Age of Entry to Kindergarten and Children's Academic Achievement and Socioemotional Development

Abstract

Research Findings-Data on more than 900 children participating in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care were analyzed to examine the effect of age of entry to kindergarten on children's functioning in early elementary school. Children's academic achievement and socioemotional development were measured repeatedly from the age of 54 months through 3rd grade. With family background factors and experience in child care in the first 54 months of life controlled, hierarchical linear modeling (growth curve) analysis revealed that children who entered kindergarten at younger ages had higher (estimated) scores in kindergarten on the Woodcock-Johnson (W-J) Letter-Word Recognition subtest but received lower ratings from kindergarten teachers on Language and Literacy and Mathematical Thinking scales. Furthermore, children who entered kindergarten at older ages evinced greater increases over time on 4 W-J subtests (i.e., Letter-Word Recognition, Applied Problems, Memory for Sentences, Picture Vocabulary) and outperformed children who started kindergarten at younger ages on 2 W-J subtests in 3rd grade (i.e., Applied Problems, Picture Vocabulary). Age of entry proved unrelated to socioemotional functioning.Practice-The fact that age-of-entry effects were small in magnitude and dwarfed by other aspects of children's family and child care experiences suggests that age at starting school should not be regarded as a major determinant of children's school achievement, but that it may merit consideration in context with other probably more important factors (e.g., child's behavior and abilities).Perhaps no other issue appears so frequently and dominantly in parents' discussions of school readiness or school districts' readiness policies as that of the age at which children are eligible (or required) to start kindergarten. When parents are surveyed about their children's school readiness and enrollment, one of the most frequent questions noted is whether their child is too young to enroll (e.g., West, Hauske, & Collins, 1993). Kindergarten teachers identify age as a factor that figures prominently in definitions and beliefs about readiness for kindergarten, and age is often used as a post hoc explanation for decisions to retain children in kindergarten (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 1993a).Age of entry to school is also of considerable policy importance (Meisels, 1992(Meisels, ,1999. It is an index society uses as an eligibility or selection mechanism for access to public resources and, consequently, an index that triggers potential benefits of stimulation gained by attendance in school. Given that, within a 12-month year, older children tend to show more advanced developmental skills than younger children, changes in age of entry can have effects on the percentages of children who meet certain academic or skill standards and can boost a district's standing on certain metrics (Vecchiotti, 2001). In short, age of entry to school figures prominently in teacher ...

Multiple Dimensions of Biological Development: Implications for Kindergarten Readiness Among Young Children in Poverty

“…In each instance, children who were older when they entered kindergarten scored higher on measures of academic achievement and psychomotor development as well as on teachers' ratings of social competence. These findings are consistent with other studies' findings (Crosser, 1991;Gullo & Burton, 1992;NICHD, 2007). In studying the effect of age on kindergarten readiness, Zill and West (2001) found that teachers rated children who were older in their classes as exhibiting more of a positive approach towards school and were more persistent in completing tasks than were younger children.…”

“…The chronological age at which children enter kindergarten has also been a focus of study relative to its effects on measures of kindergarten readiness (Crosser, 1991;Gullo & Burton, 1992;NICHD, 2007;Spitzer, Cupp, & Parke, 1995;Stipek, 2002). In general, children who enter kindergarten at younger ages score lower on measures of academic achievement associated with kindergarten readiness as compared to children who are chronologically older.…”

“…In general, children who enter kindergarten at younger ages score lower on measures of academic achievement associated with kindergarten readiness as compared to children who are chronologically older. In some studies these differences were maintained into the third grade (NICHD, 2007) and sixth grade (Crosser, 1991). Uphoff and Gilmore (1985), who were early proponents of postponing kindergarten for young age eligible children, suggested that children should enter kindergarten based on their developmental age and not their chronological age.…”

A Bayesian Approach to the Analysis of Local Average Treatment Effect for Missing and Non-normal Data in Causal Modeling: A Tutorial With the ALMOND Package in R

“…One solution is to incorporate an InsV which is correlated with the causal treatment but has no direct effect on the outcome variable so that the confounding effects are extracted by the InsVs. Authors of the original study found a positive effect from kindergarten through grade five in reading (Zhong and Hoxby, 2012), and that an ideal InsV could be the predicted relative entrance age (interaction between a child's birthday and the statelevel cut-off date for the school enrollment), as this variable is highly correlated with the actual relative age, but uncorrelated with the causal outcome itself or other unobserved determinants of academic achievements such as maturity or aptitude (Allhusen et al, 2007). With the inclusion of the predicted relative entrance age as the InsV, the local average treatment effect (LATE) is the causal effect of the early childhood relative age on reading achievement for children who enroll in the same year that meets the state-level requirements.…”

The Correlation between the Age of Starting School and Academic Achievement

“…Diğer taraftan başarıda temel belirleyicinin yaş olmadığı (NICHD, 2007) bunun yanı sıra aile, sosyo-ekonomik durum gibi değişkenlerin de önemli olduğu vurgulanmaktadır. Furlong ve Quirk'e (2011) göre öğrencilerin okula hazır oluşları, onların daha sonraki başarılarında, yaştan daha fazla etkilidir.…”