A seasonal perspective on school effectiveness: evidence from a Flemish longitudinal study in kindergarten and first grade

Abstract

Summer learning studies have been set up to investigate the evolution of initial group differences in academic achievement, for example, between low- and high-socioeconomic status (SES) children. Moreover, this approach has been used to demonstrate the absolute effect of going to school on children's learning. In the present study, we used multilevel piecewise linear growth modeling to analyze growth in mathematics skills throughout kindergarten and 1st grade. First, we added to the evidence of an absolute schooling effect by demonstrating that average learning rates were faster during both school years than during the intervening summer vacation. Second, mathematics achievement gaps between children from different socioeconomic, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds were found to remain stable during kindergarten and the summer vacation. During 1st grade, however, the ethnic and linguistic achievement gaps disappeared, whereas the SES achievement gap remained unchanged. Finally, we found no evidence for school-level variation in summer learning rates.

Keywords:

• summer learning
• absolute school effects
• primary school
• mathematics
• multilevel piecewise linear growth modeling

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by Research Grant 3H070039 for the Policy Research Centre “Study and School Careers”, Department of Education, Ministry of the Flemish Community (Belgium).

Notes

1. In Flanders, compulsory education starts on September 1 of the year in which children turn 6 years old. Before they enter compulsory education, nearly all Flemish children attend several years of kindergarten. Children can enter kindergarten when they are 2.5 years old. In most preschools, 3 subsequent years of kindergarten are provided. Subsequently, the 3rd year of kindergarten (K3) is typically attended by children who are between 5 and 6 years old. For the sake of brevity, the term “kindergarten” will be used in the remainder of the text to refer to this 3rd kindergarten year.

2. “SiBO” is a Dutch acronym for “Schoolloopbanen in het BasisOnderwijs” (School Careers in Primary Education).

3. Due to unequal variances, the adjusted Satterthwaite version of the t test was used here.

4. The standardized coefficient was used as a measure of effect size. Given the fact that SES was a continuous variable, this coefficient was calculated using the following formula: Δ_i = (β_i ∗ SD _SES) ∗ σ_Y ⁻¹ (Tymms, 2004).

5. Because the variable concerning children's language status was binary instead of continuous, an adapted formula was used to calculate the effect size: Δ_i = β_i ∗ σ_Y ⁻¹ (Tymms, 2004).

6. Reliability was estimated by Cronbach's alpha coefficient (Verachtert, 2003; Verachtert et al., 2005).