Greg Duncan

University of California, Irvine | UCI · School of Education

Worldwide millions of families with children residing with low or precarious income receive some form of unconditional cash income. Nevertheless economists have limited causal evidence on how families receiving unconditional income would spend those funds. We examine financial and time investments in infants among families living in poverty from a...

This study is a conceptual replication of a widely-cited study by Moffit and colleagues (2011) which found that attention and behavior problems in childhood (a composite of impulsive hyperactive, inattentive, and impulsive-aggressive behaviors labeled “self-control”) predicted adult financial status, health, and criminal activity. Using data from l...

Mechanisms translating initial impacts of early childhood education (ECE) programs into longer-term effects are poorly understood. As with astrophysics’ “dark matter” hypothesis, unobserved mediated effects are integral to our understanding of the pathways underlying ECE programs’ long-term impacts. Leveraging two sets of panel data (Study 1: N = 1...

Background Policy debates over anti-poverty programs are often marked by pernicious stereotypes suggesting that direct cash transfers to people residing in poverty encourage health-risking behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and other substance use. Causal evidence on this issue is limited in the U.S. Given the prominent role of child allowances a...

Significance This study demonstrates the causal impact of a poverty reduction intervention on early childhood brain activity. Data from the Baby’s First Years study, a randomized control trial, show that a predictable, monthly unconditional cash transfer given to low-income families may have a causal impact on infant brain activity. In the context...

Childhood economic disadvantage is associated with lower cognitive and social-emotional skills, reduced educational attainment, and lower earnings in adulthood. Despite these robust correlations, it is unclear whether family income is the cause of differences observed between children growing up in poverty and their more fortunate peers or whether...

A survey targeting education researchers conducted in November 2020 provides forecasts of how much achievement gaps between low- and high-income students in U.S elementary schools will change as a result of COVID-related disruptions to in-class instruction and family life. Relative to a pre-COVID achievement gap of 1.00 SD, respondents’ median fore...

Although nonexperimental studies find robust neighborhood effects on adults, such findings have been challenged by results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) residential mobility experiment. Using a within-study comparison design, this article compares experimental and nonexperimental estimates from MTO and a parallel analysis of the Panel Study...

Using an additional decade of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults (CNLSY), this study replicated and extended Deming’s evaluation of Head Start’s life cycle skill formation impacts in three ways. Extending the measurement interval for Deming’s adulthood outcomes, we found no statistically significant i...

Some environmental influences, including intentional interventions, have shown persistent effects on psychological characteristics and other socially important outcomes years and even decades later. At the same time, it is common to find that the effects of life events or interventions diminish and even disappear completely, a phenomenon known as f...

Longitudinal studies of development often rely on correlational methods to examine linkages between early-life constructs and later-life outcomes. As highlighted by responses to our article, “Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes,” interpretations of these lin...

Research Findings: This study uses data from a comprehensive meta-analytic database of early childhood education (ECE) program evaluations published between 1960 and 2007 in the United States to examine the incremental effects of adding enhancement program components to ECE programs on children’s cognitive abilities, pre-academic skills, behavioral...

Using an additional decade of CNLSY data, this study replicated and extended Deming's (2009) evaluation of Head Start's life-cycle skill formation impacts in three ways. Extending the measurement interval for Deming's adulthood outcomes, we found no statistically significant impacts on earnings and mixed evidence on other adult outcomes. Applying D...

Sustaining Early Childhood Learning Gains - edited by Arthur J. Reynolds January 2019

Although the consequences of teen births for both mothers and children have been studied for decades, few studies have taken a broader look at the potential payoffs—and drawbacks—of being born to older mothers. A broader examination is important given the growing gap in maternal ages at birth for children born to mothers with low and high socioecon...

This article reviews how the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has contributed to our understanding of the links between childhood economic conditions—in particular, the household incomes with very young children—and the economic attainment and health of those children when they reach adulthood. From its beginning, the PSID has provided data us...

