Do academic preschools yield stronger benefits? Cognitive emphasis, dosage, and early learning
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,
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2022, Journal of Applied Developmental PsychologyCitation 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.
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2020, Early Childhood Research QuarterlyCitation 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.
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2020, Early Childhood Research QuarterlyCitation 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.