what is the importance of kindergarten education

What Do Kids Learn in Kindergarten?

Whether physical, emotional or social, developing life skills is what kindergarten is all about.

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Kindergarten provides the building blocks of a strong education.

Millions of children will grab lunchboxes, backpacks and rolling bags and head to their first day of kindergarten this year. Some will go for a half day and some for a full. Some will attend private schools and some will go public. For all, however, the first day of kindergarten will inaugurate their arrival in a system where they will spend a dozen years receiving basic education.

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It begs some questions. What are the hallmarks of a high-quality kindergarten classroom? What can parents expect to see in the curriculum? How can mom and dad continue educating at home? In short, what do kids learn in kindergarten?

The answer is that kindergarten provides the building blocks of physical, social and emotional development, as well as the basics of language, literacy, thinking and cognitive skills. Equally important, it provides a bridge from education at home or in preschool to education in a more traditional classroom, where children must interact with a teacher, a set of rules and each other in order to learn.

“I think kindergarten is a good entry point into our education system,” says Alissa Mwenelupembe, senior director for early learning program accreditation at the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a professional organization that works to advance the quality of early learning. “It can really support some of the social-emotional goals that children need to meet so that they can be successful in future academic pursuits.”

Kindergarten Across the U.S.

Almost 4 million children attend kindergarten in the United States each year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau , but kindergarten instruction can be different in every locale, based on a number of variables.

For starters, while kindergarten is available almost everywhere, attendance is only mandatory in 19 states and Washington, D.C., according to the Education Commission of the States . In most communities, both full- and half-day programs are available.

Seventeen states plus Washington, D.C., require full-day kindergarten, and 39 states require districts to offer both full- and half-day options. About 81% of children in kindergarten attended full-day programs as of 2018, the latest year for which numbers are available from the National Center for Education Statistics . That number has increased over the years, climbing from 60% in 2000.

What students learn in kindergarten may also be affected by whether they are attending public school or private. Among the U.S. students who attend kindergarten, only about 15% do so in a private school, according to an analysis by the research firm Statista using 2019 data.

There are also regional differences. In some parts of the country, more emphasis is placed on academic subjects like reading and math, says Tamar Lindenfeld, founder of Chalkdust Inc., which provides tutoring, supplemental learning and academic consulting.

“In New York, the focus for the past 10 or maybe 15 years has been a lot more academic and a lot more rigorous,” she says.

Learning in Kindergarten

According to a primer by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a high-quality kindergarten should address learning in several categories:

• Physical development. This is the development of large motor skills, meaning movement of arms and legs, and fine motor skills, or use of hands and fingers. Playing outside and doing physical activities as a class address the former. Puzzles, drawing and other in-class activities address the latter.
• Social development. This is how a child interacts with others, including working cooperatively, making friends, resolving disputes and other skills. Many aspects of classroom activity will be designed to develop these skills, helping children get along with one another.
• Emotional development. This helps children understand and manage their own feelings. “Teachers help children recognize, talk about, and express their emotions and show concern for others,” the association wrote. “They also support children's development of self-regulation—being able to manage their feelings and behavior.”
• Language and literacy. This develops communication through reading, writing, talking and listening. Literacy is a major focus in early learning, and particularly in kindergarten, because these skills are so critical. Students learn to read so they can read to learn in later grades.
• Thinking and cognitive skills. This encourages students to investigate, make observations, ask questions and solve problems. “Teachers help children plan what they're going to do, encourage children to discuss and think more deeply about ideas, and include children when making decisions,” the association wrote.

Subjects like math, reading, writing, science, social studies and art are also offered in high-quality kindergartens. Mwenelupembe, who is involved in accrediting facilities, says what she looks for in a healthy kindergarten classroom is energy and activity, with children engaging both learning materials and each other to facilitate all aspects of development.

“What is important in kindergarten, but you don't always see, is that playful learning is happening,” she says. “When children are sitting at desks all day and doing things like worksheets, it doesn't really connect with what we know about the brain and how children's brains learn.”

How Parents Can Help

There is much that parents can do to help kindergarten-age children develop in all of these categories, according to education experts. “Parent participation is key,” Clare Anderson, an educational consultant in Maryland, wrote in an email.

“Skills such as persistence and stamina are critical for children to tackle foundational tasks for oral language, vocabulary, and number sense,” she says. “Parents can play an enormous role in encouraging children to wonder, question, and explore.”

Here are some things that parents can do to help kindergarteners learn:

• Encourage exploration. Education experts say that everyday activities can be major opportunities for kindergarten-age children to learn everything from cognitive skills to literacy. One example is a simple trip to the grocery store.
• Talking about the difference between the vegetables, talking about the colors of the produce, talking about how many of something you need, helping them to understand how much things cost – all of those regular, everyday moments are such important pieces of learning that are going to carry through when they get to school,” Mwenelupembe says.
• Engage in conversation. Taking the time to have full conversations with children and explain the things happening around them at home can be extremely beneficial, whether that’s cooking a meal or watering the garden. “Being able to speak and fully explain the things that you're doing to your child provides them with so much vocabulary and so much understanding,” Lindenfeld says.
• Read. Few things do more to further literacy than reading to and with a child. Having a large and compelling selection of books at home and reading those books together is always time well spent.
• Reading to your child is always beneficial,” Lindenfeld says. “No matter the age, no matter how long you're doing it for. If you only have 15 minutes a day, those 15 minutes of reading will be very valuable to your child.”
• Build everyday skills. Anything that requires thinking and cognitive skills can help children learn. “To reinforce kindergarten learning, I would think (about) anything that promotes the development of the brain's executive functions,” Lindenfeld says. “So like anything that builds the ability to think critically, problem solve, multitask, organize, plan or analyze.”
• Encourage physical activity. Opportunities to build motor skills are abundant, but experts also say physical activity can be combined with reading and other subjects to make learning more fun and beneficial. For example, after hearing an adult read a story, children can draw a picture or act out what was read. As Mwenelupembe puts it, “Children learn with their whole bodies.”

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What Makes for a Good Kindergarten Experience?

See how to evaluate a program and how to advocate for your child if their classroom doesn't measure up..

Ideally, kindergarten will be a smooth, sunny introduction to real school for your child, since it sets the stage for the rest of his education. While no program is perfect, some are better than others. Find out what sets them apart and how you can get the best possible start for your child — no matter what your options are. (Also be sure to check out our guide to kindergarten to know what you can expect from the year ahead!)

Why Kindergarten? First, consider the goal of a good kindergarten program. Kindergarten provides your child with an opportunity to learn and practice the essential social, emotional, problem-solving, and study skills that he will use throughout his schooling.

• The development of self-esteem is one of the important goals of kindergarten. This is the process of helping your child feel good about who she is and confident in her ability to tackle the challenges of learning. Books can be a great help with this — these picks help boost confidence in kids. 
• Kindergarten teaches cooperation : the ability to work, learn, and get along with others. A year in kindergarten provides your child with the opportunity to learn patience, as well as the ability to take turns, share, and listen to others — all social and emotional learning skills that he will use through his school years and beyond.
• Most children are naturally curious, but some do not know how to focus or use this curiosity. Kindergarten is a time for sparking and directing your child’s curiosity and natural love of learning.

What Does an Ideal Kindergarten Look Like? Ask any number of educators and parents, and you will get many different descriptions of the ideal kindergarten. But there are certain basic agreements among educators as to what makes a good program. It should:

• Expand your child’s ability to learn about (and from) the world, organize information, and solve problems. This increases his feelings of self-worth and confidence, his ability to work with others, and his interest in challenging tasks.
• Provide a combination of formal (teacher-initiated) and informal (child-initiated) activities. Investigations and projects allow your child to work both on her own and in small groups.
• Minimize use of large group activities that require sitting. Instead, most activities feature play-based, hands-on learning in small groups. As the year progresses, large group activities become a bit longer in preparation for 1st grade.
• Foster a love of books, reading, and writing. There are books, words, and kids’ own writing all over the classroom.

When looking at programs, keep these elements in mind — as well as the specific needs of your child and family. Not every program is perfect for every child. Some children thrive in a program with more direction, some with less. Talk to your child’s preschool teacher, visit a few schools, and talk to the principal or a kindergarten teacher before deciding.

