Photo: Michele McDonald for Strategies for Children
Children who participated in New Mexico’s pre-kindergarten initiative enter kindergarten with stronger vocabulary, early literacy and math skills than children who were not in the program, according to an evaluation by the National Institute for Early Education Research.
NIEER, which is based at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has conducted evaluations of New Mexico’s state-funded pre-kindergarten since it began in 2005. NIEER has also evaluated other state pre-kindergarten programs – and is currently evaluating Rhode Island’s pilot pre-k.
About 17% of the state’s 4-year-olds participate in New Mexico PreK, which includes public schools, Head Start, community-based centers, university-based centers, faith-based centers and family child care homes.
NIEER’s fourth annual evaluation of the New Mexico initiative found:
- The greatest gains occurred in early literacy skills, including knowledge of print concepts and phonological awareness. The improvement shown by children in the state pre-k program was about 130% of the standard deviation for the control group.
- Children’s early math skills – including addition, subtraction and telling time – showed improvement of about 37% of the standard deviation for the control group.
- Children’s vocabulary also improved at a greater rate than children in the control group. Here the improvement represents about 24% of the standard deviation for the control group.
“Each of these findings is both statistically significant and practically meaningful, because these are important content areas related to children’s success in kindergarten and beyond,†NIERR reported. “New Mexico PreK is meeting a common objective of state prekindergarten initiatives nationally, in helping prepare young children for later school success.â€
This is great. Looks like the focus was primarily on early literacy skills. I wonder if in addition to learning the basics of how books work these kids were allowed more than ample time to play. In play they begin to form their own narratives, and listen to their friends. New words and concepts are also learned in play. I suspect they were read to a lot, and I hope that there were plenty of books with sophisticated plot lines, and twists and vocabulary that must be figured out.
I am intrigued though that they are testing addition, subtraction and time telling in pre-schoolers. It seems that there are much more basic understandings of the mathematical world that are the province of early childhood. I worry that ‘teaching’ simple subtraction and addition and time telling (analog???) may result in sophisticated test takers who run into trouble later.
But all in all this looks good. We are moving forward bit by bit in lifting up the most challenged of our early learners. This project shows that focus on certain tasks yields results. We will be refining this for decades.