Preschool and primary school influences on the development of children's early numeracy skills between the ages of 3 and 7 years in Germany

Abstract

Few studies have investigated how preschool and primary school interact to influence children's cognitive development. The present investigation explores German children's numeracy skills between age 3 (1st year of preschool) and age 7 (1st year of primary school). We first identified the influence of preschool experience on development while controlling for child factors, family background, and the quality of the home learning environment (HLE). We then considered how the instructional quality of primary schools influences numeracy. We finally analysed how preschool and primary school interact. We sampled 547 children who attended 97 German preschools. Latent growth curve analyses identified child and family factors related to age 3 numeracy and development to age 7: gender, migration background, socioeconomic status (SES), mother education, HLE. The effects of preschool on numeracy development persist until age 7 with notable effects from process quality. Strengthened efforts are needed to ensure high quality preschool education in Germany.

Keywords:

• preschool quality
• cognitive development
• primary school quality
• numeracy
• longitudinal studies

Notes

1. The study is conducted within two subprojects (grant to S. Weinert and H.-G. Rossbach) of the larger interdisciplinary research group BiKS, funded by the German Research Foundation. We would like to thank all participating children, their parents, and their preschool teachers, as well as all students engaged in data collection for their most active cooperation.

2. Please note that this number is not equivalent to the class size as preschool classes usually were mixed-age groups, and therefore primary school enrolment was not due in 2008 (inclusion criterion) for all the children of one class.

3. Please note that the potential effects of clustering in all these analyses are generally low. The pattern of results remains the same if standard errors adjusted for the clustering by preschool classes or primary school classes are used. The pattern of results remains also stable if standard errors not adjusted for the multilevel structure are estimated.

4. The shown descriptives for preschool measures are slightly different to those reported in the paper of Anders and colleagues (2012). This is due to the fact that for the present analyses one further measurement point of preschool indicators could be included in the analyses.