What if the Program Is Less Than Ideal? Perhaps you have little or no choice about where to send your child to kindergarten but are concerned about its quality. First, give the program and teacher some time to get the year going. If you observed the class in the spring and it seems different when your child starts in the fall, there may be a good reason. Many programs start slowly, taking time to help children separate from their families and feel confident in school before adding learning demands.

If after a few weeks you still have concerns, talk to the teacher. Ask her about her goals and share your expectations. Sometimes an apparent mismatch can be just a difference in approach. Keep the dialogue going. Ask for information, but also be willing to hear the “whys” of the teacher’s philosophy.

Still, there are times when a teacher or his approach is not the right fit for your child. Then it is time to talk with the principal . Come prepared with clear points you want to make. This will help the principal see what the problem is and make suggestions to help your child.

Sometimes (but rarely) children need to switch to a different teacher or school. This can be the result of many classroom observations of your child by the teacher, principal, and/or another professional. It is important to have group consensus on this decision.

Help prepare your child for a successful school year with the best kindergarten books at The Scholastic Store . Plus, explore more expert-approved kindergarten books, tips, and resources at our guide to  getting ready for kindergarten , including recommended kindergarten reader s. 

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Education Policy

Teaching in the ways kindergartners learn best, play, relationships, and challenging content.

Picture taken by Laura Bornfreund

Laura bornfreund, erin freschi, march 31, 2023.

This blog post is the first in a series on Promoting Impactful Teaching and Learning in Kindergarten .

Kindergarten is an important year for children and their families. For some, it is their first experience in formal education. Some children may be away from their parents or caregiver for the first time. For those who attended an early childhood program, whether in a center, family childcare home, or with a care provider in the neighborhood, kindergarten may look and feel different than their previous experiences. While kindergarten is the first universal education access point for children, they bring diverse experiences and strengths to the classroom. And it’s incumbent on schools and educators to be ready for children regardless of what those experiences and strengths are.

Transitioning into kindergarten can be an intimidating experience for children and families unless kindergarten is a sturdy bridge that supports families and children through the transition, connecting what comes before and after, and regardless of the learning environments, they may have had. State leaders, district administrators, and kindergarten teachers themselves have an opportunity and an obligation to ensure equitable experiences for children and families through this transition, setting the stage for future growth and goal attainment. Ensuring equitable experiences requires implementing developmentally appropriate practices in kindergarten and addressing inequitable access to kindergarten for many children in this country.

If you attended kindergarten prior to the mid-1990s you may recall lots of play, singing, and graham crackers. Over the years, there has been a shift as kindergarten has become more structured and academic, with limited play and outdoor time. Children are often expected to sit at tables and complete worksheets and other rote close-ended activities. According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC ), play is a critical component of early childhood and children's physical, social, and emotional development, yet play has largely disappeared in kindergarten.

Research has shown that children learn best when they are engaged in developmentally appropriate experiences and activities: play! A developmentally appropriate kindergarten environment can support children socially and emotionally and foster positive relationships with peers and adults. According to Turnaround for Children , “...when educators neither prioritize these skills and mindsets nor integrate them with academic development, students are left without tools for engagement or a language for learning.” Developmentally appropriate environments provide the building blocks to guide the development of executive functioning skills and support foundational literacy, language, and math skills while also providing opportunities for fine and gross motor development. By incorporating play and developmentally appropriate practice into the kindergarten environment, teachers can support all children as they continue to grow and develop during this critical time in their lives.

During a webinar co-sponsored by New America and Campaign for Grade-Level Reading webinar in October 2022, A Pivotal Year: Kindergarten’s Important Role in Students’ Education, Ellen Galinsky, author of Mind in the Making, and Ryan Lee-James, Chief Academic Officer at the Atlanta Speech School, dug deeper into building executive function and children’s reading brain during the kindergarten year. Galinsky urged conversations about kindergarten readiness to move away from focusing on what kindergartners lack when they enter school and instead focus on the strengths they bring and how to then build from there. Schools must be ready for all children. Lee-James highlighted the importance of relationships for building a reading brain. She also discussed how COVID wreaked havoc on children’s learning but pointed out that schools struggled to meet all children’s needs, especially children from marginalized communities, before COVID. “We need to do better for our young learners.”

A second webinar in November 2022, Play + Academics, Relationships,” Teaching in Ways Kindergartners Learn Best explored the most important research findings on teaching and learning in kindergarten. One panelist, Nell Duke, Executive Director of the Center for Early Literacy Success at Stand for Children, spoke about the importance of looking for opportunities for interdisciplinary instruction when you’re developing language. “When you’re developing literacy, you’re developing science and math,” she said. Kathy Hirsch-Pasek, Professor at Temple University, raised how necessary it is to start “with the cultural values that are meaningful to the community that you’re working in.” And, Anya Hurwitz, Executive Director of Sobrato Early Academic Language, built on Hirsch-Pasek’s point, noting that “when children are engaged, when they’re interested, when they’re curious, the learning is deeper.”

Making learning relevant for young children, recognizing the assets and culture they bring to the classroom, and making learning joyful are all part of delivering developmentally appropriate practice.

There are many opportunities to incorporate developmentally appropriate practice, including playful learning, into the kindergarten classroom. Some strategies include:

• Maintaining an intentional emphasis on fostering social and emotional development including supporting relationship development with peers and adults. Providing a safe and supportive social space is the cornerstone of all learning.
• Using a whole child approach meeting children where they are developmentally working toward individualized goals based on their unique needs
• Prioritizing learning opportunities through engaging, guided play in place of close-ended and rote memory activities.
• Utilizing a daily structure that provides children with flexibility and ample opportunities for gross motor and outdoor activities.
• Providing opportunities for student choice and autonomy in their learning and for student talk and collaboration
• Incorporating intentional, culturally responsive, and inclusive family engagement programs and activities.
• Ensuring written materials in the classroom are reflective of the home languages and culture of the children in the class and available in all areas where the child engages throughout the day.
• Remembering always that kindergarten should reflect a joy of learning!

To support kindergarten and early grade educators in delivering these developmentally appropriate practice ideas, state and local education agencies can promote curricula and instructional tools that are aligned with DAP, provide professional learning opportunities to build teacher and principal understanding of child development, and resources to ensure that classrooms are equipped to allow for exploration, discovery, and play.

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Why early childhood care and education matters

The right to education begins at birth.

But new UNESCO data shows that 1 out of 4 children aged 5 have never had any form of pre-primary education. This represents 35 million out of 137 million 5-year-old children worldwide. Despite research that proves the benefits of early childhood care and education (ECCE), only half of all countries guarantee free pre-primary education around the world.

UNESCO’s World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education taking place in Tashkent, Uzbekistan on 14-16 November 2022 will reaffirm every young child’s right to quality care and education, and call for increased investment in children during the period from birth to eight years.  

Here’s what you need to know what early childhood care and education.

Why is early childhood care and education important?

The period from birth to eight years old is one of remarkable brain development for children and represents a crucial window of opportunity for education. When children are healthy, safe and learning well in their early years, they are better able to reach their full developmental potential as adults and participate effectively in economic, social, and civic life. Providing ECCE is regarded as a means of promoting equity and social justice, inclusive economic growth and advancing sustainable development.

A range of research and evidence has converged to support this claim. First, neuroscience has shown that the environment affects the nature of brain architecture – the child’s early experiences can provide either a strong or a fragile foundation for later learning, development and behaviours. Second, the larger economic returns on investment in prior-to-school programmes than in programmes for adolescents and adults has been demonstrated. Third, educational sciences have revealed that participation in early childhood care and education programmes boosts children’s school readiness and reduces the gap between socially advantaged and disadvantaged children at the starting gate of school.

From a human rights perspective, expanding quality early learning is an important means for realizing the right to education within a lifelong learning perspective. ECCE provides a significant preparation to basic education and a lifelong learning journey. In 2021, only 22% of United Nations Member States have made pre-primary education compulsory, and only 45% provide at least one year of free pre-primary education. Only 46 countries have adopted free and compulsory pre-primary education in their laws.

How has access to ECCE evolved?

