Do academic preschools yield stronger benefits? Cognitive emphasis, dosage, and early learning

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2017.05.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Earlier research details how quality preschool offers sustained benefits for children from poor families. But the nation’s typical program yields tepid effects for the average middle-class child. We ask whether pre-k impacts range higher when teachers spend more time on activities emphasizing language, preliteracy, and math concepts. Stronger effects are observed for children attending academic classrooms: up to about 0.27 SD in preliteracy and math concepts, compared with peers in home-based care at 52 months of age (n = 6,150). Black children enjoy strong benefits from academic pre-k, up to 0.39 SD for math concepts. Estimated benefits equal 0.43 SD for the average child attending academic pre-k after about eight months. Gains persist through kindergarten. Results stem from a national sample of children, employing a quasi-experimental method to account for confounders related to family practices and children's earlier proficiencies. Future work might focus on the interplay of academic activities with social dimensions of instructional support.

Section snippets

Classroom activities and preschool benefits

Taking high-quality preschool to scale and sustaining developmental gains has been a challenging task. Oklahoma's universal preschool effort has shown encouraging results for poor children in Tulsa, along with gains for the one-third that came from non-poor families (Gormley, Gayer, Philips, & Dawson, 2005). Similar benefits have been observed in Boston and Chicago, where programs largely serve children from low-income families (Reynolds et al., 2011, Weiland and Yoshikawa, 2013).

But early

Methods

We employ a quasi-experimental design that stems from the family of marginal structural models (MSMs), increasingly used in developmental studies to estimate treatment effects from specific interventions, such as home visitation or pre-k, utilizing large-scale population data, while controlling for the prior effects of confounding factors that likely shape both child selection into preschool and downstream outcomes (e.g., Bassok, 2010, Miller et al., 2016). This allows us to approximate a true

Which children enter preschool?

Table 1 reports attributes of sampled children and families, split by the organizational auspice of the preschool in which children were enrolled at the 48-month data wave. This illuminates differing selection paths by parents into various preschool types. We see that among children selecting into a Head Start preschool, 31% were Black, 34%, Latino, and 28% non-Latino White. Yet among Independent nonprofit preschools (non-Head Start, non-school district based), enrollments were 15% African

Discussion

We observe positive benefits on the average child's cognitive proficiencies after about five to six months of attending a preschool that is academic-oriented, and these effects display stronger magnitudes than prior studies with national samples, where investigators did not focus on academic intensity, as one specific element of classroom quality. Effect sizes are estimated at 0.02 to 0.07 SD higher than those earlier reported for children attending a typical preschool. Among those enrolled in

Acknowledgments

Drs. Bein, Fuller, and Rabe-Hesketh codirected this analysis. It stems from the Latino Child Development Project, funded by the Spencer Foundation, Berkeley's Institute of Human Development, and the University of California Educational Evaluation Center. Dr. Bein's work was supported by the federal Institute of Education Sciences as a post-doctoral scholar. The McCormick Foundation offered additional support. Special thanks to Susan Dauber, Patricia Marin, Erica Okezie-Phillips, Sunyoung Jung,

References (51)

  • N.C. Chien et al.

    Children's classroom engagement and school readiness gains in prekindergarten

    Child Development

    (2010)
  • C. Copple et al.

    Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs serving children from birth through age 8

    (2009)
  • S. Denham et al.

    Preschool emotional competence: Pathway to social competence

    Child Development

    (2003)
  • D. Dickinson et al.

    Speaking out for language: Why language is central to reading development

    Educational Researcher

    (2010)
  • J. Downer et al.

    Teacher–child interactions in the classroom: Toward a theory of within- and cross-domain links to children's developmental outcomes

    Early Education and Development

    (2010)
  • G. Duncan et al.

    Investing in preschool programs

    Journal of Economic Perspectives

    (2013)
  • G. Duncan et al.

    Modeling the impacts of child care quality on children's preschool cognitive development

    Child Development

    (2003)
  • K. Fisher et al.

    Taking shape: Supporting preschoolers' acquisition of geometric knowledge through guided play

    Child Development

    (2013)
  • B. Fuller et al.

    Learning from Latinos: Contexts, families, and child development in motion

    Developmental Psychology

    (2010)
  • C. Galindo et al.

    The social competence of Latino kindergartners and growth in mathematical understanding

    Developmental Psychology

    (2010)
  • A. Gopnik

    The gardener and carpenter

    (2016)
  • R. Gordon et al.

