How long does the preschool advantage last?
Attending preschool boosts young children's math, literacy skills, but
peers catch up in kindergarten, study finds

Date:
October 5, 2020
Source:
American Psychological Association
Summary:
Children who attend preschool enter kindergarten with greater skills
than those who don't, but that advantage is nearly halved by the
end of the year as their counterparts quickly begin to catch up,
according to new research.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Children who attend preschool enter kindergarten with greater skills
than those who don't, but that advantage is nearly halved by the end of
the year as their counterparts quickly begin to catch up, according to
research published by the American Psychological Association.


========================================================================== "Ensuring that young children enter kindergarten ready to learn has
been of great research and policy interest. By all accounts, pre-K
programs have helped achieve this goal," said Arya Ansari, PhD, of The
Ohio State University and lead author of the study, published in the
journal Developmental Psychology.

"However, there have been lingering questions as to whether contemporary
and scaled-up pre-K programs provide children with enduring benefits as
they progress throughout their educational careers." The researchers
studied 2,581 children enrolled in kindergarten in a large, ethnically
diverse county. All the participants were from low-income families that
would qualify for Head Start or another subsidized preschool program.

Slightly more than half (1,334) attended a preschool program while the
rest did not. The researchers assessed the children on their academic
skills (e.g., literacy and math), executive functioning (a set of mental
skills that includes working memory, flexible thinking and self-control)
and socioemotional skills deemed important to academic success. The
assessments were conducted at the start of the kindergarten year and
again in the spring.

"We found that pre-K graduates entered kindergarten demonstrating stronger academic skills than those who did not attend preschool. The same was
true for executive functioning, but there was no aggregate difference
in kindergarten teachers' reports of their socioemotional skills," said
Ansari. "However, we also found that the differences between attenders
and nonattenders diminished between the fall and spring of kindergarten, primarily because nonattenders who entered school for the first time
in kindergarten made larger learning gains as compared with their
classmates with pre-K experiences." These differences in progress
during kindergarten were not uniform across the board but varied by
skillset, according to Ansari. For example, for children who did not
attend preschool, approximately 80% of the difference in scores for
literacy skills was erased over the course of the academic year, but
this was the case for only 55% of the difference in math skills and 45%
of the difference in vocabulary and general knowledge skills.

"It is important to emphasize that all children -- regardless of pre- K participation -- demonstrated improvements in their academic and executive function skills in kindergarten. However, pre-K graduates made smaller improvements than their peers who did not attend pre-K," said Ansari.

The research was only done with students from low-income families because
other research shows that they enter kindergarten at a disadvantage academically, and significant public investment has been made to
provide access to preschool programs to address these gaps, according
to Ansari. Therefore, caution is required when trying to generalize the findings to higher-income families, he said.

"One interesting part of our findings was that children's classroom
experiences in kindergarten had little to do with whether the benefits
of pre-K persist over time," he said. "Instead, what our findings
appear to suggest is that even though children's skills are susceptible
to improvement as a result of pre-K, their longer-term outcomes are
likely to be affected by factors that are outside the scope of early
schooling. We need to view pre-K as one of many investments we make to
ensure that all children have an equal opportunity to succeed in life."
He suggests future research should focus on understanding why pre-K
graduates demonstrate fewer gains in kindergarten as compared with their
peers who are just entering school for the first time. That research, he
says, will require closer and more comprehensive inspection of children's experiences during the kindergarten year.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
American_Psychological_Association. Note: Content may be edited for
style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Arya Ansari, Robert C. Pianta, Jessica V. Whittaker, Virginia E.

Vitiello, Erik A. Ruzek. Persistence and convergence: The end of
kindergarten outcomes of pre-K graduates and their nonattending
peers..

Developmental Psychology, 2020; DOI: 10.1037/dev0001115 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005092335.htm

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