Is Kindergarten the New First Grade? Without a Doubt, Say Researchers
The accountability pressures ushered in by No Child Left Behind more than decade ago reached into the nation’s kindergarten classrooms, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia. In “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?”Daphna Bassock, Scott Lathem and Anna Rorem tracked the level of academic focus in kindergarten from 1998 and 2010. While they expected to find some degree of increased attention on the reading and math skills emphasized by the now-replaced NCLB, the researchers were somewhat surprised by the magnitude.
“We’ve seen the kindergarten experience essentially transformed,” says Bassock. “Academic skill-building has really taken center stage in today’s kindergarten classrooms in a way that just wasn’t the case” in the late 1990s.
Many educators and parents are concerned that the heightened focus on academics in kindergarten is accelerating learning at the expense of play and other traditional activities and skills.
There’s nothing wrong obviously with higher expectations, but real concerns persist over how these young students are learning. “We know that early social skills are important predictors of students’ learning trajectories,” Bassok explains. “So our worry is that if done inappropriately, the focus on academics may have really pushed these other kind of learning opportunities aside.”
The researchers compared data from the 1998 and 2010 Early Childhood Studies, which used nationally-representative surveys of kindergarten teachers, to examine how instruction, assessment, expectations and even classroom spaces have changed in kindergarten classrooms.
The frequency of instruction in specific literacy and math skills grew significantly over the 12 year period (see graph below). Ninety-four percent of teachers, for example, reported in 2010 that they taught students how to write sentences on a weekly basis, compared to 67 percent in 1998. Instruction in writing math equations more than doubled over the same period.
A greater focus on academic skills can lead to something else getting pushed out or sidelined. In between 1998 and 2010, music and art declined significantly. The Is Kindergarten the New First Grade? Without a Doubt, Say Researchers - NEA Today:
