Research Connections’ librarians have curated this page to include publications that may be of particular interest to child care and early education policymakers, professionals supporting the workforce, and researchers. The publications were selected because they align with federal priorities, seasonal priorities, current events, or national interest. Many of the highlighted publications have been featured in Research Connections newsletters.
Infant and early childhood mental health consultation (IECMHC) is a method of preventing early childhood expulsion and suspension used in all 50 states. This review provides an updated look at the recent body of literature on the positive impact of IECMHC in ECE settings. The review discusses…
How did child care directors respond to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic? This study analyzes a survey of 27 child care directors on the unique challenges introduced by the pandemic. Many identified concerns with staffing and financial issues, increased stress, and a disruption in the…
A close, supportive teacher-student relationship in early childhood can have long-lasting effects. This study uses data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study to look at the role of teacher-student closeness and factors like cognitive flexibility and reading motivation on student reading…
In this report, the Bipartisan Policy Center presents findings from its December 2020 national survey. According to their survey results, child care run by a faith-based organization is used by more than half (53 percent) of working parents who use center-based care. Higher income families tend…
Understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on young children and ECE programs is essential. The University of Michigan and the Urban Institute published this synthesis of 76 studies, which offers evidence of the pandemic’s impact. The authors also provide policy recommendations informed…
Even with rapid and widespread expansion of states’ quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS)—tiered frameworks that assess, communicate, and improve early childhood education (ECE) quality—there exists no population-level information regarding which providers choose to participate in these…
Describing access across multiple dimensions provides decision makers with a deeper understanding of families’ ECE needs and emphasizes the need for multi-faceted policy solutions. Yet measuring and comparing access from different perspectives requires available data and a clear measurement…
In this report we share the results of case studies of four SOELs. To set the stage for the case studies, we highlight, in Section 1, the prior research that contributed to our conceptual framework. In Section 2 we describe our methodology. We then provide the individual case studies for each of…
This program evaluation study describes 3 years of implementation of Arkansas’s BehaviorHelp (BH) system, a statewide expulsion prevention support system for early care and education (ECE). BH coordinates three tiers of supports to ECE professionals, including phone support, on-site technical…
This program evaluation study looks at Arkansas’s BehaviorHelp system, a statewide effort designed to reduce the suspension and expulsion of young children by offering support to early childhood education professionals who face challenging behaviors in the classroom. The analysis discusses…
Despite substantial federal, state, and local investments in improving early care and education (ECE), we know little about whether ECE program quality has improved over time. The lack of data tracking the quality of publicly funded ECE programs at scale creates a substantial evidence gap for…
As part of its Partnership for Pre-K Improvement (PPI) initiative, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored the RAND Corporation to study the cost of high-quality pre-K programming. The RAND study included three states — Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington — that were partnering with the…