Cambridge Core - Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology - Human Development across Lives and Generations - edited by P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale

Although effective interventions have generated immediate positive effects on mathematics achievement, these effects often diminish over time, leading to the important question of what causes fadeout and persistence of intervention effects. This study investigates how children's forgetting contributes to fadeout and how transfer contributes to the...

The present study uses nationally-representative data to estimate longitudinal associations between core executive function (EF) components—working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility—at kindergarten entry and third grade academic achievement. We focus on one key question: to what extent do EF components uniquely contribute to chi...

We replicated and extended Shoda, Mischel, and Peake’s (1990) famous “marshmallow” study, which showed strong bivariate correlations between a child’s ability to delay gratification just before entering school and both adolescent achievement and socioemotional behaviors. Concentrating on children whose mothers had not completed college, we found th...

We use experimental data to estimate impacts on school readiness of different kinds of preschool curricula – a largely neglected preschool input and measure of preschool quality. We find that the widely-used “whole-child” curricula found in most Head Start and pre-K classrooms produced higher classroom process quality than did locally-developed cur...

The current study estimated the causal links between preschool mathematics learning and late elementary school mathematics achievement using variation in treatment assignment to an early mathematics intervention as an instrument for preschool mathematics change. Estimates indicate (n = 410) that a standard deviation of intervention-produced change...

Prior research shows that short-term effects from preschool may disappear, but little research has considered which environmental conditions might sustain academic advantages from preschool into elementary school. Using secondary data from two preschool experiments, we investigate whether features of elementary schools, particularly advanced conten...

Despite calls to expand early childhood education (ECE) in the United States, questions remain regarding its medium- and long-term impacts on educational outcomes. We use meta-analysis of 22 high-quality experimental and quasi-experimental studies conducted between 1960 and 2016 to find that on average, participation in ECE leads to statistically s...

This study uses data from a comprehensive database of U.S. early childhood education program evaluations published between 1960 and 2007 to evaluate the relationship between class size, child–teacher ratio, and program effect sizes for cognitive, achievement, and socioemotional outcomes. Both class size and child–teacher ratio showed nonlinear rela...

Income inequality and the achievement test score gap between high- and low-income children increased dramatically in the United States beginning in the 1970s. This article investigates the demographic (family income, mother’s education, family size, two-parent family structure, and age of mother at birth) underpinnings of the growing income-based g...

Developmental theories often posit that changes in children's early psychological characteristics will affect much later psychological, social, and economic outcomes. However, tests of these theories frequently yield results that are consistent with plausible alternative theories that posit a much smaller causal role for earlier levels of these psy...

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/duke_prekstudy_final_4-4-17_hires.pdf

In the United States, does growing up in a poor household cause negative developmental outcomes for children? Hundreds of studies have documented statistical associations between family income in childhood and a host of outcomes in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Many of these studies have used correlational evidence to draw policy conclusio...

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine gender differences in the effects of early childhood education programs on children’s cognitive, academic, behavioral, and adult outcomes. Significant and roughly equal impacts for boys and girls on cognitive and achievement measures were found, although there were no significant effects for either gender on...

Many early childhood education (ECE) programs seek to enhance parents' capacities to support their children's development. Using a meta-analytic database of 46 studies of ECE programs that served children age three to five-years-old, we examine the benefits to children's cognitive and pre-academic skills of adding parenting education to ECE program...

Many interventions targeting cognitive skills or socioemotional skills and behaviors demonstrate initially promising but then quickly disappearing impacts. Our paper seeks to identify the key features of interventions, as well as the characteristics and environments of the children and adolescents who participate in them, that can be expected to su...

Corresponding Author: Anne W. Riley, PhD, Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, 615 N Wolfe St, Office E4539, Baltimore, MD 21205 (ariley1@jhu.edu). Published Online: June 27, 2016. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2016.1760. Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported....

To the Editor In the Original Investigation entitled “Associations of Housing Mobility Interventions for Children in High-Poverty Neighborhoods With Subsequent Mental Disorders During Adolescence” published in the March 5, 2014, issue of JAMA,¹ we inadvertently reported incorrect confidence intervals and a P value in 2 tables. This study explored t...

