It is essential that a solid research base be established to provide a foundation that will enable the field of early childhood teacher education to examine whether, for whom, and in what ways teacher education matters. The purpose of this article is to review several important domains in early childhood teacher education to illustrate the characteristics, key features, and significant gaps in current research, and to identify the kinds of research that are most needed to enhance the impact of early childhood teacher education. We conclude by identifying five crosscutting research priorities and describing what is needed to create a supportive environment that produces—and implements—early childhood teacher education research.

An accepted conclusion is that children at risk for educational failure who participate in high-quality early care and education (ECE) enter kindergarten “more ready”, possessing skills comparable to their more advantaged peers. There is less consensus about longer-term outcomes with some studies finding continuation of early gains, while others report “fade out” by elementary school. This study investigated child outcomes, kindergarten through Grade 3, of 75 children randomly assigned as infants to either participate or not in an enhanced Early Head Start/Head Start program. It was hypothesized that the children who experienced this high-quality ECE would perform better than their control group peers across a range of measures. From kindergarten to Grade 3, children in the treatment group demonstrated higher skills in letter and word identification, vocabulary, oral comprehension, and math than control group children after controlling for child/family characteristics and classroom quality. Results for executive functioning were mixed with children in the treatment group showing higher skills on one of the two measures of executive function. No group differences were found for social-emotional skills. This study contributes to the scant literature of longitudinal studies spanning infancy through to Grade 3. In addition to the findings of a general pattern of continuation of positive child outcomes in early academic skills associated with earlier high-quality ECE attendance, this study also contributes information about the potential size of impacts of contemporary ECE programs starting in infancy.

Decades of research suggest that both Head Start and public pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs boost low-income preschoolers' kindergarten skills. What is not yet well understood is whether there are relative advantages of transitioning from Head Start after 1 year into a school-based public pre-k program for the year immediately before kindergarten for children's developing cognitive and self-regulation skills. This is an important question, because in many communities Head Start and school-based pre-k programs provide competing early education options for low-income 4-year-olds, leaving policymakers, educators, and parents wondering which pathway best promotes the mix of skills predictive of success in elementary school. Only one study-conducted prior to significant recent demographic and policy changes affecting early education and focused exclusively on cognitive outcomes-has addressed this question. We extend that work with contemporary data on 362 low-income children to assess the relative advantages for both kindergarten cognitive and self-regulatory skills of 2 years of Head Start before kindergarten versus transitioning from Head Start to school-based pre-k at age 4. The child sample was evenly split by gender and diverse in race/ethnicity (50% Hispanic/Latinx; 36% Black; 7% White). Results showed that children who transitioned after 1 year of Head Start to school-based pre-k at age 4 showed marginally higher kindergarten literacy (d = .13) and significantly greater math (d = .18) skills than children who remained in Head Start for a second year, but there were no significant differences in kindergarten self-regulatory skills. Implications for contemporary, pressing policy issues are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Introduction: Resilience is a process that develops as a complex transaction as children experience and shape their social-ecological contexts. The dynamic development of self-regulation is an aspect of resilience that has received increased attention as a key mechanism predicting a variety of important short- and long-term outcomes. The current study examined how the self-regulation skills of infants and toddlers in a classroom could potentially shape classroom interactions and quality which, in turn, could potentially shape the development of self-regulation skills of the individual infants and toddlers enrolled in the classroom across an early childhood program year. The unique contribution of this study is the focus on a critical component of resilience, self-regulation, in an understudied age group, infants and toddlers, in an important and understudied context, the infant-toddler early childhood classroom.Methods: Data are from a statewide evaluation of early childhood programs serving children birth to age 3 growing up in low-income contexts. Multi-level mediation models were employed to examine the mediation effect of classroom quality between classroom-level self-regulation and individual children’s gain in self-regulation over a year.Results: We found a significant indirect path. The results showed that classroom-level self-regulation skills demonstrated by infants and toddlers in the fall predicted higher levels of teachers’ implementation of three important aspects of classroom quality – support for social-emotional, cognitive, and language development – in the winter. We also found that higher levels of teachers’ support for social-emotional, cognitive, and language development associated with children’s increased growth in self-regulation skills from fall to spring. The direct path from classroom-level self-regulation demonstrated in the fall to individual children’s gain in self-regulation was not significant.Discussion: These findings, unique due to the focus on infants and toddlers in a classroom context, are discussed within the larger body of existing self-regulation research conducted with older children and prevalent theories outlining developmental mechanisms. Implications for both infant-toddler classroom practices and future research are addressed. Relative to practice, our findings have implications for informing how the development of self-regulation, an important component of resilience, can be supported in the youngest children, infants and toddlers, specifically those enrolled in center-based classrooms serving young children growing up in families with low incomes. We focus on the need to improve the support and professional development of infant-toddler teachers which, in turn, can improve classroom quality and foster resilience in infants and toddlers. Relative to research, our use of a relatively new measure of infant-toddler classroom quality, the Quality of Care for Infants and Toddlers (QCIT), shows how this tool can expand infant-toddler research, a need in the current literature. Future research using different measures, designs, analytical strategies, and diverse samples and contexts is needed to further explain very young children’s development of self-regulation, a critical component of resilience.