Preschool Attendance and the Transition to Kindergarten

• In Event: 31.066 - Patterns of Preschool Enrollment Across Diverse Localities: Results From the Early Learning Research Network

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to explore predictors of preschool attendance in a large cohort of kindergarteners and to examine how preschool attendance is associated with their academic skills and challenges in the transition to kindergarten.
A wealth of research has documented the academic and social benefits of preschool attendance (Yoshikawa et al., 2013). However, more research is needed to better understand differences among preschool attenders and non-attenders. Additionally, there is accumulating evidence that although preschool attenders typically begin kindergarten with greater academic skills than their non-attending peers, these effects dissipate throughout the early elementary years (e.g. Lipsey et al., 2018). There are many hypotheses as to why this may occur, including repeated academic content, but few investigations have documented clear explanations. One potential mechanism that may play a role in both initial and potentially lasting influences of preschool is children’s challenges as they transition into kindergarten classrooms (Rimm-Kauffman & Pianta, 2000). For example, children may struggle to pay attention or to adapt to the more academic environment. This paper uniquely contributes to our understanding of preschool influences by focusing on a newly developed measure that captures children’s challenges in the transition to kindergarten.
Data for this project are drawn from the Early Learning Ohio project, a longitudinal study of children from a large, geographically and economically diverse school district. This paper focuses on 707 kindergarten students (see Table 1 for descriptive information). Parents reported on whether their child attended preschool during the year prior to preschool (defined as public school pre-kindergarten, Head Start, or private preschools) and on the child and family characteristics shown in Table 1. In the fall of their kindergarten year, children’s academic skills were directly assessed using three subscales of the Woodcock-Johnson assessment battery: Applied Problems, Letter Word, and Picture Vocabulary. Simultaneously, teachers reported on five items that tapped into individual children’s challenges in the transition to kindergarten (α=.92; e.g. difficulties adjusting to academic demands).
As shown in Table 1, t-tests revealed that maternal education and family income were both predictive of preschool attendance. Next, we ran regression models with clustered standard errors and demographic covariates to examine whether preschool attendance was associated with academic skills and challenges in the transition to kindergarten. As shown in Table 2, preschool attendance was associated with higher scores on the Letter Word subtest, a measure of early literacy. However, preschool attendance did not predict children’s scores on the other subtests or on teachers’ reports of their challenges in the transition to kindergarten. Future analyses will examine these skills at the end of kindergarten and will examine whether or not challenges in the transition moderate any lasting influences of preschool attendance.
Contrary to our hypothesis, kindergarteners’ classroom challenges did not differ by whether or not they had preschool experience. This highlights the need to better understand the alignment between preschool and kindergarten classrooms as a way of supporting children as they transition across the two contexts.

Authors

• Kelly Purtell, The Ohio State University

• Jessica Logan, The Ohio State University

• Tzu-Jung Lin, The Ohio State University

• Laura M. Justice, The Ohio State University