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Kindergarten
students learn how to read a number line at
Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a gifted
school that is aiming for greater
student diversity. Christina Veiga Photo
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Chalkbeat
Kindergarten classes are getting more
academic. New research says the kids are all right.
By Matt Barnum
January 24, 2019
Kindergarten isn’t what it used to be — and that might not be a bad
thing.
Recent research has found that kindergarten classrooms look
increasingly academic, with the casualties often being art and free
time for play. That’s worried plenty of parents and child advocates.
Today’s kindergarteners are “expected to be able to do things by the
time they leave kindergarten that some, perhaps even many, are not
developmentally prepared to do,” a 2016 Washington Post column warned.
But a new study suggests the concerns about academic rigor in early
grades may be overblown. It finds that students in kindergarten classes
with more academic content not only show higher math and reading
ability, they don’t do any worse — and in some cases do better — on
social-emotional metrics like self-control, focus, and behavior.
“The results bolster the stance of researchers who believe that
challenging academic content is not necessarily at odds with children’s
healthy development,” the five researchers wrote in the peer-reviewed
American Educational Research Journal study.
The paper is a sweeping one, using data on nearly 20,000
kindergarteners from across the country in the 2010-11 school year.
(That’s a useful year to examine, because the widely cited study
showing that kindergarten had become more academically focused looks at
changes between 1998 and 2010. Notably, though, the study largely
predates the rollout of the Common Core standards, which some educators
argue have pushed too much academic content into early grades.)
The researchers looked at kindergarten classrooms where teachers
reported spending more time on certain advanced topics like
alphabetizing words or recognizing fractions. Importantly, the study
controls for outside factors like poverty, prior academic skills, and
parental education that might affect students.
One unsurprising connection: being in a classroom with a greater
academic focus in both language arts and math meant students were more
likely to earn higher test scores in each subject.
More counterintuitive, to the researchers, were their other findings.
In classrooms with more advanced math content, the students displayed
stronger interpersonal and attention skills. Advanced language
arts instruction didn’t relate to any clear social-emotional benefits,
but didn’t seem to harm students, either.
It’s the latest in a string of research highlighting the potential
benefits of more rigorous academic content in earlier grades. Three
other recent studies focusing on pre-kindergarten, and two looking at
kindergarten, have found that students in classrooms with more advanced
instruction scored higher on assessments.
But Marcy Guddemi isn’t convinced. She’s an education consultant who is
on the advisory board of Defending the Early Years, a group that argues
against too much academic content for young children and for a greater
emphasis on play, which some research has linked to improved physical,
social, and cognitive development.
The latest study doesn’t necessarily undermine this. Guddemi notes that
the researchers measure academic focus by asking teachers how many days
in a month a given skill was taught. They don’t ask teachers how much
time is spent on free or academic-focused play, and those can overlap —
if a teacher used number blocks to teach math skills, for instance.
“That’s a form of play,” Guddemi said. “That’s going to enhance the
child’s understanding.”
Guddemi is also skeptical that tests are very good measures of what
students know, especially at such a young age — or that those scores
matter as students grow older. Studies frequently show that learning
gains students make in pre-K fade out as students progress through
school.
“Even though they tested higher at the end of kindergarten, that
doesn’t mean they learned and are going to retain that information,”
Guddemi said.
The study also points out that teachers who focus on higher-level
skills may simply be better educators.
“It is possible that they may be more intentional in how they teach,
more motivated to teach the subject matter at hand, better classroom
managers, or more adept at fostering a positive social-emotional and
learning environment,” the researchers say.
Still, they conclude, “We are cautiously optimistic that advanced
academic content can be taught without compromising students’
social-emotional skills.”
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