Hirokazu Yoshikawa

This project will examine associations between Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) practices and experiences and social-emotional and academic outcomes for sexual and gender minority (SGM) students. School-based extracurricular settings such as GSAs may promote a sense of school belonging, hope, positive affect, and self-worth in SGM students, which in turn may support positive academic outcomes. GSAs are now in over 37 percent of high schools across the United States, yet there is little data to in...

Rigorous evaluations of public prekindergarten programs have confirmed that children enrolled in these programs have higher language, literacy, and mathematics outcomes at kindergarten entry, on average. A prior IES-funded study of the Boston Public Schools (BPS) prekindergarten program extended this evidence base. In a regression discontinuity (RD) study of over 2,000 children, the researchers found that the BPS program had moderate-to-large impacts on children's language, literacy, and mat...

The goal of this project is to identify malleable early childhood education program characteristics associated with child achievement, cognition, antisocial behavior, and positive behavior. Researchers propose to use meta-analytic and regression-based methods to answer three key questions: (1) What structural characteristics of early education programs are associated with larger program impacts on achievement, cognition, antisocial behavior and positive behavior? (2) Is the addition of paren...

Given the current interest in national and state initiatives to expand early childhood programming, questions of under what conditions impacts can be sustained, and for whom, are of great practical importance. Among the unanswered questions in the literature are the effects of a uniform curriculum across a large-scale program and how such impacts vary depending on the specific curricula used. The proposed regression discontinuity study addresses this gap in the literature by examining the i...