by Elliot Tucker-Drob in Psychological Science
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Tucker-Drob examined 600 sets of twins from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), to find out whether preschool attendance reduced the importance of family factors like socio-economic status, minority group status and lower parental stimulation of cognitive development to children’s educational outcomes. The twins were evaluated at two, four and five years old for cognitive measures and the quality of parental interaction with their children.
Analysis found that for children with several factors correlated to lower performance (low socio-economic status, minority, poor parental stimulation) there were dramatic benefits for preschool participation. Benefits were not significant for children from high socio-economic, racial majority households with high parental stimulation.
Tucker-Drob comments that not only is preschool more important for high-risk children but those children attend at a lower rate, suggesting that part of the reason for the persistent achievement gap is lack of wide-spread access to preschool for the children who stand to benefit from it most.
This research does not specifically address variations in preschool settings, but Tucker-Drob notes that gains in the study may be driven primarily by high-quality programs. For the purposes of Head Start, this research strongly supports the need to ensure that every child exposed to risk factors for low academic achievement has access to high-quality preschool.
