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Research Findings: The study examined the relationship between Spanish-speaking DLL children's engagement within the preschool classroom with teachers, peers, and tasks and their school readiness skills compared to monolingual English-speaking peers. Results suggested that DLL children had lower language skills and phonological awareness by the end of the preschool year. However, children's positive engagement with teachers mediated the relationship between DLL status and children's language skills. Finally, the relationship between children's engagement and school readiness outcomes differed by whether children are DLL or monolingual; for DLL children, positively engaging with teachers, peers, and tasks were positively associated with their receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness, and print knowledge skills. Practice or Policy: The findings highlight how children's classroom engagement, particularly DLLs, is associated with their school readiness outcomes. That is, DLL and monolingual children are experiencing different levels of engagement expose potential inequities in the levels of quality experienced within classrooms. Classrooms must maximize the opportunities for DLLs to practice their language skills with peers, in particular, across languages as a way of supporting their development.

Achieving high-quality preschool at scale is challenging; to do so likely entails a combination of program standards, teacher qualifications and compensation, on-site quality monitoring, and professional development (PD). This study aims to examine the impact of investments in PD within the context of an expansion of universal preschool in one of the nation's largest school districts. We leverage the opportunity provided by a "natural experiment" to estimate PD's effects that embeds an evidence-based math curriculum in interdisciplinary units of study with coaching support on teacher math practices. A total of 95 schools participated in this study (51 treatment and 44 comparison schools). Treatment sites implemented more teacher-led math activities for a longer period compared to control sites. The size and magnitude of the impacts of a curriculum and PD program implemented at scale were comparable to results from studies of small-scale efficacy trials.

Research Findings: Evidence suggests that teachers are effective at improving the social and emotional readiness of low-income children. However, few measures are available to assess teachers' use of specific social-emotional practices within their classrooms. This paper compares an observational measure of teachers' social-emotional practices, the Adapted Teacher Style Rating Scale (TSRS), to an instrument of general classroom climate within a randomized control trial, including 307 Head Start classrooms across the country. Results confirmed the expected underlying three-factor structure of the Adapted-TSRS across mixed-age and 4-year-old only Head Start classrooms. The measure was found to have good internal consistency, reliability, and acceptable concurrent correlations with other previously validated observational measures of classroom climate. Policy or Practice: The results support the usefulness and added value of a more specific observational measure of teachers' social-emotional practices.

Little is understood about how an unconditional cash transfer might operate and affect behavior among low-income parents of infants in the United States. We investigate these questions using data from a random-assignment pilot study (N = 30) in which unconditional cash transfers were distributed monthly on debit cards to two groups of low-income parents in New York City during the first 12 months of their newborns’ lives. Mothers were randomized to receive either $100 per month or $20 per month. Mothers distinguished spending the cash transfer on essentials vs. extras, such as going out to dinner with family. The monthly cash transfer “tided them over,” even at the lower amount of $20, especially when income from other sources ran short at the end of the month. Some mothers reported saving money for unexpected expenses.

Person-oriented approaches can be used to identify how teachers may draw upon a combination of strategies when interacting with individual children. For nearly 1 third of children under the age of 8 who come from a household where a language other than English is spoken, it is crucial to identify patterns of teachers' use of discourse strategies that are hypothesized as being particularly important in supporting their unique developmental strengths and needs. The current study used latent profile analysis to (a) describe patterns of child-level experiences of teachers' use of discourse strategies among a low-income sample of preschool Spanish-speaking dual language learners (DLLs), and (b) examine relations between these patterns, child language skills, family demographic factors, and teacher characteristics. Four classes were identified: (a) low-quality discourse practices (50%), (b) self-talk and simultaneous translation, with low-quality use of other discourse strategies (15%), (c) diverse range of strategies (7%); and (d) closed-ended, open-ended questions and one-on-one conversations (29%). These profiles demonstrated that children experience different patterns of discourse practices that vary across quality and the type of practices. When examining differences in profiles based on child, family, and teacher variables, results revealed that indicators of family SES, children's age, bilingual expressive vocabulary, and teachers' experiences of coursework (i.e., preservice) and professional development (i.e., in-service) were associated with patterns between profiles. These results have important implications for classroom instruction and policy.

Little attention has been paid to describing the ways early childhood education (ECE) teachers implement interactive strategies and the use of Spanish and English, in real time, to support Spanish–English emergent bilingual children's contributions to shared book reading interactions. Video recordings from 19 ECE classrooms during shared book reading were used to conduct sequential analysis to examine the different types of interactive strategies (e.g., questions, extensions) implemented by bilingual ECE teachers and emergent bilinguals' responses to these strategies. This study found that teachers' interactive strategies may reflect a degree of reciprocity, with teachers and children sensitively attuned to one another's contributions in real time. Teachers' questions in English and Spanish were related to emergent bilinguals' responses across a wide range of language complexity. Similarly, teachers and emergent bilinguals tended to respond to one another in the language of the prior utterance, suggesting teachers and emergent bilinguals are attuned to the contributions of one another. By examining teacher–child dynamics, this study produced results that can address issues that may have direct, translatable implications for ECE practice and intervention efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers' stress is a dynamic combination of the individual teacher's characteristics and characteristics of the classroom and school environment. To date, there are limited studies on teachers' stress in the context of lower‐middle‐income countries (LMICs), where working conditions as well as general political and economic circumstances might pose a considerable threat for teachers' well‐being. This study explores whether certain combinations of individual and environmental experiences of teachers in LMICs may result in stress, assessed as patterns of diurnal cortisol rhythm. Participants were kindergarten teachers in Kosovo and Ukraine, two LMICs in Europe. Latent Profile Analysis identified three subgroups of teachers that significantly differed on teachers' education and experience. Preliminary results of Latent Growth Modeling suggested differences between profiles in baseline waking cortisol and patterns of diurnal decline. Teachers in the profile that was characterized by the longest experience working in the field but the lowest level of education showed blunted cortisol in the morning and a flatter slope; a pattern that could indicate a maladaptive cortisol response. Future directions for studying stress processes among teachers in LMICs and implications for policy and practice on how to support teacher well‐being in low‐resource contexts are discussed. Highlights: Teachers' stress was investigated in the context of lower‐middle‐income countries (LMICs).Explores whether certain combinations of experiences might make teachers more prone to stress.Finds differences between groups of teachers in waking cortisol and patterns of diurnal decline.Results may lead to new hypotheses on stress processes among teachers in LMICs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]