversity at family and school levels as key predictors of low-income children’s EC in elementary school (n = 391). Findings suggest that children’s EC difficulties in preschool and lower family income from early to middle childhood are robust predictors of later EC difficulties as rated by teachers in second and third grades. Findings also suggest enrollment in unsafe elementary schools is significantly predictive of higher levels of teacher-rated EC difficulty, but only for those children who showed initially elevated levels of EC difficulty in early childhood. Implications for scientific models of cognitive development and poverty-related adversity are discussed.

The present study examined the relationships between caregivers' self-reported positive and negative emotional expressiveness, observer assessments of children's emotion regulation, and teachers' reports of children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors in a sample of 97 primarily African American and Hispanic Head Start families. Results indicated that higher caregiver negativity and lower child emotion regulation independently predicted more internalizing behavior problems in children. Additionally, children's externalizing behavior problems were negatively predicted by caregivers' self-reports of positive emotional expressiveness. Importantly, results also suggested that caregivers' emotional expressiveness and children's behavioral problems may be non-linearly related, and that child gender may play an important moderating role. These results emphasize the importance of family emotional climate and child emotion regulation in the behavioral development of preschool-age children, and highlight the need for improved theoretical and practical understanding of socioemotional development in diverse populations.

The majority of evidence on the interplay between academic and non-academic skills comes from high-income countries. The aim of this study was to examine the bidirectional associations between Ghanaian children's executive function, social-emotional, literacy, and numeracy skills longitudinally. Children (N = 3,862; M age = 5.2 years at time 1) were assessed using direct assessment at three time points over the course of two school years. Controlling for earlier levels of the same skill, early executive function predicted higher subsequent literacy and numeracy skills, and early literacy and numeracy skills predicted higher subsequent executive function, indicating that the development of executive function and academic skills is inter-related and complementary over time. Early literacy and numeracy predicted subsequent social-emotional skills, but early social-emotional skills did not predict subsequent literacy and numeracy skills. The findings provide longitudinal evidence on children's learning and development in West Africa and contribute to a global understanding of the relations between various developmental skills over time.