Early Childhood School Readiness

Abstract

Early childhood school readiness is the extent to which a young child is ready to begin school for the first time, including cognitive skills as well as social, emotional, and physical development and well-being. Young children vary in readiness more than older children do, for developmental and age reasons. Even if all first-graders were six years old, for example, the eleven-month difference between the oldest and youngest represents a significant portion of their lives. These varying levels of readiness strongly correlate with later degrees of success.

Overview

School readiness is the degree to which an individual child has been prepared for the formal education experience and his or her ability to thrive in a school environment given the child's social, cognitive, physical, and emotional development. When school readiness is discussed without further qualifiers, it generally refers to the readiness of a child to begin elementary/primary education, in contrast with college/higher education readiness, where prior educational experience is one of the contributing factors. Young children are best able to succeed in transitioning to a formal education environment when they have shown early development of cognitive skills such as reading and counting, have a low-stress family life that includes stability and a healthy relationship with their parents and any other household members or caregivers, and are successful in self-regulating. Readiness can also be assisted by institutional factors. A small student-to-teacher ratio is especially beneficial to young students, as are well-trained teachers equipped to recognize the needs of individual children and the signs of those who need extra help. More so than schools for older children, schools for young children (kindergarten and elementary school) need to be designed so as to take into account the widely varying levels of readiness students will have when first entering, and to address the needs of the least ready without doing so at the expense of the most ready. They need to take into account motor, social, and emotional development, not just cognitive development and mastery of academic material.

The United States has led the world in school readiness research and programs, which initially led to the Head Start program, a program for preschool-aged children designed to combat the readiness deficiencies common to lower-income families. Unfortunately, long-term studies of Head Start have shown that while its short-term gains are considerable, by the end of elementary school, the same correlations between poverty and other factors and poor academic performance or behavior issues are found. What is less clear is whether this is a fault of the program as such, or simply reflects the fact that most children of low-income families attend poorly funded low-resource schools, and this poor performance simply reflects what happens when the additional help from a program like Head Start ends. Clearly the most reliable solution would be to fund every school to the level of the best-funded schools; this is neither politically expedient, given the tax impact, nor practicable without sufficient numbers of sufficiently expert teachers to staff them. Instead, various targeted measures attempt to intervene in order to assist in the development of young children in need and improve their readiness.

Further Insights

Early childhood development entails significant biological and cognitive changes, which are necessary to the success of a child's formal education. Genetic factors and prenatal life have a large impact on child development—maturation is a biological process determined largely by genes. Environmental factors, however, are also important and are the most controllable. Both parental care and childcare programs help foster development and impact language and communication skills, social-emotional skills, motor skills, and cognitive abilities. Factors such as diet, nutrition, sleep quality, and physical health all have an impact on both physical and cognitive development. Critically, as confirmed by numerous studies, early childhood development has long-lasting impacts on later childhood and adulthood. Poor nutrition that leads to slower physical growth in early development, for example, frequently has permanent effects on the individual's height and weight, and can impact brain development—consequences that may not be reversible even with proper nutrition after these developmental deficiencies have been observed.

If a child develops slowly in one or more areas, however, this doesn't mean that the deficit can never be addressed. Part of the work of early childhood education is identifying developmental concerns in young children in order to offer extra attention. These interventions can be successful in improving motor, cognitive, and social skills and can mitigate problems with physical development. It must also be noted that development varies from child to child, and these variations are not always indicative of a problem requiring intervention.

When discussing children aged four to six, when formal schooling begins, individual differences can be considerable both in size and in language skills, while differences in motor skills, which may be considerable among infants, have largely evened out. Social skills also often form quickly when children enter school, where they are given more opportunity for social interaction with other children and in group settings than they usually have in a home environment.

Typical milestones for a five-year-old when considering developmental norms include fluent speech with no or limited use of childish substitutions; the ability to identify their age when asked; the ability to draw a stick figure; the ability to skip and hop, which is related to a greater sense of balance; and dressing themselves. Important milestones at age six, which early elementary teachers watch for, include knowing right from left and basic counting skills.

Readiness can encompass more than just a child meeting the expected developmental milestones. Children who already have some basic math and reading skills when they begin school are much more likely to be successful in later years of school, as well as more likely to attain an advanced degree and less likely to spend significant time unemployed as adults. While most parents and educators have always been aware that school comes easier to children who have had some prior exposure to these academic skills, school readiness encompasses other areas of development as well, including social, emotional, and physical development. Readiness also impacts student engagement, especially in early grades.

