Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
Does higher peer socio-economic status predict children's language and executive function skills gains in prekindergarten?
Section snippets
Theory and empirical evidence: Peer effects in preschool
An important theoretical and conceptual question in exploring peer effects in preschool is what constitutes an ideal or optimal set of peers. Several prominent theories provide different answers to this question (Yudron, Jones, & Raver, in press). For example, Piaget argued that children learn best in same-age peer groups because they need to master the skills at one level of development before advancing to the next (Piaget, 1983). Vygotsky's theory of proximal development conversely advanced
Participants and setting
All sample children were enrolled in the Boston Public School prekindergarten program in 2009–2010. The program was open to any four-year-old in the city; there were no income requirements as there are in most prekindergarten programs (Barnett et al., 2010). Children in the program received a full day (6.5 h) of preschool. Class size was capped at 22, and classrooms were staffed by a teacher and a paraprofessional, for a maximum teacher–student ratio of 1:11. All BPS prekindergarten teachers
Descriptive statistics: Peer question predictors
On average, children were in classrooms where 32% of their peers were not eligible for free-reduced lunch (range of 0–95%; SD = 22; see Table 1). As expected and as shown in Table 2, children who had more peers ineligible for free-reduced lunch (peer SES) had peers with higher cognitive skills, on average. Having a higher percentage of peers from higher-SES families and peer PPVT scores were positively and moderately correlated (r = 0.65; p < .0001). There was a slightly weaker correlation between
Discussion
Consistent with concerns regarding the effects of limiting enrollment in public preschool programs to low-income families, we found that having a higher percentage of peers from higher-income families was positively associated with gains in children's spring receptive vocabulary skills, controlling for children's fall receptive vocabulary scores and child background, other peer, classroom, teacher, and school characteristics. Spline regression results indicated that the positive association
Acknowledgments
Authors' note: Christina Weiland's work on this paper was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences and by the Boston Public Schools. Hirokazu Yoshikawa's work on this paper was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences. Thanks is given to participating families, teachers, principals, district staff (particularly Jason Sachs and the BPS early childhood coaches), Carolyn Layzer and Abt Associates, and the Wellesley Centers for Women. Also a special thanks to Kchersti Ulvestad for
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