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2-111 - Multi-level Adversity during Early Childhood: Using Advanced Methods to Advance Policy-Relevant School Readiness Research

Fri, April 7, 12:15 to 1:45pm, Austin Convention Center, Meeting Room 6A

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Recently there has been an influx in research aimed at understanding the multidimensional nature of school readiness and its predictors, especially within the context of poverty. We know that poor children enter school far behind their more advantaged peers, and that this gap remains and often widens well into elementary school. By leveraging archival data and using advanced modeling techniques, each paper in this symposium examines how patterns of intersecting risk and protective factors help unpack our understanding of school readiness and later success in low-income children and communities. The first paper uses latent transition analysis and latent regression to analyze longitudinal data from a randomized controlled trial of a school readiness program for low-income preschoolers to investigate how school readiness varies across profiles of academic, social, and behavioral risk. The second paper uses latent class moderation to analyze data from the nationally representative, longitudinal, randomized control trial of Head Start to examine how the intervention’s impact on children’s outcomes during third grade vary across profiles of family and caregiver risk. The third paper uses generalized estimating equations to analyze state-wide data from three years of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to determine how community-level risks are predictive of child-level school readiness and later success in one state. The discussant, who brings expertise in school readiness and early intervention research in the context of poverty, and who regularly advises policymakers in these areas, will speak to the implications of the studies’ findings for early childhood education and policy.

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