Early School Achievement

Duncan, G.J., Claessens, A., Huston, A.C., Pagani, L.S., Engel, M., Sexton, H., Dowsett, C.J., Magnuson, K., Klebanov, P., Feinstein, L., Brooks-Gunn, J., Duckworth, K., & Japel, C. (2007). School Readiness and Later Achievement. Developmental Psychology, 6, 1428-1446.

Purpose of the Study and Hypotheses
The researchers of this study wanted to estimate links between key elements of school readiness-school-entry academic, attention, and socioemotional skills-and later school reading and math achievement. In particular, they wanted to find out what factors would and would not affect later education success in early childhood stages-pre- kindergarten through third grade. The hypothesis was that six areas would have an effect on a child's ability
Achievement tests and attention/impulsivity tests were administered at age 4.5 in a laboratory setting and attention problems, internalizing, and social skills were measured by teacher report in the fall of their kindergarten year. Key control variables include cognitive ability, language skills, impulsivity, and internalizing and externalizing language problems. An average of 950 children were used in the data sets in first, third, and fifth
Once this analysis was complete, it is clear that of the six school-entry measures only three predict reading and math achievement: reading/language, math, and attention. Contrary to the hypothesis, socioemotional skills do not play a major factor in later achievement. Also, rudimentary mathematics plays a more important role than either reading or attention, not to say that either are unimportant. The statistical data shows that when math was a specific school-entry measure, that reading was increased by .02 as compared to an emphasis on reading