Multiple Pathways to Early Academic Achievement

Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (ECCRN) constructed a structural model predicting reading and mathematics achievement in first-grade children from parenting, childcare, and first-grade schooling environments, which is presented in this article. The model provided a strong fit for the data, and parenting emerged as the strongest single contextual predictor of children's achievement. Nevertheless, the child-care and firstgrade schooling contexts independently contributed to children's academic performance. There were also a number of indirect pathways of prediction that combined environmental and child factors. Overall, results confirmed that multiple factors act in concert over the school transition period to shape children's reading and mathematics skills.