Support young children during their transition to kindergarten through these resources for researchers, parents, and providers.

Crane’s September 2019 research forum hosted Dr. Arya Ansari, Assistant Professor, Human Sciences. Dr. Ansari spoke to attendees about the long term effects of early childhood education.

Dad said “public school was a ploy by the government to lead children away from God”, while grandma added we should be in school and not “roaming the mountain like savages.” So begins the compelling memoir of Tara Westover, raised in the rural shadows of Buck’s Peak in Idaho.

The purpose of this study was to identify which new mothers may be especially prone to use Facebook more often and more intensely, and to further examine the potential consequences of Facebook activity for new mothers’ emotional well-being.

Early childhood educators play a critical role in providing the language and literacy instruction that young children need in order to develop key skills for later school success. This study seeks to understand how educators’ backgrounds may be linked to the amount of language and literacy instruction they provide.

Young children with developmental disabilities often demonstrate delays in learning important early literacy skills, and are often at a higher risk for future reading problems. This study asks: to what extent are there differences in the home-literacy experiences of children with and without disabilities, and how are these experiences related to children’s early literacy skills?

Who preschoolers choose to interact with most frequently can have a significant impact on their development of social and emotional skills, and emergent language and literacy skills. This study asks, “Do rural preschoolers interact most often with peers who share similar characteristics or skills, such as learning-related behaviors, and language and literacy skills?”

This study suggests children from lower-income families have lower ability to distinguish between thought and reality because their parents are less likely to discuss their feelings and more likely to use harsher discipline strategies. Child vocabulary appears to be more important than parent discipline for understanding how higher-income children acquire greater false belief understanding.

This study suggests that there are complex patterns of kindergarten readiness for rural Appalachian children from low-income families. A significant number of low-income children from rural Appalachia appear to be at-risk. These results suggest the need for further research into similar populations, and continued efforts to improve pre-K access and quality for socioeconomically disadvantaged communities.

This study asks: 1) Do children that spend more time reading with their parents watch less TV? and 2) Does the association between parent-child book reading and TV-viewing vary depending on family structure (e.g. single-parent v. two-parent home), mother’s level of education, household size, and whether the child attends daycare?

Greater father positive involvement weakened the effect of family poverty on child behavior problems. For children living below the poverty level, greater father positive involvement further disrupted the persistence of internalizing behavior problems from early to middle childhood.

Some scholars argue that educating children with disabilities separately allows them to receive more targeted, intensive instruction than they would be able to receive in an inclusive classroom setting. Advocates of inclusion counter that educating children with disabilities in an inclusive setting enables them to develop important academic and social skills.