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Boston Early Childhood Research Practice Partnership

Boston Early Childhood Research Practice Partnership

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Boston RPP briefs

Going the Distance: Disparities in Pre-K Enrollment in Higher-Quality Schools by Geographic Proximity, Race/Ethnicity, Family Income, and Home Language

April 29, 2023
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Meghan McCormick, Mirjana Pralica, JoAnn Hsueh, Christina Weiland, Amanda Ketner Weissman, Anna Shapiro, Samantha Xia, Cullen MacDowell, Samuel Maves, Anne Taylor, Jason Sachs
This study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS pre-K from 2012–2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and...
Learning from lottery-based evaluations of early education programs
Boston RPP briefs

Enrollment in Pre-K and children's social-emotional and executive functioning skills: To what extent are associations sustained across time?

April 20, 2023
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Lillie Moffett, Amanda Weissman, Meghan McCormick, Christina Weiland, Joann Hsueh, Catherine Snow, Jason Sachs
Pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) improves the school readiness of all children, but less is known about whether associations between enrollment in Pre-K and different indicators of social–emotional and executive functioning (EF) skills are sustained as...
Children and teacher reading
Boston RPP briefs

Professional Development in the Time of COVID-19: Evidence and Insights from Early Educators in the Boston Public Schools

April 7, 2023
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Christina Weiland, Meghan McCormick, Tiffany Wu, Cullen MacDowell, Paola Guerrero-Rosada, Anne Taylor, Catherine Snow, Jason Sachs
This brief is part of a larger body of research examining the Boston Universal Pre-K (UPK) expansion and the Expanding Children’s Early Learning (ExCEL) P-3 Project focused on sustaining children’s early learning gains. As we navigate the...
Teacher wearing a mask elbow bumping with child wearing a mask
Boston RPP briefs

Enrollment in Pre-K and children's social-emotional and executive functioning skills: To what extent are associations sustained across time?

December 22, 2022
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Lillie Moffett, Amanda Weissman, Meghan McCormick, Christina Weiland, JoAnn Hsueh, Catherine Snow, Jason Sachs
Pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) improves the school readiness of all children, but less is known about whether associations between enrollment in Pre-K and different indicators of social–emotional and executive functioning (EF) skills are sustained as...
Students sit around teacher reading, some raising hands
Boston RPP briefs

Learning experiences vary across young children in the same classroom: Evidence from the individualizing student instruction measure in the Boston Public Schools

November 28, 2022
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Christina Weiland, Lillie Moffett, Paola Guerrero Rosada, Amanda Weissman, Kehui Zhan, Michelle Maier, Catherine Snow, Meghan McCormick, JoAnn Hsueh, Jason Sachs
Classroom-level quality measures are widely used in early education settings but may mask important variation in learning experiences across children in the same classroom. This study investigates this possibility using detailed data from an...
Students raising hands in classroom
Boston RPP briefs

Mixed-Delivery Public Prekindergarten: Differences in Demographics, Quality, and Children’s Gains in Community-Based versus Public School Programs across Five Large-Scale Systems

September 1, 2022
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Christina Weiland, Meghan McCormick, Jennifer Duer, Allison Friedman-Kraus, Mirjana Pralica, Samantha Xia, Milagros Nores, Shira Mattera
Nearly all states with public prekindergarten programs use mixed-delivery systems, with classrooms in both public schools and community-based settings.  However, experts have long raised concerns about systematic inequities by setting within these...
Children and teacher reading
Boston RPP briefs

A New Approach to Sustaining Pre-K Impacts

April 1, 2022
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Meghan McCormick, Rebecca Unterman, Mijana Pralica, Christina Weiland, Amanda Weissman, Joann Hsueh
Support for expanding access to high-quality prekindergarten (pre-K) is at an all time high. Increased investments in early care and education have been spurred in part by rigorous evidence finding that four-year-old students who attend pre-K score...
Students playing with toys around teacher
Boston RPP briefs

Content-rich instruction and cognitive demand in prek: using systematic observations to predict child gains

February 3, 2022
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Michelle Maier, Meghan McCormick, Samantha Xia, JoAnn Hsueh, Christina Weiland, Abby Morales, Marina Boni, Melissa Tonachel, Jason Sachs, Catherine Snow
Currently available measures of PreK classroom quality inconsistently predict gains in children’s outcomes. Extant measures may not capture the full range of instructional practices—including the degree to which children are exposed to rich content...
Boston RPP briefs

Does Kindergarten Instruction Matter for Sustaining the Prekindergarten (PreK) Boost? Evidence From Individual- and Classroom-Level Survey and Observational Data

