Weekly E-News
October 23, 2026
Hot Topics
Let Them Play: How State Policies Impact Nature-Based Preschool Learning
More outdoor time has been found to be associated with better executive functioning. For example, a study of 562 Norwegian preschoolers found a positive association between time spent outdoors and executive functions and a negative association between outdoor time and inattention-hyperactivity symptoms.
In NIEER’s brief, “State Policies and Guidance Relating to Outdoor and Nature-Based Experiences in Preschool,” authors Tracy Jost, Steve Barnett, and Kate Hodges:
- consider in greater detail the potential benefits of outdoor and nature-based experiences in preschool programs;
- review state policies to assess the extent to which they facilitate or present barriers to implementing outdoor and nature-based experiences in state-funded preschool; and
- offer recommendations for improvements in state policies to facilitate outdoor and nature-based experiences in state funded preschool.
Playtime with Parents Sparks "Learning-Ready" Brain Waves in Toddlers, Study Finds
A new study published in Brain and Language by Brittany L. Manning, Megan Y. Roberts, Lauren S. Wakschlag, and Elizabeth S. Norton has captured a real-time neurological blueprint of a toddler bonding with a parent. Researchers collected EEG data from 49 typically developing toddlers ages 24 to 44 months during book reading, puzzle play, and a movie watching baseline, with social engagement coded moment by moment from video. During these moments of connection, toddlers exhibited a sharp drop in "alpha" power and a surge in "theta" power, meaning the children’s brains actively switched gears from a relaxed, passive state to a highly focused, learning-ready state. The same pattern was replicated in an independent sample of 24 children ages 25 to 47 months that included children diagnosed with autism. These findings indicate that EEG measures can reliably record changes in a toddler's brain activity during natural interactions rather than structured laboratory environments.
NIEER Activity
NIEER Director Facilitates Global Panel on Financing and Scaling Quality Early Childhood Systems
This week, NIEER director Steven Barnett facilitated a session on Philanthropy, Scaling and Financing Architecture at the annual global ISSA conference: Advancing Integrated Early Childhood Systems for Every Child's Wellbeing. Presenters included: Aimee Vachon, who manages early childhood development grants in 23 countries in Europe and Southeast Asia for Human Safety Net; Dadisai Taderera from SmartStart South Africa; Sarah Klaus, a Senior Global Program Advisor for OneSky and founding Executive Director of ISSA; and, Michelle Neuman, a senior fellow at Results for Development.
“Participants generated innovative suggestions, including how both philanthropic and public funding can better support all ECE programs in quality improvement. I look forward to seeing their ideas move beyond dialogue to action after this year's conference,” said Barnett.
Parents Read to Young Children Less Today Than Before 2020
New research by NIEER’s Kwanghee Jung and Steven Barnett, published in JAMA Network Open, "Parent-Child Shared Book Reading With Preschoolers During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic," finds that the frequency of parent-child shared reading has been disturbingly low after the pandemic with less than 3 of 4 families reporting that preschool-aged children are read to at least three tim es a week. Reading is even less frequent in low-income homes. Findings from this study are based on 5 years of NIEER's Preschool Learning Activities (PLA) survey of American families, made possible by funding from the PNC Foundation's Grow Up Great Initiative.
Additional findings include:
- Each additional 10 physical books in the home is associated with 8 percent higher odds of frequent reading. Access to eBooks had no statistically significant association.
- Screen time is negatively associated with reading frequency, suggesting digital media may displace interactive reading.
- Black and Hispanic parents reported less frequent reading than other parents, but the Black-White difference is statistically insignificant after adjusting for other socioeconomic characteristics.
How State Policies Relate to Public Pre-K Teachers’ Curriculum Use
As many states expand pre-K, policymakers are focused on better understanding the role of curriculum in ensuring students receive high-quality early childhood education.
