The relationship between access to pre-school education and the development of social-emotional competencies: Longitudinal evidence from Peru

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2021.102482Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Exploring the implications of pre-school on a Peruvian cohort tracked for 15 years.

  • Attendance to pre-school is positively associated with socio-emotional ability.

  • The association does not differ by area of residence.

  • For those that start pre-school early, the association with agency remains at age 15.

Abstract

We provide evidence of the role pre-school has in the development of social-emotional competencies. We used data from the Young Lives longitudinal study in Peru to test the relationship between attendance to pre-school education with agency and pride at ages 8, 12, and 15, and self-efficacy and self-esteem at ages 12 and 15. We found that attendance to pre-school is related to higher socio-emotional ability, specifically higher scores on indicators of agency and pride. For those that start early (at 3 or 4 years), the relationship with agency persists up to the age of 15 years.

Introduction

The role of pre-school education in explaining better school performance is well established in the literature (e.g., Barnett, 1992, 1995; Currie, 2001; Berlinski et al., 2008, 2009; Cunha et al., 2006; Conti et al., 2016; Joo et al., 2020). Furthermore, pre-school attendance is related to better economic results, and lower risk behaviors in the long term (Nores et al., 2005; Heckman et al., 2010; Schweinhart, 2013; Campbell et al., 2014; Conti et al., 2016; Joo et al., 2020). One of the factors that might explain the long-term impacts of pre-school education is its potential role in shaping socio-emotional skills (Carneiro and Heckman, 2003; Cunha et al., 2006; Joo et al., 2020). Evidence of such relationship is scarce in developing countries, yet important given the expansion of pre-school services observed in the last decade (Alcázar and Sánchez, 2016). Within this context, this study aims to expand the evidence on the relationship between pre-school attendance and the development of social-emotional competencies.

We analyse the case of Peru, a middle-income country with inequalities in access to basic education. By 2001, only 54 % of Peruvian children aged 3–5 years were attending pre-school education (ESCALE, 2021). Since then, access to pre-school education has increased substantially (up to 93 % in 2019), however the inequality in access observed in the previous decade might have had long lasting consequences. We used longitudinal data from the Young Lives (YL) study, an international study that is tracking the livelihoods of children in Peru, India, Ethiopia, and Vietnam. The Peruvian younger cohort is a sample of children aged 6–18 months in 2002 (n = 2,052 in the first visit) that come from 20 districts (approximately 100 children per district) and that are tracked within the national bounds. These districts, located in urban and rural areas in the three climatic regions of the country, were randomly selected from the universe of districts in Peru (excluding the wealthiest 5 %). The younger cohort was visited for the first time in 2002 and followed for 14 years, with an attrition rate of 8,1 % in the last visit in 2016. When the younger cohort was old enough to start attending pre-school (2004-5), Peru had a monetary poverty rate of 59 %, a nation-wide pre-school attendance rate of 59 %, and a level of chronic undernutrition of 30 %. By the time of the last visit the cohort aged about 15 years, and most participants were attending secondary level education.

Using data from the Peruvian YL sample, this paper analyses the association between pre-school attendance and four socio-emotional scales: the Agency and Pride scales at ages 8, 12, and 15, and the self-efficacy and self-esteem generalized scales at ages 12 and 15. Agency and Pride measure specific domains of self-efficacy and self-esteem (Dercon and Krishnan, 2009). Self-efficacy and self-esteem during childhood and adolescence are important not only in and of themselves, but because of their relationship with other results later in life. Evidence shows that higher self-efficacy is related to higher academic achievement (Bandura et al., 1996), and that higher self-efficacy and self-esteem are related to better results in the labor market (Stajkovic and Luthans, 1998; Bowles et al., 2001). Additionally, there is evidence that both self- constructs are malleable. Studies using YL data from four countries (Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam) show that both competencies vary according to the level of monetary poverty of the household and the social-emotional competencies of the primary caregiver (Dercon and Krishnan, 2009; Dercon and Sánchez, 2013). Likewise, in line with the skills formation model and the concept of cross complementarity (Cunha and Heckman, 2007), these competencies were found to vary according to a child’s cognitive skills (Sánchez, 2017; Outes et al., 2018). In the specific case of Peru, a child’s self-efficacy was found to vary according to whether the primary caregiver was exposed to intimate partner violence (Bedoya et al., 2020).