Overall, there has been significant global progress in achieving inclusive and high-quality ECCE. Globally, the ratio for pre-primary education has increased from 46% in 2010 to 61% in 2020. The global ratio for participation in organized learning one year before the official primary school entry age also increased to reach 75% in 2020. However, in low- and lower-middle-income countries, fewer than two in three children attend organized learning one year before the official primary entry age.  Furthermore, the proportion of children receiving a positive and stimulating home environment remains significantly low with only 64% of children having positive and nurturing home environments. Great regional disparities remain the biggest challenges. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 40% of children have experienced a positive and stimulating home learning environment compared to 90% of children in Europe and Northern America.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted ECCE?

The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effect on ECCE and amplified its crisis. Young children have been deemed the greatest victims of the pandemic, experiencing the impact of on their immediate families, and because of stay-at-home orders of lockdowns, having been deprived of essential services to promote their health, learning and psychosocial well-being. Some children will start basic education without organized learning experiences to the detriment of their readiness for school. It was estimated that the closure of ECCE services has resulted in 19 billion person-days of ECCE instruction lost with 10.75 million children not being able to reach their developmental potential in the first 11 months of the pandemic.

What are the consequences on foundational learning?

ECCE is a pre-requisite for meeting the right to learn and to develop. In particular, access to pre-primary education is a basis for acquiring foundational learning including literacy, numeracy and socio-emotional learning. Yet, according to the recent estimate, about 64% of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple story at age 10. The roots of this learning poverty start in ECCE and its lack of capacity to make children ready for school.

What is the situation regarding ECCE teachers and care staff?

As the calls grow for higher quality ECCE provision, teacher shortages and quality has received increasing attention. The number of teachers who received at least the minimum pedagogical teacher training, both pre-service and in-service, increased from 68% to 80% between 2010 and 2020. It is estimated that ECCE services need another 9.3 million full-time teachers to achieve the SDG target . Most Member States have established qualification requirements for ECCE teachers, while far less attention has been focused on ECCE teachers’ working conditions and career progression. The low social status, poor salaries and job insecurity of ECCE teachers and care staff tend to have an adverse impact on attracting and retaining suitably qualified early childhood educators.

What are the policies, governance and financing implications?

It is time for societies and governments to implement relevant policies to recover and transform their ECCE systems. ECCE is seen by many countries as a key part of the solution to a myriad of challenges including social inclusion and cohesion, economic growth and to tackle other sustainable development challenges. According to the 2022 Global Education Monitoring Report, 150 out of 209 countries have set targets for pre-primary education participation by 2025 or 2030. The proportion of countries that monitor participation rates in pre-primary education is expected to increase from 75% in 2015 to 92% in 2025 and 95% in 2030. It is expected that the pre-primary participation rate for all regions will exceed 90% by 2030. In Central and South Asia, East and South-East Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, participation rates are expected to be nearly 100%. At the same time, it is projected that participation rates in Northern Africa and Western Asia will be about 77% by 2030.

What are the obstacles to ensuring access to quality ECCE?

• Policy fragmentation: In many countries, ECCE policies and services are fragmented and do not leverage whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches to addressing the holistic needs and rights of families and their young children. This is particularly challenging for national governments with limited resources, low institutional capacities and weak governance.
• Lack of public provision : Non-state provision of ECCE continues to grow in many contexts, and the role of non-state actors in influencing policy development and implementation is evident. Non-state actors provide a large proportion of places in pre-primary education. In 2000, 28.5% of pre-primary aged children were enrolled in private institutions, and this rose to 37% in 2019, a figure higher than for primary (19%) or secondary (27%) education.
• Insufficient regulation of the sector : Specific regulations and standards for ECCE are not in place in most countries. Regulations usually do not establish quality assurance mechanisms and those that do, tend not to focus on outcomes.
• Chronic underfunding : An average of 6.6% of education budgets at national and subnational levels were allocated to pre-primary education. Low-income countries, on average, invest 2% of education budgets in pre-primary education, which is far below the target of 10% by 2030 suggested by UNICEF. In terms of international aid, pre-primary education remains the least funded sector.

What are the solutions?

Political will and ownership are key to transforming ECCE. UNESCO’s review highlights progress in some countries, giving an indication of what is required to successfully strengthen the capacity of ECCE systems:

• Expanding and diversifying access : Increasing investment and establishing a legal framework to expand ECCE services are essential steps. Innovative ECCE delivery mechanisms such as mobile kindergartens with teachers, equipment for learning and play, have been deployed in some countries to reach remote areas and provide children with pre-primary education.  
• Enhancing quality and relevance : ECCE curriculum frameworks should cover different aspects of early learning and prepare children with essential knowledge, skills, and dispositions to transit smoothly to formal education.
• Making ECCE educators and caregivers a transforming force : For the transformation of ECCE to take place, ECCE educators need to be adequately supported and empowered to play their part.
• Improving governance and stakeholder participation : Countries have adopted different modes of governance. There are generally two systems that are followed, an integrated system and a split system.
• Using funding to steer ECCE development : Strengthening domestic public financing is important for providing affordable ECCE. Since ECCE services are offered by different ministries, there must be a clear demarcation of funding and financing rules for different sectors and different ministries. Innovative financing may include earmarking resources from economic activities and other sources.
• Establishing systems for monitoring and assessing whole-of-child development . System-level action in strengthening the availability and reliability of data obtained from assessments enables efficient and timely monitoring of programmes and child developmental milestones.
• Galvanize international cooperation and solidarity . The World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education is an opportunity to mobilize existing global, regional, and national networks to increase focus on identifying and sharing innovations, policies and practices.

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Ask the Expert: Why is a Preschool Education Important? ‘When Children Attend High-quality Pre-K Programs, They Get a Really Great Boost in Early Skills That Set Them Up for Success in Elementary School,’ Says Assistant Professor Michael Little

This is part of the monthly  “Ask the Expert” series  in which NC State College of Education faculty answer some of the most commonly asked questions about education.

Early childhood is a critical time when a child’s brain is highly impacted by the contexts and environments that surround them. It is for that reason that NC State College of Education Assistant Professor Michael Little, Ph.D. , says a preschool education is important for all students who are able to attend.

“Oftentimes, when children attend high-quality and effective Pre-K programs, they get a really great boost in early skills that set them up for success in elementary school,” said Little, who studies policies and programs that seek to improve early educational outcomes for students with a focus on connections between preschool and early elementary grades.

Decades of research have demonstrated the benefits of preschool, Little said, including a long-term study of an early model Pre-K program that began in the 1960s. Participants in that study, who are now middle aged, have been followed throughout their lives by researchers who have found that those who attended the preschool program demonstrated beneficial outcomes throughout their lives, including having superior health outcomes and being less likely to be incarcerated than those who did not attend preschool.

Studies on scaled up Pre-K programs, including North Carolina’s state-funded Pre-K program, also show that attendance leads to robust benefits for kids that set them up for success in early elementary school grades, Little said.

Despite these initial benefits, Little said that more can be done to help children sustain the academic gains that they make in preschool. Stronger alignment between preschool and the K-12 school system, specifically in kindergarten through third grade, can help prevent “Pre-K fadeout,” a phenomenon in which the early benefits of preschool can diminish in elementary school.

“This is a really critical challenge because, to deliver on the promise and effectiveness of Pre-K, we need to make sure that we’re sustaining the gains of Pre-K throughout elementary school and beyond,” he said. “That means coordinating and creating an aligned system of early learning that builds upon the gains that kids made in Pre-K and sustains them throughout the early grades. This is often referred to as P-3 alignment.”

Little’s own research has demonstrated that school-based preschool programs, which are located within an elementary school rather than in a separate building, could be a crucial element to improving P-3 alignment. When preschools reside in the same location as K-3 teachers, it can create conditions for educators to better collaborate and share student data in order to break down barriers that often exist between the worlds of Pre-K and K-12 learning.

Making sure that preschool and kindergarten teachers are able to communicate and create stronger transition practices from Pre-K to kindergarten can also help support P-3 alignment, Little said.

In addition to helping children to sustain academic gains, P-3 alignment also has the benefit of helping schools to achieve goals of educational equity, as children who attend state-funded preschool programs are often historically marginalized students or students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“If the effects of Pre-K simply fade away once they enter elementary school, we’re not delivering on the promise of preschool as an equity achieving policy intervention. For us to close achievement gaps and really deliver on the promises of Pre-K, we need to ensure through P-3 alignment that the benefits of Pre-K are sustained,” Little said.

