Jeffrey Williams

The purpose of this project is to add science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) assessments to a recently developed direct child assessment system. The School Readiness Curriculum Based Measurement System (SRCBM) was developed to assess young children's language and literacy skills in Spanish and English. Children's pre-academic skills are associated with their academic achievement in kindergarten and later years of school. Although there is a growing interest in supporting and promot...

Many states estimate that half of their students arrive at kindergarten already far behind where they need to be in order to succeed. There is growing consensus that high quality preschool experiences can lay a strong foundation for school readiness even among economically disadvantaged children. However, there is a mismatch between the preparation of most early childhood educators and the preparation needed to optimize classroom practices. Support from parents in the home environment can al...

The purpose of this project is to compare the efficacy of two distinct approaches for providing professional development support to child care teachers: remote, video-based coaching and in-classroom coaching. Both approaches seek to increase the quality of child care teachers’ language and literacy instruction and positive responsiveness to children in order to improve children’s school readiness skills. While support has been found for both coaching approaches, each method has i...