By combining data from NIEER’s State of Preschool Yearbook with data from RAND's American Pre-K Teacher Survey, NIEER’s Jennifer Duer and Allison Friedman-Krauss and RAND’s Anna Shapiro and Elizabeth D. Steiner investigated the role that state policies related to preschool curriculum play in public school pre-K teachers’ reported curricula use across the United States.
The authors found substantial variation in the curricula that teachers report using across states, and some differences across pre-K programs within states. In addition, specific state curriculum guidance appears to influence classroom curriculum use. When states require that teachers use specific curricula (rather than recommending curricula), teachers reported combining fewer curricula in their classrooms.
Curriculum and Family Child Care: Guidance for Mixed-Delivery Pre-K Programs
With the support of Home Grown, NIEER launched the Enriching Public Pre-K Through Inclusion of Family Child Care (EPIC FCC) initiative in 2024. Through this effort, we worked with pre-K system leaders and FCC educators in Alabama, Nevada, Durham, North Carolina, and Michigan as the established advisory groups, examined their pre-K and FCC systems, and/or developed policies and funding streams to support FCCs in their pre-K systems. NIEER’s FCC & Pre-K Policy Data Snapshots were developed as a result of some of the discussions that occurred during the EPIC FCC initiative.
Check out our latest data snapshot, "Curriculum and Family Child Care: Guidance for Mixed-Delivery Pre-K Programs," and the full FCC & Pre-K Policy Data Snapshots series, here.
Focus on New Jersey Weekly Feature
NIEER’s new report, authored by Sharon Ryan and Karin Garver and funded by the Maher Charitable Foundation, examines the perspectives of child care and Head Start directors in New Jersey who contract with school districts to provide public preschool. New Jersey has a long history as a leader in providing public preschool through a mixed delivery system where policymakers, advocates, and researchers have worked together to address implementation issues. However, efforts to expand the availability of public preschool, along with changes in state policy that no longer mandate partnering with local child care and Head Start providers, bring new challenges. Findings from this study suggest the need for durable, statewide structures to support continued development of mixed delivery.
Licensed Center-Based Child Care Providers in New Jersey: Revenues and Expenses
In a new Rutgers Child Care Research Collaborative report, Milagros Nores, Christina Stephens, Allison Friedman-Krauss, Andrea Kent and Karin Garver analyze revenue sources and operating costs for New Jersey child care centers. The findings offer insights into licensed center-based providers in NJ that may be useful for identifying supports and policies to strengthen and improve access to the state’s ECE system:
- Most centers received tuition payments from families (80%), about 2 out of 3 responding centers reported receiving funding from the state’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP; 61%), and 18% received state pre-k funding.
- The NJ provider landscape appears largely divided (with some overlap) between those receiving mostly CCAP and a smaller share receiving state pre-K funding. That is, CCAP and state pre-K mostly support different segments of the ECE market, functioning as complementary policy levers.
- Staff salaries represented the largest share of centers’ total operating expenditures, accounting for two-thirds of total expenses (66%).
“It’s critical that we understand the financial structure of child care,” said the report’s lead author Milagros Nores. “We should be reviewing the fiscal state of the child care system regularly to understand how its doing and inform policy decisions accordingly.”
The Rutgers Child Care Research Collaborative is a partnership between NIEER, the Center for Women and Work, and the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, made possible through funding and support from the New Jersey Department of Children and Families.
International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy (IJCCEP) Weekly Feature
Clarissa M. Corkins, Amanda W. Harrist, Isaac J. Washburn, Larisa Callaway-Cole, Jennifer B. Stepp, and Robin L. Fuxa examined the roles of paraprofessional assistant teachers working in U.S. public Pre K classrooms for 4-year-olds. Using a mixed methods design, the researchers first analyzed 12 assistant teacher job descriptions and then surveyed 118 assistant teachers about their characteristics, experiences, and classroom duties. Analyses identified two social role profiles and two patterns of classroom responsibilities reflecting more hierarchical versus co teaching structures, although assistant teachers’ characteristics and contexts did not significantly predict which duty pattern they experienced. The findings highlight substantial variation in how assistant teachers are used across Pre K settings.
