The Importance of Challenging Content

Research seems to indicate that, while children who attend formal preschool programs usually begin their Kindergarten year with higher achievement test scores than their peers who did not, this advantage tends to disappear quite quickly, usually before the end of Kindergarten (Barnett, 1995).

Some studies have shown that this may at least partially be due to the quality of elementary schools that students attend. However, researchers from the University of Chicago and Vanderbilt University suspected that the type of content children were exposed to once they entered Kindergarten may also play a role in the rapid dissipation of the relative advantages enjoyed by children who had attended preschool.

Using a sample of 15,892 students from the Kindergarten Cohort from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (a database held by the US National Center for Education Statistics), the researchers set out to determine the extent to which exposure to basic vs. advanced content in the Kindergarten year affected academic outcomes in mathematics and reading for students who had attended preschool programs as compared with those who had not.

Content was classified as basic or advanced depending on whether more than half of children had already mastered a particular piece of content prior to entering Kindergarten. Examples of basic content included things like counting out loud, naming shapes and ordering objects in mathematics and naming letters and practicing writing letters in reading. Examples of advanced content included things like place value and adding single-digit numbers in mathematics, and matching letters to sounds and using context cues for comprehension in reading.

What were the results of the study?

• In general, Kindergarten teachers tend to spend more time on basic content than on advanced content in both mathematics and reading. Teachers reported teaching basic reading content on 18 days per month and basic math content on 10 days per month. In contrast, according to teacher reports, advanced reading content was covered on 10 days per month and advance mathematics content on only 6.

• The difference in time spent on advanced content between teachers was striking. Those categorized as “high” on advanced math content, for example, spent nine days per month on advanced topics, compared to three days per month for teachers categorized as “low.”

• Additional time spent on advanced content in both mathematics and reading was associated with higher gains on test scores.

• Additional time spent on basic content in both mathematics and reading was associated with smaller gains on test scores.

• The researchers expected that students who had attended preschool and therefore had already been exposed to basic content in mathematics and reading would not benefit from further exposure to this basic content. On the other hand, they expected that students who had not attended preschool would benefit from more exposure to basic content since it would compensate for their not yet having already received this instruction. The surprise finding from this study was that this second hypothesis was not supported by data. The study found that all children benefited from more time spent on advanced content and less spent on basic content.

• Interestingly, the scores of children who had not attended preschool tended to converge over time with the scores of children who had, but who subsequently spent less time on advanced content in Kindergarten.

• The pattern of results for children from low-income households was similar to the overall pattern.

What might this mean for our classrooms?

The researchers do not go into detail about what they believe might account for these results, particularly the result that even those children who had not attended preschool failed to benefit from extra time spent on basic content. One obvious factor is simply the concept of “opportunity to learn.” With more opportunities to learn advanced content, naturally children were able to learn more of it. I believe that the issues go beyond this, however. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that challenge is an important component of motivation. It is quite possible that the higher level of challenge contributed to higher motivation and therefore greater learning. A third possible factor is the connection between more advanced content and more basic content. It may be the case that some of the basic skills are actually better learned when they are applied in conjunction with more advanced content in more complex contexts. Whatever the underlying causes, we would do well to consider the level of challenge we provide our students in Kindergarten and indeed beyond. In international schools, Preschool and Kindergarten usually happen within the one school and therefore, hopefully at least, discontinuity of curriculum is less of a problem. There is still no room for complacency when it comes to challenge, however. A recent report from the United States focusing on fourth and eighth graders suggested that many of the topics covered in those grades are also too easy and that in general students are not challenged by their schoolwork (Boser & Rosenthal, 2012). This is simply not good enough.

Reference:

Claessens, A., Engel, M., & Curran F. (2014). “Academic content, student learning, and the persistence of preschool effects.” American Educational Research Journal 51:2, 403–434.

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