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Early Education Pays Off. A New Study Shows How

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The benefits of early-childhood education can take a decade or more to come into focus, but a new study in the journal Child Development suggests preschool may help prepare students for better academic engagement in high school.

Researchers at the nonprofit ChildTrends, Georgetown University, and the University of Wisconsin tracked more than 4,000 children who started kindergarten in Tulsa, Okla., public schools in 2006. Some 44 percent of the students participated in the Sooner State’s universal state-funded preschools, which include partnerships between school districts and early-learning organizations. Another 14 percent of the students had participated in federal Head Start programs, and the rest did not participate in either program.

Early benefits of preschool participation on students’ math and reading scores mostly faded away by the time students reached high school—a common fade-out problem seen for early education. But Amadon and her colleagues found that students who had participated in Tulsa’s state-funded preschool programs were more likely to attend school regularly and take more-challenging courses than those who participated in Head Start or did not receive early-childhood education.

“The fact that students were attending school more days, the fact that they were enrolling in different types of courses indicates some sort of different engagement in and commitment to their education and their schooling,” said Sara Amadon, a senior research scientist for the nonprofit ChildTrends and lead author of the study. “It didn’t translate to GPA or test scores, but, you know, we also know that GPA and test scores are just one part of the puzzle of persistence and engagement through high school. Those behavioral indicators are also really powerful predictors of graduation.”

The results come as the Biden administration continues to press for universal, publicly funded preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden signed a $1.5 trillion spending bill for fiscal 2022 that included more than $584 million in additional support for child care and early learning programs, including Head Start, Early Head Start, and the Child Care and Development Block Grants. However, the new study suggests state-supported programs may have more-stable benefits than Head Start in the long term.

Overall, students showed no significant differences in cumulative grade point averages or scores on ACT or SAT college placement exams, regardless of whether or not they participated in preschool. There were two exceptions: Native American students performed better in English/language arts on college placement exams, and Hispanic students had higher GPAs, if they attended preschool than if they had not.

Moreover, compared with children who had not attended early education, alumni of Tulsa’s universal preschools challenged themselves more academically: They were significantly more likely to take an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate class, and less likely to fail a high school course in general, than students who had not attended preschool. (By contrast, there was no significant difference academically for students who had participated in Head Start or no early education.)

Better attendance habits later on for preschool participants

In part, this could be because students who attended Tulsa’s universal preschools developed better attendance habits early—and kept them throughout their academic careers.

Students who had attended Tulsa’s preschools were significantly less likely to be chronically absent in high school—defined as missing 10 percent of school days or more—than their classmates who had not attended preschool. On average, preschool alumni missed 1.5 fewer days a year than those who hadn’t attended.

On average, students who had attended Head Start programs instead were also slightly less likely to miss school, but showed no other academic or engagement advantages.

Students of color who had attended preschool were particularly likely to be more engaged in school later on. For example, Hispanic students who had attended preschool attended 2.8 more school days on average in high school compared with Hispanic students who had not attended preschool or who had attended Head Start.

Amadon said the study also highlights the need for educators and school leaders to plan for additional supports for students entering school during the pandemic, who may have had less access to early-childhood education.

“When we think about the upcoming pre-K classes, [education leaders should] make sure they are giving that extra push to ensure that all students are accessing pre-K ... doing a little more outreach, especially to the neighborhoods and communities that you know have families that were hard hit by the pandemic or struggled to find child care” and early education, she said.

The study is part of an ongoing research project tracking the long-term effects of early-childhood education. The next study in the project will focus on differences in college-going among these students.

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• Early childhood education

Every child deserves access to quality early childhood education.

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Quality pre-primary education is the foundation of a child’s journey: every stage of education that follows relies on its success. Yet, despite the proven and lifelong benefits, more than 175 million children – nearly half of all pre-primary-age children globally – are not enrolled in pre-primary education.

Nearly half of all pre-primary-age children around the world are not enrolled in preschool.

In low-income countries, the picture is bleaker, with only 1 in 5 young children enrolled. Children from poor families are the least likely to attend early childhood education programmes. For children who do have access, poorly trained educators, overcrowded and unstimulating environments, and unsuitable curricula diminish the quality of their experiences.

Failure to provide quality early childhood education limits children’s futures by denying them opportunities to reach their full potential. It also limits the futures of countries, robbing them of the human capital needed to reduce inequalities and promote peaceful, prosperous societies.

Why should universal access to pre-primary education be a global priority?

Children enrolled in at least one year of pre-primary education are more likely to develop the critical skills they need to succeed in school and less likely to repeat grades or drop out. As adults, they contribute to peaceful societies and prosperous economies. Evidence of the ways in which pre-primary education advances development exists around the world.

Yet, global disparities in enrolment persist. More than half of low- and lower-middle-income countries are not on track to ensure at least one year of quality pre-primary education for every child by 2030, as set out by the Sustainable Development Goals .

What should governments do to ensure pre-primary education for all?

1. scale up investment.

Pre-primary education provides the highest return on investment of all education sub-sectors. Yet, it receives the smallest share of government expenditure compared to primary, secondary and tertiary education. 

2. Progressively grow the pre-primary system, while improving quality

Efforts to scale up access to pre-primary education should not come at the expense of quality. Quality is the sum of many parts, including teachers, families, communities, resources, and curricula.

Without adequate safeguards for quality, expansion efforts can intensify education inequities. It is only by investing in quality as education systems grow – not after – that governments can expand access and maintain quality.

9.3 million new teachers are needed to achieve universal pre-primary education

Only 50% of pre-primary teachers in low-income countries are trained, only 5% of pre-primary teachers globally work in low-income countries, 3. ensure vulnerable populations are not the last to benefit.

Access to early childhood education has been slow and inequitable, both across and within countries. Worldwide, vulnerable children are disproportionately excluded from quality pre-primary education – even though it can have the greatest impact on them.

To ensure no child is left behind, Governments should adopt policies that commit to universal pre-primary education and prioritize the poorest and hardest-to-reach children at the start of the road to universality, not the end.

*Early childhood education 

The richest children are 7 times more likely to attend ECE* programmes than the poorest

Children of mothers with secondary education are 5 times more likely to attend ECE* programmes

Children in urban areas are 1.5 times more likely to attend ECE* programmes than those in rural areas

Equitable attendance in ECE* programmes exists between girls and boys

What does UNICEF call for to achieve universal pre-primary education?

What does unicef do to advance pre-primary education.

UNICEF works to give every child a fair start in education. We support pre-primary education in 129 countries around the globe by:

• Building political commitment to quality pre-primary education through evidence generation, advocacy and communication
• Strengthening policies and advocating for increased public financing for pre-primary education
• Bolstering national capacity to plan and implement quality pre-primary education at scale
• Enhancing the quality of pre-primary programmes by supporting the development of quality standards, curricular frameworks, teacher training packages and more
• Collecting data and generating evidence for innovative approaches that deliver quality pre-primary education for vulnerable children
• Delivering conflict-sensitive early childhood education and psychosocial support to young children and their families in humanitarian situations

More from UNICEF

Early childhood education for all.

It is time for a world where all children enter school equipped with the skills they need to succeed.

175 million children are not enrolled in pre-primary education – UNICEF

Early childhood education has a new MOOC

A new Massive Open Online Course sets out to give all children the best start in education

5 fun ideas for learning through play

Eat, play, love: Playful ways to help build your child’s brain

Better Early Learning and Development at Scale

Build to last: a framework in support of universal quality pre-primary education, blogs on the pilot countries’ belds experiences:  ghana ,  lesotho ,  the kyrgyz republic,   sao tome and principe.

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A top researcher says it's time to rethink our entire approach to preschool

Anya Kamenetz

Dale Farran has been studying early childhood education for half a century. Yet her most recent scientific publication has made her question everything she thought she knew.

"It really has required a lot of soul-searching, a lot of reading of the literature to try to think of what were plausible reasons that might account for this."

