Early childhood education and cognitive outcomes in adolescence: a longitudinal study from Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Previous research shows that Early Childhood Education (ECE) positively impacts cognitive outcomes later in life. Few studies examine the impacts of ECE in developing countries. We use data from the Young Lives project in Vietnam with 2SLS regressions to estimate the impact of years spent in ECE on cognitive outcomes in adolescence. We find that one year in ECE corresponds to 21.8 percentage point (1.25 SD) and 30.8 percentage point (2.78 SD) increases in math and verbal cognition scores, respectively. Our estimates suggest that ECE is highly effective in Vietnam and is a potential strategy for bridging educational outcomes gaps.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• education outcomes
• Vietnam
• cognitive outcomes
• education
• learning outcomes
• Young Lives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use ‘Early Childhood Education’ and ‘Preschool’ interchangeably in this paper. Both terms indicate educational programs for children aged 3- to 6-years old.

2 See Supplementary Tables 6 and 7 for further details on F-statistics, endogenous test and over-identification tests’ statistics.

3 See Table 3 for descriptive statistics on all variables included in the model.

4 See Supplementary Table 9 for full results in SD.

5 Decree No. 17/2019/TT-BGDĐT by the Ministry of Training and Education, issued on 25 July 2009.

6 The others were physical development, cognitive development and emotional and social skill development.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by a fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation.