Research Supports Need for Close Examination of Efforts to Improve Math Instruction Prior to School Entry and During Elementary School
Distinguished Professor
Irvine, Calif., December 1, 2010
Parents hope that preschools and primary schools will help them develop a variety of academic, social and emotional skills in their children. As a practical matter, though, teachers and schools face stark choices in deciding which curricula to adopt and how much time teachers should spend developing concrete literacy, numeracy, or behavioral skills. Which are likely best able to promote a child’s success in school and beyond?
Distinguished Professor of Education Greg Duncan, member of the National Academy of Science, has been heading an interdisciplinary team investigating this issue. In a study published in 2007, "School Readiness and Later Achievement", they identified six population-based data sets that included measures of reading and math achievement, attention skills, anti-social and mental health problems, all taken around the time of school entry and followed the children for at least several years to monitor their school achievement.
They found that early academic skills appeared to be the strongest predictor of later school achievement, even after adjusting for the fact that early achievers score higher on tests of cognitive ability and come from more advantaged families. Early math skills were more consistently predictive of later achievement than early reading skills. A student’s school-entry ability to pay attention and stay on task was modestly predictive of later achievement, while early problem behavior and other dimensions of social skills and mental health problems were not at all predictive. If “school readiness” is defined as the skills and behaviors that best predict later academic achievement, then concrete numeracy and literacy skills are decidedly the most important.
However, it is far from clear whether early academic skills matter as much and early behaviors as little for adolescent and early-adult school attainment as they do for middle-childhood reading and math achievement. Finishing high school likely requires a combination of achievement, engagement and perseverance. Anti-social behaviors in primary school may lead only to inconsequential trips to the principal’s office, while such behaviors in middle or high school may result in suspension, expulsion, or even criminal prosecution.
In ongoing work with Katherine Magnuson and other collaborators, Duncan is studying links between persistent academic and behavior problems during primary school and high school completion. Just as in the school-achievement analyses, math achievement emerged as the single most powerful predictor of educational attainment. Children with persistent math problems in elementary school were much less likely to graduate from high school and, especially, attend college. But while school-entry reports of anti-social behavior problems had not been predictive of later school achievement, persistent behavior problems were indeed correlated with high school dropout and college attendance. Surprisingly, persistent early reading problems were not predictive of these outcomes, nor were persistent attention problems. Patterns were broadly similar for different socioeconomic and racial groups, although they did differ by gender – anti-social behavior was more predictive of schooling attainment for boys than for girls.
Duncan views his findings as providing compelling evidence that future research should be devoted to a close examination of efforts to improve math skills both prior to school entry and during elementary school.
Evaluations of early math programs that focus on the development of particular mathematical skills and track children’s reading and math performance throughout the elementary school years could help us understand why early math skills boost later school achievement. In terms of policy, it appears that preschool curricula that promote concrete literacy and, especially, numeracy skills are better bets for boosting children’s chances of eventual school success than curricula that focus solely on promoting social and emotional development. Effective programs that address persistent anti-social behavior problems during primary school may also enhance children’s life chances.