And by "this," she means the outcome of a study that lasted more than a decade. It included 2,990 low-income children in Tennessee who applied to free, public prekindergarten programs. Some were admitted by lottery, and the others were rejected, creating the closest thing you can get in the real world to a randomized, controlled trial — the gold standard in showing causality in science.

The Tennessee Pre-K Debate: Spinach Vs. Easter Grass

Farran and her co-authors at Vanderbilt University followed both groups of children all the way through sixth grade. At the end of their first year, the kids who went to pre-K scored higher on school readiness — as expected.

But after third grade, they were doing worse than the control group. And at the end of sixth grade, they were doing even worse. They had lower test scores, were more likely to be in special education, and were more likely to get into trouble in school, including serious trouble like suspensions.

"Whereas in third grade we saw negative effects on one of the three state achievement tests, in sixth grade we saw it on all three — math, science and reading," says Farran. "In third grade, where we had seen effects on one type of suspension, which is minor violations, by sixth grade we're seeing it on both types of suspensions, both major and minor."

That's right. A statewide public pre-K program, taught by licensed teachers, housed in public schools, had a measurable and statistically significant negative effect on the children in this study.

Farran hadn't expected it. She didn't like it. But her study design was unusually strong, so she couldn't easily explain it away.

"This is still the only randomized controlled trial of a statewide pre-K, and I know that people get upset about this and don't want it to be true."

Why it's a bad time for bad news

It's a bad time for early childhood advocates to get bad news about public pre-K. Federally funded universal prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds has been a cornerstone of President Biden's social agenda, and there are talks about resurrecting it from the stalled-out "Build Back Better" plan. Preschool has been expanding in recent years and is currently publicly funded to some extent in 46 states. About 7 in 10 4-year-olds now attend some kind of academic program.

This enthusiasm has rested in part on research going back to the 1970s. Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, among others, showed substantial long-term returns on investment for specially designed and carefully implemented programs.

To put it crudely, policymakers and experts have touted for decades now that if you give a 4-year-old who is growing up in poverty a good dose of story time and block play, they'll be more likely to grow up to become a high-earning, productive citizen.

What went wrong in Tennessee

No study is the last word. The research on pre-K continues to be mixed. In May 2021, a working paper (not yet peer reviewed) came out that looked at Boston's pre-K program. The study was a similar size to Farran's, used a similar quasi-experimental design based on random assignment, and also followed up with students for years. This study found that the preschool kids had better disciplinary records and were much more likely to graduate from high school, take the SATs and go to college, though their test scores didn't show a difference.

Farran believes that, with a citywide program, there's more opportunity for quality control than in her statewide study. Boston's program spent more per student, and it also was mixed-income, whereas Tennessee's program is for low-income kids only.

So what went wrong in Tennessee? Farran has some ideas — and they challenge almost everything about how we do school. How teachers are prepared, how programs are funded and where they are located. Even something as simple as where the bathrooms are.

In short, Farran is rethinking her own preconceptions, which are an entire field's preconceptions, about what constitutes quality pre-K.

Do kids in poverty deserve the same teaching as rich kids?

"One of the biases that I hadn't examined in myself is the idea that poor children need a different sort of preparation from children of higher-income families."

She's talking about drilling kids on basic skills. Worksheets for tracing letters and numbers. A teacher giving 10-minute lectures to a whole class of 25 kids who are expected to sit on their hands and listen, only five of whom may be paying any attention.

A Harsh Critique Of Federally Funded Pre-K

"Higher-income families are not choosing this kind of preparation," she explains. "And why would we assume that we need to train children of lower-income families earlier?"

Farran points out that families of means tend to choose play-based preschool programs with art, movement, music and nature. Children are asked open-ended questions, and they are listened to.

5 Proven Benefits Of Play

This is not what Farran is seeing in classrooms full of kids in poverty, where "teachers talk a lot, but they seldom listen to children." She thinks that part of the problem is that teachers in many states are certified for teaching students in prekindergarten through grade 5, or sometimes even pre-K-8. Very little of their training focuses on the youngest learners.

So another major bias that she's challenging is the idea that teacher certification equals quality. "There have been three very large studies, the latest one in 2018, which are not showing any relationship between quality and licensure."

Putting a bubble in your mouth

In 2016, Farran published a study based on her observations of publicly funded Tennessee pre-K classrooms similar to those included in this paper. She found then that the largest chunk of the day was spent in transition time. This means simply moving kids around the building.

Partly this is an architectural problem. Private preschools, even home-based day cares, tend to be laid out with little bodies in mind. There are bathrooms just off the classrooms. Children eat in, or very near, the classroom, too. And there is outdoor play space nearby with equipment suitable for short people.

Putting these same programs in public schools can make the whole day more inconvenient.

"So if you're in an older elementary school, the bathroom is going to be down the hall. You've got to take your children out, line them up and then they wait," Farran says. "And then, if you have to use the cafeteria, it's the same thing. You have to walk through the halls, you know: 'Don't touch your neighbor, don't touch the wall, put a bubble in your mouth because you have to be quiet.' "

One of Farran's most intriguing conjectures is that this need for control could explain the extra discipline problems seen later on in her most recent study.

"I think children are not learning internal control. And if anything, they're learning sort of an almost allergic reaction to the amount of external control that they're having, that they're having to experience in school."

In other words, regularly reprimanding kids for doing normal kid stuff at 4 years old, even suspending them, could backfire down the road as children experience school as a place of unreasonable expectations.

We know from other research that the control of children's bodies at school can have disparate racial impact. Other studies have suggested that Black children are disciplined more often in preschool, as they are in later grades. Farran's study, where 70% of the kids were white, found interactions between race, gender, and discipline problems, but no extra effect of attending preschool was detected.

Preschool Suspensions Really Happen And That's Not OK With Connecticut

Where to go from here.

The United States has a child care crisis that COVID-19 both intensified and highlighted. Progressive policymakers and advocates have tried for years to expand public support for child care by "pushing it down" from the existing public school system, using the teachers and the buildings.

Farran praises the direction that New York City, for one, has taken instead: a "mixed-delivery" program with slots for 3- and 4-year-olds. Some kids attend free public preschool in existing nonprofit day care centers, some in Head Start programs and some in traditional schools.

But the biggest lesson Farran has drawn from her research is that we've simply asked too much of pre-K, based on early results from what were essentially showcase pilot programs. "We tend to want a magic bullet," she says.

"Whoever thought that you could provide a 4-year-old from an impoverished family with 5 1/2 hours a day, nine months a year of preschool, and close the achievement gap, and send them to college at a higher rate?" she asks. "I mean, why? Why do we put so much pressure on our pre-K programs?"

We might actually get better results, she says, from simply letting little children play.

Education: Kindergarten Matters!

Can kindergarten be that important.

Posted August 1, 2010

Did you read the article in the New York Times last week discussing research that demonstrated the clear importance of kindergarten to later success? It was a real eye opener for many people who are involved in public education and real confirmation for those of us who have advocated for true reform in an American public-education system that has been in steady decline for years. And, in an odd sort of way, it confirms the wisdom of the 1988 book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten .

Three findings were most compelling. First, children who learned more in kindergarten, compared to similar students, were less likely to be single parents, went to college in higher numbers, had higher incomes, and had retirement plans. What was most striking about these findings was that they stand in sharp contract to other research involving test scores indicating that quality early education had a diminishing effect on students as they progress through elementary and high school.

The second important finding was that the quality of teachers has a direct impact on the long-term success of students, not just on test scores. This result is one of those "We didn't need science to tell us the obvious" observations, but it does defang arguments made from theory, conjecture, anecdote, or ideology suggesting otherwise. Class size had some effect as did the socioeconomic status of students in classes (the higher, the better all students performed). But the data demonstrated unequivocally that better teachers had the most significant influence on their students in adulthood. The researchers estimated that, based on the differences in adult income of the different classes of kindergarteners, exceptional teachers are worth $320,000 a year. That dollar figure doesn't include other personal, economic, and social gains such as improved health, more stable marriages, better parenting , and reduced crime . And these gains are likely to increase exponentially with each succeeding generation.

The third finding, though less clear, is that kindergarteners are gaining something very powerful from quality early education. The researchers didn't speculate on what those benefits are, but some obvious ones are worth considering. These early school experiences may instill a belief in the value of education and a joy (or at least an appreciation) for learning. They may build students' confidence in their competence and their ability to learn. These students may learn important life skills, as the article suggests, such as motivation , discipline, patience, and persistence, all qualities that aren't directly assessed by testing.