The National School Readiness Indicators Initiative (NSRII) was a seventeen-state project (including all of New England as well as California and several Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic states) to study children's progress and produce a list of readiness indicators and readiness-improving measures. One consistent finding is that early intervention by school or other authorities is helpful in mitigating the correlation between harmful factors and low levels of readiness. Private and public school readiness programs exist to help parents meet the costs of childcare, preschool, pre-kindergarten, and other services that help prepare young children for school while relieving some of the time and work burdens from low- and middle-income parents.

The NSRII identified four components of the "Ready Child Equation"—ready families, ready communities, ready services, and ready schools—as well as the five dimensions of readiness that are now commonly accepted: physical well-being and motor development, social and emotional development, approaches to learning, language development, and cognition and general knowledge.

NSRII also identified core indicators associated with problems in each of these areas. For the five dimensions of readiness, these indicators are the percentage of children lacking in sufficient development in each dimension. For Ready Families, the core indicators are mother's education level, birth to teens, child abuse and neglect, and children in foster care; for Ready Communities, young children in poverty, support for families with infants and children, and lead poisoning; for Ready Services, health insurance, low birthweight infants, access to prenatal care, immunizations, enrollment in early education programs, early education teacher credentials, accreditation of childcare centers, accreditation of family childcare homes, and childcare subsidies; for Ready Schools, class size (teacher/child ratio) and fourth grade reading scores.

Issues

Researchers have investigated various correlations between school readiness and factors in the child's life. One of the strongest is poverty. Children living in poverty in their early years are significantly less likely to be able to count to twenty, identify all the letters of the alphabet, or write their names before entering school. There is also a strong correlation between parental education and cognitive skills, in that the more education a child's parents had, the more likely the child is to demonstrate those skills. Correlations between race or ethnicity and readiness—which favor whites and Asians over others—exist, however there is disagreement over whether they are wholly explained by the aforementioned economic and education indicators.

Other studies have found correlations between multiple moves in early childhood and reduced readiness, worse behavioral outcomes, and higher rates of high school dropouts (Ziol-Guest & McKenna, 2014); between low levels of readiness and cognitive skills and grade retention (Davoudzadeh et. al., 2015); between maternal supportiveness and readiness in low-income children (Brophy-Herb et al., 2013); between self-regulation and school readiness (Ursache et al., 2012); and between teenage mothers and low levels of readiness (Brown, 2015).

The correlation between multiple moves and low readiness tends to impact many adopted and foster children. Families living below the poverty line have a moving rate twice as high as those living above it. Theorists have pointed to the psychological stress caused by moving and its impact on parental behaviors and availability. Some studies cited by Ziol-Guest and McKenna suggest a deleterious effect of housing instability independent of economic correlations, especially where behavioral and emotional problems are concerned, which suggests support for the stress mechanism explanation.

One key factor in readiness according to several studies is the child's self-regulation or self-regulatory competence, that is, the ability of a child to control his or her own behavior, to pay attention, and to modulate emotions. For example, one study (Razza & Raymond, 2013) found a strong correlation between a child's ability to delay gratification and their school readiness, and consequently a correlation between maternal behaviors related to delayed gratification and readiness. The ability of a parent to recognize cues from young children and respond appropriately is one of many aspects of sensitive parenting. Parental modeling, in turn, develops children's social, emotional, and cognitive skills as they learn to control parental behavior by sending such cues.

While it is well understood that self-regulation consistently predicts academic success, it is less clear which aspects of self-regulation are most implicated, and by what mechanism they assist readiness. Two skill sets of self-regulation that seem important are emotion regulation, which is understandably related to avoiding behavioral problems that would interfere with academic success, and executive functions, which include the ability to direct conscious thinking toward a goal, including the ability to resist distractions both external and internal, to use working memory, and shift the cognitive set (the child's attentional focus) to the relevant subjects.

Terms & Concepts

Cognitive Skills: The skills related to mental activities, including information processing, memory, literacy, and numeracy.

Development: Childhood development encompasses the physical, cognitive, and social changes of the early years of a child's life, and that child's progress according to specific milestones associated with various ages or age ranges.