To do research that really makes a difference—the authors of this book argue—social scientists need a diverse set of questions and methods, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to reflect the complexity of the world. Bringing together a consortium of voices across a variety of fields, Methods That Matter offers compelling and successful exam...

This paper considers whether expanding access to center-based early childhood education (ECE) will reduce economic inequality later in life. A strong evidence base indicates that ECE is effective at improving young children's academic skills and human capital development. We review evidence that children from low-income families have lower rates of...

Increases in family income inequality in the United States have translated into widening gaps in educational achievement and attainments between children from low- and high-income families. We describe the mechanisms that have produced this disturbing trend. We argue that the three dominant policy approaches states and the federal government have u...

Although school attainment is a cumulative process combining mastery of both academic and behavioral skills, most studies have offered only a piecemeal view of the associations between middle-childhood capacities and subsequent schooling outcomes. Using a 20-year longitudinal data set, this study estimates the association between children’s academi...

Compared with their higher-income counterparts, children growing up in low-income families in the United States typically complete less schooling, report worse health, and work and earn less in adulthood. Moreover, changes in the American economy over the last 40 years have raised the level of skills and qualifications that children need to obtain...

Purpose: With a growing focus on the importance of men's reproductive health, including preconception health, the ways in which young men's knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs (KAB) predict their reproductive paths are understudied. To determine if reproductive KAB predicts fatherhood status, timing and residency (living with child or not). Methods...

The authors draw data from the College Roommate Study (ROOM) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to investigate gene-environment interaction effects on youth binge drinking. In ROOM, the environmental influence was measured by the precollege drinking behavior of randomly assigned roommates. Random assignment safeguards against...

Our recent meta-analysis concluded that training on working memory can improve performance on tests of fluid intelligence (Au et al., Psychon Bull Rev, 22(2), 366-377, 2015). Melby-Lervåg and Hulme (Psychon Bull Rev, doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0862-z ) challenge this conclusion on the grounds that it did not take into consideration baseline difference...

Replications and robustness checks are key elements of the scientific method and a staple in many disciplines. My wish is for prioritizing both explicit replications and, especially, the lowest of low-hanging fruit: within-study robustness checks. I provide recommendations for editorial policies that encourage these practices and describe ways of p...

Data from the Head Start Impact Study (N = 3540) were used to test for differential benefits of Head Start after one program year and after kindergarten on pre-academic and behavior outcomes for children at risk in the domains targeted by the program's comprehensive services. Although random assignment to Head Start produced positive treatment main...

Significance We provide, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence of neighborhood effects on the use by low-income minority youth of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Rising U.S. residential economic segregation may be contributing to growing differences within the population in AAVE use, which has benefits to in-group solidarity...

Despite research demonstrating a strong association between early and later mathematics achievement, few studies have investigated mediators of this association. Using longitudinal data (n = 1,362), this study tested the extent to which mathematics self-concepts, school placement, executive functioning, and proficiency in fractions and division acc...

Despite a growing understanding that the social determinants of health have an impact on body mass index (BMI), the role of fatherhood on young men's BMI is understudied. This longitudinal study examines BMI in young men over time as they transition from adolescence into fatherhood in a nationally representative sample. Data from all four waves of...

As policymakers contemplate expanding preschool opportunities for low-income children, one possibility is to fund 2, rather than 1 year of Head Start for children at ages 3 and 4. Another option is to offer 1 year of Head Start followed by 1 year of pre-K. We ask which of these options is more effective. We use data from the Oklahoma pre-K study to...

Early childhood education (ECE) programs offer a promising mechanism for preventing early externalizing behavior problems and later antisocial behavior; yet, questions remain about how to best maximize ECE's potential. Using a meta-analytic database of 31 studies, we examined the overall effect of ECE on externalizing behavior problems and the diff...

