Sara Staszak's scientific contributions

... Although children were benefiting in intended ways from their early childhood experiences and vocabulary gains were maintained into first grade similar to other studies , children in the comparison group improved their skills relative to the target group. In a phenomenon termed convergence (Weiland et al., 2020), researchers document that comparison children often catch up to children in the early childhood treatment groups in the early elementary grades because they experience other early learning or school-based supports designed to promote learning (Hill et al., 2015). Much of the convergence for reading and math skills occurs during the kindergarten year with remaining differences fading by the end of second grade (Ansari et al., 2020;McCormick et al., 2022;Weiland et al., 2021), a finding replicated in this study. ...