Some provocative inferences can be drawn from these findings. These more ethereal gains from quality early education aren't resilient enough to overcome the debilitating environment of bad schools and result in higher test scores. Yet, they are hardy enough to resist the discouraging culture and experiences of bad schools and reemerge in adulthood with, as the research shows, startling benefits.

Several lessons emerge from this article. First, testing isn't a valid measure of educational attainment and long-term benefit. As has often been reported, children who attend quality early education, such Head Start, suffer from a "fade out effect" in which any gains that are made tend to disappear, based on test scores, as children progress through school. Yet, consistent with my indictment of testing, the research found that there were clear benefits to children who attend quality kindergarten that are realized in adulthood. As the lead researcher noted, "We don't really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes." Could the obvious have been stated any more clearly? Doesn't this statement shoot holes in the use of testing as the end-all, be-all of Race to the Top as a means of assessing students' academic benefits and progress? What it does clearly demonstrate is that our current battery of academic-assessment tests simply don't measure what we need them to measure and, as a result, should be reconsidered.

The second lesson is that teachers matter. As such, they deserve not only our respect -- sadly, teachers are typically considered to be pretty far down on the career food chain -- but also much better pay. Thankfully, as noted in the New York Times article, school districts around the country are showing signs of getting this message and starting to pay teachers accordingly (and teachers unions are getting the message that contracts based on seniority and tenure just won't fly these days).

The final, and most important, lesson is that quality early education makes a huge difference. And quality early education is a very good investment. We spend billions upon billions of dollars struggling to deal with problems after the fact, such as lack of job skills, ill health, high unemployment, drug abuse , broken families, and high crime rates, all of which result partly from poor education, with little to show for those dollars spent. Why not prevent these enormous social problems by ensuring high-quality early (and later) education. Imagine the economic gains when you multiply that $320,000 per class by every kindergarten class of disadvantaged students in America by the decades ahead of us. Based on my very rough calculations, it is safe to say that is far into the trillions of dollars.

I don't want to get into an argument with deficit hawks or libertarians about how to pay for education reforms to bolster early education. But it seems obvious that, based on this data, a well-used investment in children, teachers, and schools now can have massive individual, economic, and social benefits twenty year later and beyond.

Jim Taylor, Ph.D. , teaches at the University of San Francisco.

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Why Is Early Childhood Education Important for Children?

Early childhood education (ECE) plays a vital role in children’s development. It provides a strong foundation for later academic, social, and emotional growth.

During these formative years, a child's brain is like a sponge, absorbing new information and experiences at a remarkable rate. According to VeryWellMind, this critical period of brain development brings rapid cognitive, emotional, and physical growth for a child. It paves the way for greater learning capabilities.

Early childhood education programs and ECE educators prove invaluable during this critical time, offering structured, creative environments to nurture the developing child. Engaging in well-designed ECE programs equips children at this stage with the essential tools and skills they will need throughout their academic journey and life.

Cognitive Development in Early Childhood Education

It is important to provide children with stimulating environments and projects to enhance their cognitive abilities during their preschool years.

A key benefit of early childhood education is the support it provides to prepare children for entering kindergarten. Many ECE programs teach children to reason by incorporating problem-solving tasks, which helps to develop their critical thinking skills.

Effective childhood education also encourages children to explore their surroundings, which fosters curiosity and a sense of wonder. Imaginative play, such as pretending to be a doctor or a chef, allows a child to exercise creativity and develop an imagination.

In fact, a great deal of early learning takes place when young students are involved in different forms of play:

• Hands-on activities: These activities involve sensory play, art projects, science experiments, and construction using building blocks. Such activities encourage exploration, creativity, and an understanding of basic scientific concepts.
• Storytelling, reading, music, and dance: Reading and storytelling foster language skills, comprehension, and a love for literature. They also enhance imagination and listening abilities, while activities like singing, dancing, and playing simple musical instruments help young students to develop motor skills, rhythm, and self-expression.
• Group projects and collaborative activities: Working together on projects teaches kids skills such as cooperation, problem-solving, and teamwork.
• Exploration of new cultures and languages: Activities that introduce children to different cultures, languages, and customs broaden their understanding of the world and promote inclusion.
• Technology games and apps: Integrating age-appropriate technology like educational apps and interactive games during playtime enhances learning and tech literacy, which is a practical skill in today’s digital age.

Laying the Foundations for Literacy

A child’s early years lay the groundwork for more advanced literacy skills. During early childhood education, young students develop pre-reading abilities as they practice letter recognition and phonics, as well as building their vocabulary. Even at this young age, children are exposed to a rich language environment, which helps them learn how to communicate.

Long before they enter kindergarten, young students can begin to develop early math knowledge, such as counting, sorting, and recognizing shapes. This rudimentary knowledge supplies children with the necessary tools to sustain themselves academically as they eventually progress through school.

Enhancing Social and Emotional Growth

Social development is closely related to cognitive development. Young students who interact with their peers, share ideas, and collaborate on projects develop valuable social skills, including empathy, cooperation, and conflict resolution.

These social interactions further enhance cognitive abilities and contribute to children’s overall emotional well-being.

Recognizing Diverse Learning Needs

Quality early childhood care acknowledges young students as individuals whose cognitive development is as unique as their personalities. Educators must understand the importance of creating inclusive environments that cater to the various learning needs of each child.

As a result, teachers should provide differentiated instruction, adapting their teaching methods and lesson plans to suit the diverse learning styles of their students. Personalized teaching approaches ensure all children have the opportunity to thrive and reach their full cognitive potential.

Social and Emotional Growth in Early Childhood

An early childhood education program should provide a safe, nurturing environment for young students to develop their social and emotional skills. This type of environment encourages interactions with peers, teachers, and caregivers to build meaningful social connections and relationships. By integrating collaborative play in early childhood education, young students also learn to share, take turns, and cooperate effectively, which are among the biggest challenges for young students to learn.

Early childhood educators can further promote students’ emotional growth by teaching them how to identify and express their emotions in a healthy manner. This way, they learn how to manage their feelings and resolve conflicts peacefully.

Acquiring the ability to manage emotions and resolve conflicts help contribute to children’s emotional intelligence, a necessity for successfully navigating relationships and developing strong social bonds at any age. 

Key Factors in Early Childhood Social and Emotional Growth

Various factors are involved in a student's social, emotional, and academic growth. They include both direct and indirect influences that collectively shape a child's growth.

From the level of nurturing at home to the social and educational experiences at school, nearly every aspect of kids' lives guides them either closer to or further away from becoming well-rounded and capable individuals. Recognizing this intricate interplay is of the utmost importance for caregivers and early childhood educators.

Building Secure Relationships

Children’s social abilities are greatly influenced by the quality of the relationships they forge with early childhood educators such as preschool teachers. These relationships serve as the basis for a child’s sense of security and emotional well-being.

A child who feels supported and cared for is more inclined to develop trust, empathy, and effective communication. The security offered through their relationships helps to create a positive self-image and gives children resilience to overcome social challenges later on.

Furthermore, healthy relational dynamics allow children to practice cooperation, conflict resolution, and emotional regulation. It builds a strong foundation for their future interpersonal interactions and emotional health.

The Role of Free Play in a Child’s Life and Growth

Social and emotional growth are also fueled by participating in free play. “Free play” refers to recreational time, during which young people engage their imaginations. Free play allows them to explore their emotions, develop their creativity, and practice social interactions.

Whether they’re building a tower with blocks or pretending to be superheroes, kids learn important social skills such as negotiation, compromise, and empathy by playing.

The Importance of ECE Programs and ECE Staff

The importance of ECE programs in social and emotional growth cannot be overstated. These programs often incorporate storytelling, role-playing, and group discussions, through which young people learn how to recognize and understand their emotions.

However, a program of early childhood education is only as helpful as the adults who run it. The best early childhood educators demonstrate passion, creativity, and understanding in their work with young people.

These professionals bear the responsibility of supporting their students' social and emotional development during early childhood education. They must create a positive and inclusive classroom environment where everyone can feel valued and respected during their early childhood.