Engagement: The degree to which a student responds to, interacts with, and is interested in material; greater engagement tends to lead to greater mastery of the material.

Grade Retention: The procedure of having a student repeat a grade rather than move on to the next grade, because of poor academic performance, insufficient attendance, or other factors.

Readiness: The ways in which a child is prepared to enter school and make full use of the experience.

Self-regulation: A set of related subskills that have emotional intelligence and control in common, including the ability to maintain attention on a topic, to modulate one's emotions and emotional responses, and to control one's behavior. Among children, the ability to "sit still" and to act in the ways that are considered appropriate for various social contexts (not fidgeting in church, not talking loudly in a movie) are aspects of self-regulation.

Bibliography

Brown, A. L. (2015). The impact of early intervention on the school readiness of children born to teenage mothers. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 13(2), 181–195. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=103161584&site=ehost-live

Davoudzadeh, P. P., McTernan, M. L., & Grimm, K. J. (2015). Early school readiness predictors of grade retention from kindergarten through eighth grade: A multilevel discrete-time survival analysis approach. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 32, 183–192. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=102879368&site=ehost-live

Hojnoski, R. L., & Missall, K. N. (2006). Addressing school readiness: Expanding school psychology in early education. School Psychology Review, 35(4), 602–614. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=23852640&site=ehost-live

Ionescu, T., & Benga, O. (2007). Reconceptualizing early education on scientific grounds: School readiness in focus. Cognitie, Creier, Comportament/Cognition, Brain, Behavior, 11(1), 49–65. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=24523691&site=ehost-live

McCoy, D. C., Zuilkowski, S. S., Yoshikawa, H., & Fink, G. (2017). Early childhood care and education and school readiness in Zambia. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 10(3), 482–506. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=124090972&site=ehost-live

Pilkauskas, N. N. (2014). Living with a grandparent and parent in early childhood: Associations with school readiness and differences by demographic characteristics. Developmental Psychology, 50(12), 2587–2599. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=99734488&site=ehost-live

Razza, R. A., & Raymond, K. (2013). Associations among maternal behavior, delay of gratification, and school readiness across the early childhood years. Social Development, 22(1), 180–196. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=84783050&site=ehost-live

Reynolds, A., Richardson, B. A., Momoko, H., Englund, M. M., & Suh-Ruu, O. (2016). Multi-site expansion of an early childhood intervention and school readiness. Pediatrics, 138(1), 1–11. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=116609661&site=ehost-live

Ursache, A., Blair, C., & Raver, C. C. (2012). The promotion of self-regulation as a means of enhancing school readiness and early achievement in children at risk for school failure. Child Development Perspectives, 6(2), 122–128. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=75176283&site=ehost-live

Yoshikawa, H. H., Gassman-Pines, A., Morris, P. A., Gennetian, L. A., & Godfrey, E. B. (2010). Racial/ethnic differences in effects of welfare policies on early school readiness and later achievement. Applied Developmental Science, 14(3), 137–153. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=52288290&site=ehost-live

Ziol-Guest, K. M., & McKenna, C. C. (2014). Early childhood housing instability and school readiness. Child Development, 85(1), 103–113. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=94253907&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Brophy-Herb, H. E., Zajicek-Farber, M. L., Bocknek, E. L., McKelvey, L. M., & Stansbury, K. (2013). Longitudinal connections of maternal supportiveness and early emotion regulation to children's school readiness in low-income families. Journal of the Society for Social Work & Research, 4(1), 2–19.

Mendelsohn, A. L., Brockmeyer Cates, C., Weisleder, A., Berkule, S. B., & Dreyer, B. P. (2013). Promotion of early school readiness using pediatric primary care as an innovative platform. Zero to Three, 34(1), 29–40. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=90336250&site=ehost-live

Murray, J. (2017). Young children are human beings. International Journal of Early Years Education, 25(4), 339–342. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=125941498&site=ehost-live

RaeHyuck, L., Fuhua, Z., Brooks-Gunn, J., Wen-Jui, H., & Waldfogel, J. J. (2014). Head Start participation and school readiness: Evidence from the early childhood longitudinal study-birth cohort. Developmental Psychology, 50(1), 202–215. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=93805104&site=ehost-live

Vitiello, V. V., & Greenfield, D. D. (2017). Executive functions and approaches to learning in predicting school readiness. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 53, 1–9. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=126210423&site=ehost-live