Using information on birth and kindergarten start dates to generate an exogenous measure of the relative age of a student’s peer group, we find that, controlling for age, females with older peers are more likely to use substances than females with younger peers. In contrast, there is little evidence that having older peers is related to the risky behavior of male adolescents. Because there is n...

The validity of three subtests of the Dynamic Indicators for Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) was investigated for kindergarten children in a large urban school district. A stratified, random sample of 330 participants was drawn from an entire cohort of kindergarten children. Letter Naming Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, and Nonsense Word Fluency evidenced significant concurrent and ...

PURPOSE To examine the validity of the Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT; K. Williams, 1997) for assessing the expressive vocabulary skills of African American students. METHOD/RESULTS One hundred sixty-five African American preschool and kindergarten students were administered the EVT. The mean EVT score for these African American students was 96.44 (SD = 11.42), which is not appreciably lower...

Kindergartens are public institutions in which programmes of preschool education take place for children aged one (with exceptions of 6 months old) until they start attending elementary school. Depending on the programme, children spend in kindergarten between 5 and 10 hours a day, which means that the majority of their nutritional requirements are consumed there. According to the recommendatio...

In the research reported here, we examined these and related questions, exploring both the expansion in preschool attendance and its consequences, especially for disadvantaged children, and the effects of the increased outlays on early childhood education and child care over the 1990s. We drew on enrollment data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the newly available Early Childhood Lo...