Publish in the International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy (IJCCEP)
- It’s FREE – article processing charges for all articles published in the journal are fully sponsored.
- The journal is indexed by Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) and by Scopus.
- All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 license. Authors will retain copyright.
ECE Research
In the International Journal of Behavioal Nutrition and Physical Activity, Zheng Ye, Johannes Carl, Feiyu Liu, Siu Ming Choi, James Robert Rudd, Jia Yi Chow, Cindy Hui Ping Sit, Suzannie Kit Ying Leung, and Raymond Kim Wai Sum systematically reviewed 203 studies involving 30,521 children ages 3 to 6 and included 164 studies with 23,073 children in the meta-analysis. Physical activity interventions were associated with improvements in overall physical literacy, with the largest effects in the physical domain and smaller but positive effects in cognitive, affective, social, and behavioral domains. Results varied substantially across studies, with intervention effects influenced by factors including who delivered the program, intervention duration, comparison group, and target population. The authors also note that the evidence base remains heavily weighted toward physical outcomes, with less research addressing the broader dimensions of physical literacy. The findings suggest that well designed physical activity interventions can support multiple aspects of preschool children’s development, while highlighting the need for more comprehensive and standardized research across all physical literacy domains.
In Journal of Intelligence, Davide Apicerni, Paolo Stievano, Giulia Brandi, Lilian Zotti, Sergio Melogno, and Lina Pezzuti examined how different executive functions relate to specific early numerical skills among 316 Italian preschool children ages 3 to 6. Using a tablet-based assessment battery, the researchers measured inhibitory control, verbal short term memory, visuospatial working memory, set shifting, receptive language, rapid automatized naming, and three foundational math building blocks: procedural cardinality, non-symbolic quantity reproduction, and approximate number system performance. Age was the strongest predictor across outcomes, while verbal short term memory uniquely predicted procedural cardinality and inhibitory control predicted approximate number system performance. Rapid automatized naming was the most consistent predictor beyond age, contributing to both nonsymbolic quantity reproduction and approximate number system performance, while set shifting did not show robust associations. The findings suggest that executive functions do not contribute uniformly to early mathematics, but instead support different numerical skills in distinct ways, with some preschool math abilities relying more heavily on general processing efficiency than on executive control.
Emily Carver, William Coventry, Stephen Petrill, Robin Corley, Stefan Samuelsson, Richard Olson, and Brian Byrne, writing in Twin Research and Human Genetics, examined whether socioeconomic status and time spent in preschool help explain shared environmental influences on reading development. The longitudinal behavior genetic study followed 511 identical and 515 same sex fraternal twin pairs from Australia, the United States, and Scandinavia from preschool through grade 2. Socioeconomic status and preschool time together explained 9 percent of total variation in reading at preschool and 4 percent by grade 2, with socioeconomic status accounting for most of this contribution at both points. The interaction between socioeconomic status and time in preschool did not explain reading differences at any stage, and time in preschool contributed relatively little compared with socioeconomic status. The findings suggest that family socioeconomic conditions account for a meaningful portion of shared environmental variation in early reading, while the amount of time children spend in preschool appears to play a much smaller role.
Opportunities
Senior Research Associate, Annenberg Institute, Brown University
Assistant Director for Program Evaluation, Harlem Children’s Zone
Enrollment Research, Analytics, and Policy (ERAP) 2-K Analyst, NYC Public Schools
Sr. Project Manager of ECE Strategy, Policy, and Planning, City of Philadelphia
Vice President, Early Childhood Policy, Center for American Progress
National Sales Manager, Professional Development, ZERO TO THREE
Advisory Services Analyst, Early Childhood Programs, Mathematica
Analyst, Research and Evaluation, Illinois Action for Children
Early Learning Policy Associate, Texans Care for Children
The Authors
Allison Muhlendorf manages external affairs for NIEER, including communications, earned and owned media, government relations, partnerships, and outreach.
About NIEER
The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at the Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, conducts and disseminates independent research and analysis to inform early childhood education policy.
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