The influence of kindergarten on students’ performance: The Spanish case

ABSTRACT

Most Spanish parents enrol their children in preschool education (ages 3–5) as a way of preparing them for compulsory education. However, not all parents decide to enrol their children in kindergarten (ages 0 to 2). In this context, the aim of the present study is to analyse the influence of kindergarten attendance on students’ academic performance in third and sixth grades. In order to address this issue, we employ census and longitudinal data from the Spanish region of the Canary Islands and an instrumental variable approach to go beyond simple correlation. Our results show that kindergarten attendance improves students’ performance in around one standard deviation in third grade, but that this influence is reduced and almost disappears when reaching sixth grade, particularly in reading.

KEYWORDS:

• Kindergarten
• Primary education
• Instrumental variables
• Reading
• Mathematics

Acknowledgments

This work has been partly supported by FEDER funding (under Research Project PY20-00228), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (under Research Project PID2020-119471RB-I00), the Andalusian Regional Government (SEJ-645) and the Universidad de Málaga (under Research Project B1-2022_23). The data have been provided by the Agencia Canaria de Calidad Universitaria y Evaluación Educativa.

Notes

¹ TIMSS stands for “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.”

² PISA stands for “Programme for International Student Assessment.”

³ These scores have been standardised to have mean 0 and standard deviation 1, using the mean and standard deviation of the population, so results can be interpreted as effect sizes, which is useful for international comparisons.

⁴ Father’s employment situation in third grade has also been employed as a robustness check, although it does not work as an instrument. This is a logical result, to the extent that in Spain care tasks are usually performed by the mother. These estimations will be provided by the authors upon request.