An early childhood educator or preschool teacher may accomplish this goal by serving as a model of positive behavior, and providing guidance during conflicts. Teachers can also encourage empathy to help children develop healthy relationships.

Studies indicate that children with well-developed social and emotional abilities during their early years tend to achieve greater academic success as they grow older. Similarly, these young people tend to experience fewer mental health concerns.

Social and emotional skills allow young students to maintain healthy relationships with each other and their families, manage stress, cope with challenges, and make responsible decisions.

The Role of Early Childhood Education in Preparing for School

Early childhood education programs serve as a bridge between home life with parental involvement and the more structured world of elementary school with teachers. Childcare centers and preschools provide environments that mirror the classroom to encourage adaptability and prepare children for future academic challenges.

These early educational settings also play a crucial role by imparting various skills necessary for healthy development. Young kids become accustomed to adhering to routines while they enhance their abilities to listen and follow instructions.

In addition, children learn to cooperate with others by actively participating in group activities. This early exposure to structured learning cultivates critical thinking and collaboration, which are essential for their proper development and lifelong learning.

Early childhood education also places a strong emphasis on developing self-help skills. Mastering tasks like getting dressed, independently using the restroom, and maintaining good hygiene gives children a sense of independence and self-reliance.

Moreover, a child’s education is fundamental in building confidence and autonomy. Early childhood education equips students with the self-assurance required to navigate the more formal and demanding environment of schooling. Such holistic development ensures children are ready – academically, emotionally, and socially – to transition to the next stage of life.

The Long-Term Benefits of Early Childhood Education

According to Learning Policy Institute, studies consistently demonstrate that children who are provided with high-quality early childhood education reap enduring benefits that last for years to come. Additionally, Learning Policy Institute notes that that children who have attended preschool or early childhood programs demonstrate better academic performance throughout their schooling years when compared to those who did not.

Early childhood education has also been linked to improved socio-economic outcomes in adulthood, according to Gray Group International. Evidently, individuals who receive a high-quality early education are more likely to graduate from high school, seek a degree, and pursue a career.

Ultimately, early childhood education can have a long-lasting, positive impact on a child's overall well-being and future endeavors.

Is Early Childhood Education the Right Path for You?

Early childhood educators help shape the lives of many young learners. They serve as a guidepost for parents and families during one of the most impactful times in children’s lives.

If you're inspired to begin your own ECE journey, consider looking into American Public University's early childhood education associate degree program. In this degree program, students explore the latest in educational practices and child development theories. Visit our Early Childhood Care and Education program page to explore the curriculum.

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The benefits of a kindergarten education: why it is important to start school early.

Starting school early provides children with the essential skills and knowledge to succeed in their academic careers. Kindergarten is the first step toward children realizing their potential and reaching their goals.

Benefits of Kindergarten

One of the main benefits of kindergarten is that it provides children with the opportunity to learn how to interact with others in a social setting. By having regular classroom activities, children develop an understanding of basic concepts that will help them succeed.

Importance of Kindergarten

The importance of kindergarten centers around the fact that it allows children to explore and grow academically, socially, and emotionally through play-based learning activities like music time or outdoor playtime. Additionally, since many kindergarten classrooms are highly interactive environments where teachers use technology such as computers or tablets for teaching purposes, students gain valuable tech skills that can also be beneficial later in life.

Parents’ Goals for Kindergarten Students

Parents’ goals for kindergarten students should be specific and might include:

• mastering basic concepts, such as numbers and letters
• developing positive relationships with classmates
• engaging in meaningful conversations
• building self-confidence
• gaining independence
• mastering basic problem-solving skills

What Are the Benefits of Early Childhood Education?

So, what are the benefits of early childhood education? Early childhood education helps to develop critical thinking skills from a young age by providing opportunities such as problem-solving activities or games that require independent decisions or collaboration between peers. It also encourages creativity through art projects or experiments to promote imagination and innovation. Early childhood education also teaches essential communication skills.

At Calibre Academy we believe there are many advantages of early childhood education. Contact us today to get your child headed for success.

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The Power of Playful Learning in the Early Childhood Setting

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Play versus learning represents a false dichotomy in education (e.g., Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 2008). In part, the persistent belief that learning must be rigid and teacher directed—the opposite of play—is motivated by the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes playful learning (Zosh et al. 2018). And, in part, it is motivated by older perceptions of play and learning. Newer research, however, allows us to reframe the debate as learning via play—as playful learning.

This piece, which is an excerpt from Chapter 5 in  Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth Through Age 8, Fourth Edition (NAEYC 2022), suggests that defining play on a spectrum (Zosh et al. 2018, an idea first introduced by Bergen 1988) helps to resolve old divisions and provides a powerful framework that puts  playful learning —rich curriculum coupled with a playful pedagogy—front and center as a model for all early childhood educators. ( See below for a discussion of play on a spectrum.)

This excerpt also illustrates the ways in which play and learning mutually support one another and how teachers connect learning goals to children’s play. Whether solitary, dramatic, parallel, social, cooperative, onlooker, object, fantasy, physical, constructive, or games with rules, play, in all of its forms, is a teaching practice that optimally facilitates young children’s development and learning. By maximizing children’s choice, promoting wonder and enthusiasm for learning, and leveraging joy, playful learning pedagogies support development across domains and content areas and increase learning relative to more didactic methods (Alfieri et al. 2011; Bonawitz et al. 2011; Sim & Xu 2015).

Playful Learning: A Powerful Teaching Tool

This narrowing of the curriculum and high-stakes assessment practices (such as paper-and-pencil tests for kindergartners) increased stress on educators, children, and families but failed to deliver on the promise of narrowing—let alone closing—the gap.  All  children need well-thought-out curricula, including reading and STEM experiences and an emphasis on executive function skills such as attention, impulse control, and memory (Duncan et al. 2007). But to promote happy, successful, lifelong learners, children must be immersed in developmentally appropriate practice and rich curricular learning that is culturally relevant (NAEYC 2020). Playful learning is a vehicle for achieving this. Schools must also address the inequitable access to play afforded to children (see “Both/And: Early Childhood Education Needs Both Play and Equity,” by Ijumaa Jordan.) All children should be afforded opportunities to play, regardless of their racial group, socioeconomic class, and disability if they have been diagnosed with one. We second the call of Maria Souto-Manning (2017): “Although play has traditionally been positioned as a privilege, it must be (re)positioned as a right, as outlined by the  United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 31” (785).

What Is Playful Learning?

Playful learning describes a learning context in which children learn content while playing freely (free play or self-directed play), with teacher guidance (guided play), or in a structured game. By harnessing children’s natural curiosity and their proclivities to experiment, explore, problem solve, and stay engaged in meaningful activities—especially when doing so with others—teachers maximize learning while individualizing learning goals. Central to this concept is the idea that teachers act more as the Socratic “guide at the side” than a “sage on the stage” (e.g., King 1993, 30; Smith 1993, 35). Rather than view children as empty vessels receiving information, teachers see children as active explorers and discoverers who bring their prior knowledge into the learning experience and construct an understanding of, for example, words such as  forecast  and  low pressure  as they explore weather patterns and the science behind them. In other words, teachers support children as active learners.

Importantly, playful learning pedagogies naturally align with the characteristics that research in the science of learning suggests help humans learn. Playful learning leverages the power of active (minds-on), engaging (not distracting), meaningful, socially interactive, and iterative thinking and learning (Zosh et al. 2018) in powerful ways that lead to increased learning.

Free play lets children explore and express themselves—to be the captains of their own ship. While free play is important, if a teacher has a learning goal, guided play and games are the road to successful outcomes for children (see Weisberg, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff 2013 for a review). Playful learning in the form of guided play, in which the teacher builds in the learning as part of a fun context such as a weather report, keeps the child’s agency but adds an intentional component to the play that helps children learn more from the experience. In fact, when researchers compared children’s skill development during free play in comparison to guided play, they found that children learned more vocabulary (Toub et al. 2018) and spatial skills (Fisher et al. 2013) in guided play than in free play.

Self-Directed Play, Free Play

NAEYC’s 2020 position statement on developmentally appropriate practice uses the term  self-directed play  to refer to play that is initiated and directed by children. Such play is termed  free play  in the larger works of the authors of this excerpt; therefore, free play is the primary term used in this article, with occasional references to self-directed play, the term used in the rest of the DAP book.

