Zhiling M. Shea (Early Childhood, Multilingual, and Special Education) and her co-author at UCLA published an article, "Patterns of kindergarten mathematics instructional content in the United States’ classrooms and associations with children’s academic gains" in Early Childhood Research Quarterly

While most prior research has used variable-centered approaches to examine how mathematics instructional content relates to children’s academic outcomes, we extend the literature by applying the latent class analysis to classify patterns of teacher reported mathematics instructional content in 2,800 classrooms at the spring of kindergarten and investigate their associations with children’s (Child N = 12,290) academic gains from fall to spring. We further explore whether initial skills moderate the associations between latent patterns and children’s gains, distinguishing between children with initial lower and higher mathematics or reading skills. Utilizing nationally representative data from Early Childhood Longitudinal Study in the U.S. Kindergarten: 2011 sample (Child M_age= 5.60 years, SD_age = .35 in the fall of kindergarten; M_age = 6.10 years, SD_age= .35 in the spring of kindergarten), we identified four different mathematics instructional content patterns: (1) high-frequency comprehensive (n = 520, 18%), (2) consistent broad coverage (n = 930, 33%), (3) selective advanced with sparse basic (n = 830, 30%), and (4) moderate basic coverage with minimal advanced (n = 520, 19%). Findings indicate that children in classrooms characterized by Patterns (1) and (2) demonstrated greater gains in both mathematics and reading than peers in Patterns (3) and (4). Moreover, children with initially low mathematics skills in Pattern 2 classrooms showed higher mathematics gains than those in Patterns 3 or 4. By uncovering empirically driven instructional patterns, the findings highlight that exposure to relatively higher coverage across multiple mathematics content areas is associated with greater gains in mathematics and reading, particularly for children entering school with lower initial mathematics skills.