2-165 - Patterns of Childcare and Economically Disadvantaged Children’s School Readiness

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Early childcare settings are undoubtedly a critical developmental context, particularly for low-income children. However, recent research has shown that they are not static. Children often experience multiple care settings concurrently and transition between different care settings throughout their early years. These papers use unique data and sophisticated analyses to explore how these complex patterns of care influence low-income children’s development and prepare them for kindergarten. The first three papers use data from the Head Start Impact Study, a nationally representative experiment of the effects of Head Start. The first paper examines why children change care settings in the second year of the study, after the experiment was over, and how sequences of care across the two years predict children’s school readiness. The second paper uses propensity score modeling to examine how years of Head Start participation and the quality of the Head Start centers attended influences children’s school readiness. The third paper examines concurrent multiple care arrangements and uses the experimental treatment in instrumental variable models to obtain causal estimates of the impact of these arrangements on children’s academic outcomes. The fourth paper uses data from the Oklahoma Pre-K program and combines propensity score and regression discontinuity techniques to examine how patterns of Head Start and Pre-K enrollment predict children’s academic skills. Taken together, these papers highlight the complexity of children’s care arrangements and provide new, analytically rigorous estimates of the relations between patterns of childcare enrollment and their academic and behavioral development at the end of their pre-school years.

Sub Unit

• School Readiness/Childcare

Chairs

• Kelly M Purtell, Ohio State University

• Elizabeth T. Gershoff, University of Texas at Austin

Individual Presentations

• Sequences of Childcare across the Preschool Years and Low-Income Children’s School Readiness - Presenting Author: Kelly M Purtell, Ohio State University; Elizabeth T. Gershoff, University of Texas at Austin; Arya Ansari, University of Texas at Austin

• Testing for Dosage-Outcome Relationships Using the Head Start Impact Study - Presenting Author: Elizabeth B. Miller, UC Irvine; YI PAN, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill; Margaret Burchinal, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Enrollment in Multiple Concurrent Early Childhood Care and Education Settings: Impacts on Children’s Math and Language Skills - Presenting Author: Allison Hope Friedman-Krauss, New York University; Pamela Morris, New York University

• Head Start at ages 3 and 4 versus Head Start followed by state pre-k: Which is more effective? - Presenting Author: Jade V Marcus Jenkins, Univ of California-Irvine; George Farkas, Univ of California Irvine; Greg J Duncan, University of California, Irvine; Margaret Burchinal, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Deborah L Vandell, University of CA, Irvine