Value-added (VA) models measure teacher contributions to student learning and are increasingly employed in educational reform efforts. Using data from 35 seventh-grade teachers and 2,026 students across seven schools, we employ VA methods to measure teacher contributions to students’ motivational orientations (mastery and performance achievement go...

examine learning processes and outcomes in any context (e.g., early childhood, primary and secondary, after-school, postsecondary, lifelong learning) or country. Although we anticipate that the vast majority of articles published in AREA Open will be empirical studies, we also seek innovative conceptual articles that make exceptional contributions...

This Viewpoint discusses why the National Children’s Study was discontinued and whether a scaled-down version of the original study would be as effective. On December 12, 2014, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD, announced his intention to discontinue the National Children’s Study (NCS), ending nearly 15 years of plann...

This study estimates peer effects on alcohol use, drawing from a database of about 2000 randomly-assigned roommates on a college campus. The estimation of peer influences also takes into consideration ego's history of alcohol use and friendship with the peer. College students averaged an additional two-fifths of a binge drinking episode per month a...

Using a poverty line of about $23,000 for a family of four, the Census Bureau counted more than 16 million US children living in poor families in 2011. Poor children begin school well behind their more affluent age mates and, if anything, lose ground during the school years. On average, poor US kindergarten children have lower levels of reading and...

Families who live in poverty face disadvantages that can hinder their children’s development in many ways, write Greg Duncan, Katherine Magnuson, and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal. As they struggle to get by economically, and as they cope with substandard housing, unsafe neighborhoods, and inadequate schools, poor families experience more stress in their...

Much of child care research has focused on the effects of the quality of care in early childhood settings on children's school readiness skills. Although researchers increased the statistical rigor of their approaches over the past 15 years, researchers' ability to draw causal inferences has been limited because the studies are based on nonexperime...

This paper examines the causal effects of housing vouchers on children's outcomes using data from a randomized housing-voucher wait-list lottery conducted in Chicago in 1997. Unlike with MTO, where the offer of a voucher to families in public housing lead to large changes in neighborhood environments, our families are all in private-market housing...

Background: To examine overweight/obesity in young males over time as they transition to fatherhood in a nationally representative, longitudinal sample. Methods: We combined all 4 waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to support a 20-year longitudinal analysis of 10,623 men and then created a "fatherhood-year" data set, ca...

Although previous research has established the association between early-grade mathematics knowledge and later mathematics achievement, few studies have measured mathematical skills prior to school entry, and few have investigated the predictive power of early gains in mathematics ability. The current paper relates mathematical skills measured at 5...

I concentrate on a subset of the methodological issues raised in the chapters of Part IV of this volume. First, is the multiple testing problem raised by Moore and Wood (Chap. 13). I point to the advantages of replication across experimental sites or across experiments themselves as a useful antidote for multiple testing bias. Second, as detailed b...

Replications and robustness checks are key elements of the scientific method and a staple in many disciplines. However, leading journals in developmental psychology rarely include explicit replications of prior research conducted by different investigators, and few require authors to establish in their articles or online appendices that their key r...

Working memory (WM), the ability to store and manipulate information for short periods of time, is an important predictor of scholastic aptitude and a critical bottleneck underlying higher-order cognitive processes, including controlled attention and reasoning. Recent interventions targeting WM have suggested plasticity of the WM system by demonstr...

The impact of a baby book intervention on promoting positive reading beliefs and increasing reading frequency for low-income, new mothers (n = 167) was examined. The Baby Books Project randomly assigned low-income, first-time mothers to one of three study conditions, receiving educational books, non-educational books, or no books, during pregnancy...

Chronic inflammation is a potentially important physiological mechanism linking early life environments and health in adulthood. Elevated concentrations of C-reactive protein (CRP)-a key biomarker of inflammation-predict increased cardiovascular and metabolic disease risk in adulthood, but the developmental factors that shape the regulation of infl...

Rates of paternal depression range from 5% to 10% with a growing body of literature describing the harm to fathers, children, and families. Changes in depression symptoms over the life course, and the role of social factors, are not well known. This study examines associations with changes in depression symptoms during the transition to fatherhood...