Kids Do Better With Quality Care

May 3, 2011

Preliminary results of a current study being conducted by Vanderbilt University in partnership with the Division of School Readiness and Early Learning at the Tennessee State Department of Education show that children attending state-sponsored pre-kindergarten programs do significantly better in school than those who do not attend pre-K.Participants will be followed until third grade in order to assess the long-term effects of pre-K. The study is currently in its second year of evaluation.

Methods

Participants were separated in two sub-studies, a randomized control trial (RCT) and a regression discontinuity design (RDD). 303 children in twenty-three schools in fourteen Tennessee school districts participated in the RCT group. These children were randomly selected from a list of pre-K applicants. Each child was individually assessed at the beginning and end of the pre-k year using a few measurements from the Woodcock Johnson III battery, which measures early literacy, language and math skills. At the end of the school year, the children who had attended pre-K showed better results on all measures of literacy, language and math.

The RDD followed two groups of pre-K attendees. One group was a total of 682 children in 36 pre-K classes spread throughout rural and urban middle Tennessee. The other was an older group of 676 pre-K students that enrolled a year later because they did not meet the age requirement cut-off date by September 30 during the previous school year (2008-2009). Both groups were assessed before and after pre-K attendance during the 2009-2010 school year. The results of the study, like the RCT, show that students did better after attending pre-K.

During the 2009-2010 school year, 713 students attended pre-K in the Memphis and Shelby County school systems (SCHS, 3). Further supporting Vanderbilt’s preliminary findings, the Memphis City Schools has seen that students who attended pre-K programs scored the highest, of any group, on the Kindergarten Readiness Indicator (SCHS, 5). 

For more information on the study, please contact Dr. Mark Lipsey, Principal Investigator, at mark.lipsey@vanderbilt.edu.

References: 

Peabody Research Institute. (2011). Evaluating the Effectiveness of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K Program: Initial Results. Vanderbilt University. Retrieved from: http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/Documents/pdf/PRI/Summary_TN%20State%20Pre-K%20Study%20initial%20results2.pdf.

Shelby County Head Start. (2010). Community Assessment Update. Retrieved from: http://www.shelbycountytn.gov/DocumentView.aspx?DID=1341.