    An assessment of the validity of the ECERS-R with implications for measures of child care quality and relations to child development

    Developmental Psychology

    (2013)
  • W. Gormley et al.

    The effects of universal pre-k on cognitive development

    Developmental Psychology

    (2005)
  • F.M. Gresham et al.

    Social skills rating system

    (1990)
  • B. Hamre

    Teachers' daily interactions with children: An essential ingredient in effective early childhood programs

    Child Development Perspectives

    (2014)
  • Cited by (39)

    • Do preschool entitlements distribute quality fairly? Racial inequity in New York City

      2022, Early Childhood Research Quarterly
      Citation Excerpt :

      Yet, evidence that pre-K directly narrows disparities in children's early learning (equality of welfare) remains scarce. Evidence consistently shows that quality pre-K experienced by 3 or 4-year-olds from poor families significantly lifts early learning, spurred by cognitively challenging activities and rich interaction between teachers and children (e.g., Fuller et al., 2017; Yoshikawa et al., 2013). Comparative benefits (effect sizes) for poor children remain slightly greater, relative to middle-class peers as reported for Boston, Tulsa, and parts of California (citations in Table 1).

    • Differences between pre-k and kindergarten contexts and achievement across the kindergarten transition

      2022, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Based on this research, we expected that experiencing a decrease in the quality of teacher-child interactions as students transition from pre-k to kindergarten would fail to provide the developmental supports needed to sustain positive development of early academic skills like vocabulary, early literacy, and math. There is some disagreement among early childhood stakeholders who view self-directed play as fundamental to early learning (Nicolopoulou, McDowell, & Brockmeyer, 2006) and those who argue that children need substantial time on academic content in order to reach their potential (Fuller, Bein, Bridges, Kim, & Rabe-Hesketh, 2017). Emergent evidence does suggest that more academic time is associated with better academic outcomes (Fuller et al., 2017) and yet there is no empirical evidence to determine how much time on academic instruction is enough or too much in pre-k or kindergarten.

    • Changes in academic instructional experiences in Head Start classrooms from 2001–2015

      2020, Early Childhood Research Quarterly
      Citation Excerpt :

      In general, ECE classrooms vary in terms of the amount of time focused specifically on teaching academic content and the types of instructional formats children spend time in (i.e., child-selected activities or choice time, whole group activities, teacher-directed small groups, etc.), and this variability has been linked to both children’s engagement in their ECE classrooms and, ultimately, their skill development (e.g., Chien et al., 2010; Fuligni, Howes, Huang, Hong, & Lara-Cinisomo, 2012; Goble & Pianta, 2017). Evidence suggests that spending more time on academic content is associated with greater academic skill gains (Fuller et al., 2017). A large body of research also demonstrates the effectiveness of preschool curricula that focus specifically on language, literacy, and mathematics skills (e.g. Barnett et al., 2008; Clements & Sarama, 2007; Lin et al., 2017), suggesting that the amount of time spent intentionally on academic content matters.

    • Using feedback to improve monitoring judgment accuracy in kindergarten children

      2020, Early Childhood Research Quarterly
      Citation Excerpt :

      Kindergarten programs aim to prepare children for the transition to elementary school and formal learning (Hamre & Pianta, 2007). Well-preparing kindergartners for the tasks and demands in elementary school has positive effects on cognitive development and long-term attitudes to learning (Blair, 2002; Fuller, Bein, Bridges, Kim, & Rabe-Hesketh, 2017). Teacher feedback can help children to prepare for school tasks, foster engagement in learning, and advance long-term learning outcomes (Pakarinen et al., 2017).

    • Alignment and misalignment of classroom experiences from Pre-K to kindergarten

      2020, Early Childhood Research Quarterly
      Citation Excerpt :

      This line of inquiry represents some of the clearest evidence in favor of better alignment, but even these studies had data only from the kindergarten year and were not able to directly examine what content was taught in pre-K. Regarding how much class time is devoted to academic content, there is tension between early childhood stakeholders who view self-directed play as paramount to learning (Nicolopoulou, McDowell, & Brockmeyer, 2006) and those who argue in favor of more structured time on content (Fuller et al., 2017). Evidence suggests that more academic time is associated with greater learning outcomes (Fuller et al., 2017), but there is little evidence in early education to define how much time is enough or too much.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text