February 1, 2022
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Meghan P. McCormick, Mirjana Pralica, Christina Weiland, JoAnn Hsueh, Lillie Moffett, Paola Guerrero-Rosada, Amanda Weissman, Kehui Zhang, Michelle F. Maier, Catherine E. Snow, Emily Davies, Anne Taylor, Jason Sachs
The sustaining environments hypothesis theorizes that the lasting effects of PreK programs are contingent on the quality of the subsequent learning environment in early elementary school. The current study tests this theory by leveraging data from...
Boston RPP briefs

Unpacking pre-K classroom organization: Types, variation, and links to school readiness gains

December 23, 2021
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Lillie Moffett, Amanda Weissman, Christina Weiland, Meghan McCormick, JoAnn Hsueh, Catherine Snow, Jason Sachs
Classroom organization is an important facet of prekindergarten quality but is typically measured at a global level and as a single construct. Little is known about how experiences of different facets of classroom organization—namely, exposure to...
Boston RPP briefs

Fast-Response Research to Answer Practice and Policy Questions

April 1, 2021
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Christina Weiland, Jason Sachs, Meghan McCormick, JoAnn Hsueh, Catherine Snow
Research-practice partnerships often face a fundamental tension: well-designed, high-quality research takes time, but practitioners and policy makers need answers to pressing questions as soon as possible. In this article, Jason Sachs, Meghan...
Boston RPP briefs

Is Skill Type the Key to the PreK Fadeout Puzzle? Differential Associations Between Enrollment in PreK and Constrained and Unconstrained Skills Across Kindergarten

January 9, 2021
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Meghan McCormick, Christina Weiland, JoAnn Hsueh, Mirjana Pralica, Amanda Weissman, Lillie Moffett, Catherine Snow, Jason Sachs
This study examines whether associations between enrollment in public and non-public PreK and children’s (N = 508; Mage = 5.60 years in fall of kindergarten) math and language and literacy outcomes were more likely to be sustained through the spring...
Boston RPP briefs

Costs of the Boston Public Prekindergarten Program

November 11, 2020
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Sarah Kabay, Christina Weiland, Hirokazu Yoshikawa
Though there is an expanding field of research on public prekindergarten, there is a relatively little comprehensive investigation into what public prekindergarten costs. We address some of the absences in the literature by analyzing public-sector...
Boston RPP briefs

Null relations between CLASS scores and gains in children’s language, math, and executive function skills: A replication and extension study

July 23, 2020
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Paola Guerrero Rosada, Christina Weiland, Meghan McCormick, JoAnn Hsueh, Jason Sachs, Catherine Snow, Michelle Maier
General measures of process quality are widely used in the early childhood education (ECE) field. However, the evidence regarding associations between the most widely used process quality measure, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS;...
Boston RPP briefs

Can Center-Based Care Reduce Summer Slowdown Prior to Kindergarten? Exploring Variation by Family Income, Race/Ethnicity, and Dual Language Learner Status

April 25, 2020
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Meghan McCormick, Mirjana Pralica, Paola Guerrero Rosada, Christina Weiland, JoAnn Hsueh, Barbara Condliffe, Jason Sachs, Catherine Snow
This study examines growth in language and math skills during the summer before kindergarten; considers variation by family income, race/ethnicity, and dual language learner status; and tests whether summer center-based care sustains preschool...
Boston RPP briefs

Promoting content-enriched alignment across the early grades: A study of policies & practices in the Boston Public Schools

June 3, 2019
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Meghan McCormick, Christina Weiland, JoAnn Hsueh, Michelle Maier, Rama Hagos, Catherine Snow, Nicole Leacock, Laura Schick
As states and districts expand access to publicly funded PreK programs, researchers and policymakers have been grappling with experimental evidence demonstrating that the benefits of PreK on academic skills are not likely to last into early...
Boston RPP briefs

The little kids down the hall: Associations between school climate, pre-k classroom quality, and pre-k children's gains in receptive vocabulary and executive function

February 21, 2019
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Shana Rochester, Christina Weiland, Rebecca Unterman, Meghan McCormick, Lillie Moffett
In recent years, policymakers’ and practitioners’ interest in school climate as a contributor to K-12 student learning and classroom processes has increased, both in the US and internationally. However, researchers have not yet examined the...
Boston RPP briefs

Preschool Curricula and Professional Development Features for Getting to High-Quality Implementation at Scale: A Comparative Review Across Five Trials

January 1, 2018
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Christina Weiland, Meghan McCormick, Shira Mattera, Michelle Maier, Pamela Morris
Experts have heralded domain-specific play-based curricula coupled with regular coaching and training as our “strongest hope” for improving instructional quality in large-scale public preschool programs. Yet, details from different evaluations of...
Boston RPP briefs

The Challenge of Sustaining Preschool Impacts

July 1, 2017
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Meghan McCormick, Joann Hsueh, Christina Weiland, Michael Bangser
Early childhood interventions can be highly cost effective when positive impacts are sustained into adulthood. Yet while many recent preschool interventions have been found to have short-term effects on young children's language, literacy,...