Proceedings from a working meeting on recent school readiness research: Guiding the synthesis of early childhood research

This document presents the proceedings from “A Working Meeting on Recent School Readiness Research: Guiding the Synthesis of Early Childhood Research,” which was held on October 21-22, 2008 in Washington, D.C. The meeting was sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) and the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE), Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Abt Associates Inc. and the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) convened the meeting.

The purposes of the meeting were to:

• Synthesize findings about impacts on children’s school readiness outcomes and teachers’ behavior emerging from a set of federally funded studies of early childhood programs, practices, interventions and curricula;and integrate new results with findings from previous research.
• Bring together early childhood research and policy experts to examine and evaluate the state of our knowledge about how to support the early development of young children, particularly those who are at-risk for poor outcomes because of poverty, and take stock of progress being made to understand how to narrow the school readiness gap. (author abstract)