Douglas D. Ready

Social-Class Differences in Summer Learning Between Kindergarten and First Grade: Model Specification and Estimation

Sociologists suggest that children from socially advantaged families continue to learn during the summer, whereas children from disadvantaged families learn either little or lose ground. This disparity in summer learning is hypothesized to result from differential participation in educationally beneficial summer activities. In this article, we test this theory with current and nationally representative data, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort. We examine how childrens socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with their learning of literacy, mathematics, and general knowledge over the summer between kindergarten and the first grade. We also explore whether social-background differences in learning are explained by differential participation rates in summer activities. Our analytic models adjust for discrepancies between the timing of assessments and the timing of schools closing for the summer and opening in the fall. Much of the observed gain results from time in school. Nonetheless, social stratification characterizes summer learning between kindergarten and the first grade, with higher-SES children learning more. However, these social-background differences are only modestly explained by the activities in which children participate during the summer months.

Explaining Girls’ Advantage in Kindergarten Literacy Learning: Do Classroom Behaviors Make a Difference?

This study investigated gender differences in kindergarteners’ literacy skills, specifically, whether differences in children’s classroom behaviors explained females’ early learning advantage. Data included information on 16,883 kindergartners (8,701 boys and 8,182 girls) from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort of 1998–1999 (ECLS‐K). The ECLS‐K directly assessed children’s cognitive skills and collected extensive data on children’s sociodemographic and behavioral backgrounds through structured telephone interviews with parents and written surveys with children’s teachers. Findings suggested that not only did girls enter kindergarten with somewhat stronger literacy skills but they also learned slightly more than boys over the kindergarten year. Taking into account teachers’ reports of girls’ more positive learning approaches (e.g., attentiveness, task persistence) explained almost two‐thirds of the female advantage in literacy learning. Accounting for boys’ more prevalent external behavior problems, thought by many to explain girls’ advantage in literacy development, did little to diminish the gender gap.

Accuracy and Inaccuracy in Teachers’ Perceptions of Young Children’s Cognitive Abilities The Role of Child Background and Classroom Context

Teachers’ subjective understandings of their students’ cognitive abilities have important implications for classroom interactions, children’s access to resources and opportunities, and educational equity more broadly. Using nationally representative data and three-level hierarchical linear models, this study explored the links between teacher perceptions and children’s sociodemographic backgrounds. The authors find that teachers perceive substantial racial-ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender differences in children’s literacy skills. Roughly half of these disparities are explained by actual between-group differences. The remaining perceptual inaccuracies flow more from classroom characteristics than from teachers’ professional or personal backgrounds (e.g., their own race or ethnicity). Specifically, holding students’ social and academic backgrounds constant, the authors find that teachers in lower-socioeconomic-status and lower-achieving contexts more often underestimate their students’ abilities. These results highlight the importance of recent policy efforts to avoid isolating traditionally disadvantaged children.

Socioeconomic Disadvantage, School Attendance, and Early Cognitive Development: The Differential Effects of School Exposure

Over the past several decades, research has documented strong relationships between social class and children’s cognitive abilities. These initial cognitive differences, which are substantial at school entry, increase as children progress through school. Despite the robust findings associated with this research, authors have generally neglected the extent to which school absenteeism exacerbates social class differences in academic development among young children. Using growth-curve analyses within a three-level hierarchical linear modeling framework, this study employs data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) to examine the links between children’s social class, school absences, and academic growth during kindergarten and first grade. Results suggest that the effects of schooling on cognitive development are stronger for lower socioeconomic status (SES) children and that the findings associated with theories of summer learning loss are applicable to literacy development during early elementary school. Indeed, although they continue to achieve at lower absolute levels, socioeconomically disadvantaged children who have good attendance rates gain more literacy skills than their higher SES peers during kindergarten and first grade.

Full-Day versus Half-Day Kindergarten: In Which Program Do Children Learn More?

Do children learn more in full‐day kindergartens than half‐day programs? If full‐day kindergarten increases learning, are kindergartners in some schools particularly advantaged by their full‐day experience? We address these questions with a nationally representative sample of over 8,000 kindergartners and 500 U.S. public schools that participated in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort. More than half of kindergartners experience full‐day programs, which are most commonly available to less‐advantaged children. Using multilevel (HLM) methods, we show that children who attend schools that offer full‐day programs learn more in literacy and mathematics than their half‐day counterparts. We also explore differential effectiveness in some school settings.

U.S. high school curriculum: three phases of contemporary research and reform.