One of the main challenges in this type of analysis refers to the endogenous nature of pre-school attendance. The association between pre-school enrolment and social-emotional competencies at ages 8,12, and 15, could be explained by unobservable characteristics of the child, home, and community that explain both results. To reduce the possibility of this type of bias1, we implemented a multivariate regression approach and used the wealth of information collected in the YL study to control for standard child and household characteristics (demographic information), and for characteristics that are typically unobserved, including the early nutritional status of the child, the social-emotional competencies of the primary caregiver, and total household expenditure. Our estimations also include community fixed effects, which control for community level characteristics that are fixed over time. In addition, we explore the robustness of the results to the inclusion of other control variables that capture other parental investments in the child. Although this evidence cannot be subject to causal interpretations because in both cases there can be unobservable characteristics that are not accounted for, the information available allows us to uniquely document whether there is a relationship between pre-school attendance and social-emotional competencies, and whether the relationship is maintained over time.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The following section describes the context of pre-school education in Peru. Sections 3 and 4 describe the data used and the empirical methodology, respectively. Next, we present the main results for the full sample and by area of ​​residence (Section 5), and we discuss the implications of these results (Section 6). The final section concludes.

Section snippets

National context: Peru and the characteristics of the pre-school system

Peru is a country with 32 million inhabitants and has gone from having a monetary poverty rate of 58.7 % in 2004 to 20.5 % in 2018 (INEI, 2018). According to information from the last household census of 2017, 79.3 % of households reside in urban areas. The highest levels of monetary poverty are observed in rural areas, especially in areas where a portion of the population have other languages than Spanish as their mother tongues.

Basic education in Peru consists of three levels: pre-school

Young Lives study

The YL study is an international, longitudinal study that collects data in four developing countries: Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. In each country, data were collected for two cohorts: the younger cohort born in 2001-2, and the older cohort born in 1994-5. The present study uses data from the younger cohort from Peru. This is a nationwide sample of children. Households were selected through a two-stage sampling technique. In the first stage, 20 districts were randomly selected from the

Method

We used a multivariate linear regression model to estimate the relationship between attendance to pre-school education and socio-emotional competencies:yi,y,c=α0+α1prei+Xi,yΓ+Zi,yΘ+ϕc+εiwhere yi,y,c is a generic term that represents a social-emotional indicator of the child i at the age of y years who belongs to community c: Agency, Pride, generalized self-efficacy, and generalized self-esteem. In addition, Eq. (1) is estimated using as outcome a latent variable that captures the variance that

Results

Table 1 shows the main characteristics of the analytical sample. The sample is balanced between males and females, and 85 % of participants have mothers with Spanish as their native language. A large proportion of the sample was originally located in urban areas (69 %). In addition to this information, it is worth to highlight that in the last visit 97 % of the sample was still attending school, the majority in the third and fourth grade of secondary (49 % and 27 %, respectively).

Table 2

Discussion

This study focuses on measuring the relationship between pre-school attendance and the levels of Agency, Pride, generalized self-efficacy and self-esteem children achieve at 8, 12, and 15 years of age, differentiating the results by area of ​​residence (rural and urban) and by the age at which attendance starts. The Agency and Pride scales were designed to measure aspects relevant for children’s lives in the context of the countries in which YL collects data (Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam).

Conclusions

Results of various international studies show that pre-school education develops cognitive abilities, constitutes the basis for lifelong learning, promotes more equitable learning outcomes, and develops social-emotional competencies. We contribute to the literature by showing two key findings. First, pre-school attendance is associated with improvements in socio-emotional ability, specifically in the dimensions of Agency and Pride. Second, for Agency, this association can be persistent

Authorship statement

All authors certify that they have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content, including participation in the concept, design, analysis, writing, or revision of the manuscript. Brityit Arapa and Eduardo Sánchez were in charge of the econometrics estimations.

Funding

This work was supported by the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa [Contract number IBA–CS–03-2019-UNSA], and, in the case of Alan Sánchez, by the Old Dart Foundation.

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  • The authors would like to thank the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa - UNSA, for the financial support for the research project as per Contract No. IBA-CS-03-2019-UNSA. Likewise, Alan Sánchez would like to thank the Old Dart Foundation for its support in carrying out this study. The data used in this study come from Young Lives, an international study on the changing nature of child poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam (1). The Young Lives study was funded primarily by the British international aid (UK Aid) from 2001 to 2018

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