Effects of the Tennessee Prekindergarten Program on children’s achievement and behavior through third grade

By Mark Lipsey, Dale Farran, Kelley Durkin. 2018

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This report presents results of a randomized trial of a state prekindergarten program. Low-income children (N = 2990) applying to oversubscribed programs were randomly assigned to receive offers of admission or remain on a waiting list. Data from pre-k through 3rd grade were obtained from state education records; additional data were collected for a subset of children with parental consent (N = 1076). At the end of pre-k, pre-k participants in the consented subsample performed better than control children on a battery of achievement tests, with non-native English speakers and children scoring lowest at baseline showing the greatest gains. During the kindergarten year and thereafter, the control children caught up with the pre-k participants on those tests and generally surpassed them. Similar results appeared on the 3rd grade state achievement tests for the full randomized sample – pre-k participants did not perform as well as the control children. Teacher ratings of classroom behavior did not favor either group overall, though some negative treatment effects were seen in 1st and 2nd grade. There were differential positive pre-k effects for male and Black children on a few ratings and on attendance. Pre-k participants had lower retention rates in kindergarten that did not persist, and higher rates of school rule violations in later grades. Many pre-k participants received special education designations that remained through later years, creating higher rates than for control children. Issues raised by these findings and implications for pre-k policy are discussed.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1dcef14a3a761ddc269dc0503aaba49176a6a0b

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Citations in the corpus

Children's school readiness skills across the pre-K year: Associations with teacher-student interactions, teacher practices, and exposure to academic content (2020, background): “Although certain of these features have been included in many of these studies (e.g., Lipsey et al., 2018), not every study includes direct assessments of several key classroom process indicators.”
The Long-Term Effects of Universal Preschool in Boston (2021, unknown): “More broadly, our ﬁndings echo those in other recent randomized studies of preschool programs, which often ﬁnd limited achievement effects in elementary school (Puma et al. 2010; Lipsey, Farran, and Durkin 2018).”