Valerie Lee and Douglas Ready explore the influences of the high school curriculum on student learning and the equitable distribution of that learning by race and socioeconomic status. They begin by tracing the historical development of the U.S. comprehensive high school and then examine the curricular reforms of the past three decades. During the first half of the twentieth century, the authors say, public high schools typically organized students into rigid curricular “tracks” based largely on students’ past academic performance and future occupational and educational plans. During the middle of the century, however, high schools began to provide students with a choice among courses that varied in both content and academic rigor. Although the standards movement of the 1980s limited these curricular options somewhat, comprehensive curricula remained, with minority and low-income students less often completing college-prep courses. During the 1990s, say the authors, researchers who examined the associations between course-taking and student learning reported that students completing more advanced coursework learned more, regardless of their social or academic backgrounds. Based largely on this emerging research consensus favoring college-prep curriculum, in 1997 public high schools in Chicago began offering exclusively college-prep courses. To address the needs of the city’s many low-performing ninth graders, schools added extra coursework in subjects in which their performance was deficient. A recent study of this reform, however, found that these approaches made little difference in student achievement. Lee and Ready hypothesize that “selection bias” may explain the divergent conclusions reached by the Chicago study and previous research. Earlier studies rarely considered the unmeasured characteristics of students who completed college-prep courses—characteristics such as motivation, access to academic supports, and better teachers—that are also positively related to student learning. Although the Chicago evaluation is only one study of one city, its findings raise the worrisome possibility that the recent push for “college-prep for all” may not generate the improvements for which researchers and policy makers had hoped.

High-Quality Preschool: The Socioeconomic Composition of Preschool Classrooms and Children's Learning

Research Findings: As policymakers expand access to preschool, the sociodemographic composition of preschool classrooms will become increasingly important. These efforts may create programs that increase the concentration of children from low-income families or, alternatively, foster the creation of socioeconomically diverse preschool classrooms. What effect the creation of such contexts would have on very young children remains unclear. Using multilevel methods and data on 2,966 children in 704 prekindergarten classrooms, this study explores the relationship between socioeconomic classroom composition and childrens social and cognitive development. The results indicate positive associations between the mean socioeconomic status (SES) of the class and childrens receptive language, expressive language, and mathematics learning, regardless of childrens own sociodemographic backgrounds and the characteristics of their classrooms. However, the analyses indicate no association between the development of social competence and class mean SES. Practice or Policy: The links between classroom SES and language and mathematics development were comparable in size to those associated with instructional quality and even childrens own SES. Neither structural nor instructional characteristics of prekindergarten classrooms explained these relationships, suggesting the possibility of direct peer effects. The findings indicate that the composition of childrens classrooms should be considered an important aspect of preschool quality.

Attacking the African American-White Achievement Gap on College Admissions Tests

For decades researchers have discussed the lower levels of educational achievement of African American compared with white students.1 This achievement gap exists even among the youngest children; African American students arrive at kindergarten considerably behind their white peers in measurable cognitive skills.2 Although the gap has narrowed somewhat over the past several decades, the average African American still scores below 75 percent of white students on standardized tests.3 Alarming racial gaps are consistently found on the SAT, which plays an important role in the quality of access to higher education and, in turn, to social and economic mobility. Between 1976 and 1988 substantial progress was made in closing the gap, and the advantage for whites was reduced by 25 percent.4 In subsequent years, however, the gap has remained steady or even increased slightly. In 1999 the African American–white SAT gap was between 0.75 and 1 full standard deviation (SD).5 A seemingly endless array of theories has been advanced to explain the consistently lower academic performance of African American students: linguistic and social incongruities between home and school culture; historic immigrant status; differing levels and types of parental involvement; contrasting forms of cultural and social capital; the generally lower socio-

Associations Between Student Achievement and Student Learning Implications for Value-Added School Accountability Models

Accountability systems that measure student learning rather than student achievement have the potential to more accurately evaluate school quality. However, one methodological concern has remained surprisingly absent from discussions of value-added modeling. Standardized assessments that exhibit either positive or negative correlations between achievement and achievement gains will produce value-added estimates that contradict actual patterns of school effectiveness. This study uses student-level state assessment data to explore the ramifications of these relationships for value-added indicators. Within this state’s assessment, the author finds strong negative relationships between achievement and subsequent achievement gains—initially low-scoring students appeared to gain more than their high-achieving peers. Because students are not randomly assigned to schools by achievement, these child-level correlations strongly influence school-level value-added estimates, in some cases quite dramatically. However, the manifestation of these relationships varies across four different analytic techniques, depending on how a particular approach modeled the associations between initial status and gain.

Sociodemographic Inequality in Early Literacy Development: The Role of Teacher Perceptual Accuracy

Previous research has established that student learning is influenced by how accurately teachers perceive student academic ability. But studies rarely investigate the degree to which inaccuracies in teacher perceptions exacerbate demographic inequality in academic ability. Using a sample of almost 14,000 children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort, we found that children whose literacy skills are overestimated by their teachers typically gain more literacy skills during kindergarten. Conversely, children whose skills are underestimated learn less. It is important to note that the skills of socioeconomically disadvantaged children are on average underestimated. As a result, inequalities in kindergarten literacy development stem in part from the links between teacher misperceptions and student background. We also explored the extent to which these relationships operate through practices associated with ability grouping. We found instructional grouping to be a weak facilitator of the link between teacher perceptions and student learning, suggesting the need for further research that identifies the social and structural classroom characteristics that link teacher perceptual accuracy to student learning.