Do High-Quality Kindergarten and First-Grade Classrooms Mitigate Preschool Fadeout?

ABSTRACT

Prior research shows that short-term effects from preschool may disappear, but little research has considered which environmental conditions might sustain academic advantages from preschool into elementary school. Using secondary data from two preschool experiments, we investigate whether features of elementary schools, particularly advanced content and high-quality instruction in kindergarten and first grade, as well as professional supports to coordinate curricular instruction, reduce fadeout. Across both studies, our measures of instruction did not moderate fadeout. However, results indicated that targeted teacher professional supports substantially mitigated fadeout between kindergarten and first grade but that this was not mediated through classroom quality. Future research should investigate the specific mechanisms through which aligned preschool-elementary school curricular approaches can sustain the benefits of preschool programs for low-income children.

KEYWORDS:

• Head Start
• preschool
• fadeout
• early childhood education
• classroom quality

Notes

¹ We also estimate our analyses using each individual outcome variable comprising the language and literacy composite separately (see robustness section).

² We also ran our analyses with only the first-grade instructional measures (see robustness section).

³ Clements and colleagues (2013) found that teachers were somewhat resistant to this additional PD, because they were teaching a new curriculum for the first time and believed that this already constituted a challenge and that simultaneously modifying it would be too challenging. Thus, they found that this follow-through treatment condition was weakly implemented.

⁴ We estimate intent-to-treat effects for each study because they are most policy relevant, as it tests whether the opportunity to participate in a given program at the population-level produces long-run impacts. Furthermore, we lack sufficient measures of program attendance in the TRIAD study for which to calculate treatment-on-treated (TOT) estimates.

⁵ The COEMET does have one item that directly measures differentiation (“The teacher adapted tasks and discussions to accommodate the range of children's abilities and development”). Because it was only a single item, we opted to use the COEMET as it was intended, aggregating scores across items for each math activity.

⁶ The only significant coefficient is full-day pre-K (β = −.05), but because this represents one of 22 regressions, this could be significant due to chance alone.

⁷ Furthermore, the standard errors for the HSIS longitudinal weighted models with corresponding jackknife standard error calculations cannot be estimated in our models with include fixed effects or indicators for center of random assignment. For comparison, we present the results from tests of differential attrition by treatment status using the IPT weights and using the HSIS provided sampling weights in Appendix Table D.

⁸ This corresponds with Puma et al.'s (2012) findings, reporting negative impact estimates for nine of the eleven language and literacy outcomes at the end of third grade. However, their estimates were much smaller (−.01), and most of the HSIS first- and third-grade impacts are positive and insignificant. Taken together, we focus not on the −.15 impact coefficient and instead on the hypothesized interactions.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by awards from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to Greg Duncan and George Farkas (P01HD065704) and Elizabeth Gershoff (R01HD06956). Research was also supported by the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) from awards to Duncan (R305B120013) and Douglas Clements (R305K05157 & R305A120813). The content of this article is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of NICHD or IES.