Children entering kindergarten with elementary math and reading skills are the most likely to do well in school later, even if they have various social and emotional problems, say researchers who examined data from six studies of close to 36,000 preschoolers.
Children's attention-related skills also mattered, the researchers found.
These findings are reported on in the November issue of Developmental Psychology , published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
For the first time, researchers compfared results from six large-scale longitudinal studies comprising two national representations of U.S. children, two multi-site studies of U.S. children, one study focusing on children from Great Britain and one study focusing on children from Canada to assess what school-entry skills and behaviors best predicted higher teacher ratings and reading and math test scores as the children progressed through school. Children's preschool cognitive abilities and socio-demographic characteristics were held constant to rule out their influences.
From a meta-analysis of the results, economist Greg J. Duncan, PhD, of Northwestern University, and 11 co-authors found that mastering early math concepts, such as knowledge of numbers and understanding the order of numbers, best predicted later success. Mastering early language and reading skills that included vocabulary, knowing letters and understanding phonetics were next in predicting later achievement. Also contributing to later achievement were children's attention-related skills, including the ability to control hyperactive behavior, to concentrate while completing a task, and to be motivated for learning. Surprisingly, difficulty getting along with classmates, aggressive or disruptive behaviors, and sad or withdrawn behaviors did not detract from later learning.
School readiness skills and behaviors were measured at school entry (around age 5) and later achievement was measured between the ages of 7 and 14. Even after controlling for children's prior cognitive ability, the authors found that early math skills were strong predictors of later math achievement and predicted later reading achievement as well as early reading skills. These and other patterns were similar for boys and girls and for children from both upper- middle-class and poor families.