Bailey's research interests include mathematical development, individual differences, and longitudinal methods. As a Jacobs Foundation Research Fellow (2019-2021), Bailey is studying the processes underlying the stability of individual differences in youngsters’ mathematical achievements and the medium- and long-term effects of early interventions. He serves as the UCI School of Education’s Faculty Director of Undergraduate Programs.
Farkas’s research expertise includes special education needs and consequences, pre-school readiness, disparities and impacts of child care, children’s growth trajectories in reading, math, and science, and early interventions for students who have fallen behind in reading . His research has made a major contribution to understanding the school achievement gap for low income and ethnic minority students. Farkas has authored or co-authored four books and more than 125 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Collectively, his work has been cited more than 14,000 times. Recently, he was honored with the American Sociological Association Willard Wallen Award for lifetime achievement in the field of sociology of education. (Read more here.) At UCI, Farkas directs the Reading One-to-One program. Abstract Prior nonexperimental studies have been used to conclude that children’s reading and mathematics achievement bidirectionally influence each other over time, with strong paths from (a) early reading to later mathematics and (b) early mathematics to later reading. In the most influential study on the topic, the early math-to-later-reading path was reported to be stronger than the early reading-to-later-math path (Duncan et al., 2007). Yet prior estimates may be confounded by stable environmental and personal factors influencing both reading and mathematics achievement. We reexamined the bidirectional relations between reading and mathematics achievement using both traditional models and extensions intended to account for unmeasured confounding. Results based on a large nationally representative sample of children from kindergarten to 3rd grade (N = 9,612) indicated that the estimated effects between reading and mathematics achievement differ substantially after accounting for the confounding effects of stable unmeasured factors. In these models, autoregressive and cross-lagged paths were substantially reduced. The finding that early mathematics predicts later reading more strongly than early reading predicts later math disappears and sometimes reverses, suggesting that larger paths from math to reading than from reading to math in previous related analyses are not causally informative. Stability in early mathematics and reading achievement resulted from substantially overlapping time invariant factors that correlate above .90. Comments are closed.
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