Journal article
Age of entry, preschool experience, and sex as antecedents of academic readiness in kindergarten
Early childhood research quarterly, v 7(2)
1992
Abstract
Readiness, or preparing young children for the formal curriculum, is garnering much attention and controversy in the field of early childhood education. Many factors have been examined in efforts to determine what affects academic readiness. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of children's age of entry, number of years of preschool, and sex on academic readiness at the end of kindergarten. A total of 4, 539 children participated in the study. Of these, 104 children started public school at age 3 (K3), 1, 234 started school at age 4 (K4), and 3, 201 started at age 5 (K5). At-risk status was determined using the Cooperative Preschool Inventory (Caldwell, 1974), and first-grade readiness was determined using the Metropolitan Readiness Test (MRT; Nurss & McGauvran, 1974). Controlling for risk status, regression analysis revealed that age of entry and number of years of preschool accounted for a significant amount of the variance, while sex did not. Analyses of covariance indicated that children who entered the public school preschool program at K3 or K4 scored significantly higher on the MRT than children who entered at K5. The findings also indicated that if children were the youngest in their class they did not score as high as their older counterparts in the K4 and K5 cohorts. However, no difference was found on achievement scores between the oldest and the youngest for the K3 cohort.
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39 citations in Scopus
Details
- Title
- Age of entry, preschool experience, and sex as antecedents of academic readiness in kindergarten
- Creators
- Dominic F. Gullo - University of Wisconsin–MilwaukeeChristine B. Burton - University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
- Publication Details
- Early childhood research quarterly, v 7(2)
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- School of Education
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-0000680952
- Other Identifier
- 991020531815804721