Imagine an everyday block corner. The children are immersed in play with each other—some trying to build high towers and others creating a tunnel for the small toy cars on the nearby shelves. But what if there were a few model pictures on the wall of what children could strive to make as they collaborated in that block corner? Might they rotate certain pieces purposely? Might they communicate with one another that the rectangle needs to go on top of the square? Again, a simple insertion of a design that children can try to copy turns a play situation into one ripe with spatial learning. Play is a particularly effective way to engage children with specific content learning when there is a learning goal.

Why Playful Learning Is Critical

Teachers play a crucial role in creating places and spaces where they can introduce playful learning to help all children master not only content but also the skills they will need for future success. The science of learning literature (e.g., Fisher et al. 2013; Weisberg, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff 2013; Zosh et al. 2018) suggests that playful learning can change the “old equation” for learning, which posited that direct, teacher-led instruction, such as lectures and worksheets, was the way to achieve rich content learning. This “new equation” moves beyond a sole focus on content and instead views playful learning as a way to support a breadth of skills while embracing developmentally appropriate practice guidelines (see Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2020).

Using a playful learning pedagogical approach leverages the skill sets of today’s educators and enhances their ability to help children attain curricular goals. It engages what has been termed active learning that is also developmentally appropriate and offers a more equitable way of engaging children by increasing access to participation. When topics are important and culturally relevant to children, they can better identify with the subject and the learning becomes more seamless.

While educators of younger children are already well versed in creating playful and joyful experiences to support social goals (e.g., taking turns and resolving conflicts), they can use this same skill set to support more content-focused curricular goals (e.g., mathematics and literacy). Similarly, while teachers of older children have plenty of experience determining concrete content-based learning goals (e.g., attaining Common Core Standards), they can build upon this set of skills and use playful learning as a pedagogy to meet those goals.

Learning Through Play: A Play Spectrum

As noted previously, play can be thought of as lying on a spectrum that includes free play (or self-directed play), guided play, games, playful instruction, and direct instruction (Bergen 1988; Zosh et al. 2018). For the purposes of this piece, we use a spectrum that includes the first three of these aspects of playful learning, as illustrated in “Play Spectrum Showing Three Types of Playful Learning Situations” below.

The following variables determine the degree to which an activity can be considered playful learning:

• level of adult involvement
• extent to which the child is directing the learning
• presence of a learning goal

Toward the left end of the spectrum are activities with more child agency, less adult involvement, and loosely defined or no particular learning goals. Further to the right, adults are more involved, but children still direct the activity or interaction.

Developmentally appropriate practice does not mean primarily that children play without a planned learning environment or learn mostly through direct instruction (NAEYC 2020). Educators in high-quality early childhood programs offer a range of learning experiences that fall all along this spectrum. By thinking of play as a spectrum, educators can more easily assess where their learning activities and lessons fall on this spectrum by considering the components and intentions of the lesson. Using their professional knowledge of how children develop and learn, their knowledge of individual children, and their understanding of social and cultural contexts, educators can then begin to think strategically about how to target playful learning (especially guided play and games) to leverage how children naturally learn. This more nuanced view of play and playful learning can be used to both meet age-appropriate learning objectives and support engaged, meaningful learning.   

In the kindergarten classroom in the following vignette, children have ample time for play and exploration in centers, where they decide what to play with and what they want to create. These play centers are the focus of the room and the main tool for developing social and emotional as well as academic skills; they reflect and support what the children are learning through whole-group discussions, lessons, and skills-focused stations. In the vignette, the teacher embeds guided play opportunities within the children’s free play.

Studying Bears: Self-Directed Play that Extends What Kindergartners Are Learning

While studying the habits of animals in winter, the class is taking a deeper dive into the lives of American black bears, animals that make their homes in their region. In the block center, one small group of children uses short lengths and cross-sections of real tree branches as blocks along with construction paper to create a forest habitat for black bear figurines. They enlist their friends in the art center to assist in making trees and bushes. Two children are in the writing center. Hearing that their friends are looking for help to create a habitat, they look around and decide a hole punch and blue paper are the perfect tools for making blueberries—a snack black bears love to eat! Now multiple centers and groups of children are involved in making the block center become a black bear habitat.

In the dramatic play center, some of the children pretend to be bear biologists, using stethoscopes, scales, and magnifying glasses to study the health of a couple of plush black bears. When these checkups are complete, the teacher suggests the children could describe the bears’ health in a written “report,” thus embedding guided play within their free play. A few children at the easels in the art center are painting pictures of black bears.

Contributed by Amy Blessing

Free play, or self-directed play, is often heralded as the gold standard of play. It encourages children’s initiative, independence, and problem solving and has been linked to benefits in social and emotional development (e.g., Singer & Singer 1990; Pagani et al. 2010; Romano et al. 2010; Gray 2013) and language and literacy (e.g., Neuman & Roskos 1992). Through play, children explore and make sense of their world, develop imaginative and symbolic thinking, and develop physical competence. The kindergarten children in the example above were developing their fine motor and collaboration skills, displaying their understanding of science concepts (such as the needs of animals and living things), and exercising their literacy and writing skills. Such benefits are precisely why free play has an important role in developmentally appropriate practice. To maximize learning, teachers also provide guided play experiences.

Guided Play

While free play has great value for children, empirical evidence suggests that it is not always sufficient  when there is a pedagogical goal at stake  (Smith & Pellegrini 2008; Alfieri et al. 2011; Fisher et al. 2013; Lillard 2013; Weisberg, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff 2013; Toub et al. 2018). This is where guided play comes in.

Guided play allows teachers to focus children’s play around specific learning goals (e.g., standards-based goals), which can be applied to a variety of topics, from learning place value in math to identifying rhyming words in literacy activities. Note, however, that the teacher does not take over the play activity or even direct it. Instead, she asks probing questions that guide the next level of child-directed exploration. This is a perfect example of how a teacher can initiate a context for learning while still leaving the child in charge. In the previous kindergarten vignette, the teacher guided the children in developing their literacy skills as she embedded writing activities within the free play at the centers.

Facilitating Guided Play

Skilled teachers set up environments and facilitate development and learning throughout the early childhood years, such as in the following:

• Ms. Taglieri notices what 4-month-old Anthony looks at and shows interest in. Following his interest and attention, she plays Peekaboo, adjusting her actions (where she places the blanket and peeks out at him) to maintain engagement.
• Ms. Eberhard notices that 22-month-old Abe knows the color yellow. She prepares her environment based on this observation, placing a few yellow objects along with a few red ones on a small table. Abe immediately goes to the table, picking up each yellow item and verbally labeling them (“Lellow!”).
• Mr. Gorga creates intrigue and participation by inviting his preschool class to “be shape detectives” and to “discover the secret of shapes.” As the children explore the shapes, Mr. Gorga offers questions and prompts to guide children to answer the question “What makes them the same kind of shapes?”

An analogy for facilitating guided play is bumper bowling. If bumpers are in place, most children are more likely than not to knock down some pins when they throw the ball down the lane. That is different than teaching children exactly how to throw it (although some children, such as those who have disabilities or who become frustrated if they feel a challenge is too great, may require that level of support or instruction). Guided play is not a one-size-fits-all prescriptive pedagogical technique. Instead, teachers match the level of support they give in guided play to the children in front of them.

Critically, many teachers already implement these kinds of playful activities. When the children are excited by the birds they have seen outside of their window for the past couple of days, the teachers may capitalize on this interest and provide children with materials for a set of playful activities about bird names, diets, habitats, and songs. Asking children to use their hands to mimic an elephant’s trunk when learning vocabulary can promote learning through playful instruction that involves movement. Similarly, embedding vocabulary in stories that are culturally relevant promotes language and early literacy development (García-Alvarado, Arreguín, & Ruiz-Escalante 2020). For example, a teacher who has several children in his class with Mexican heritage decides to read aloud  Too Many Tamales  (by Gary Soto, illus. Ed Martinez) and have the children reenact scenes from it, learning about different literary themes and concepts through play. The children learn more vocabulary, have a better comprehension of the text, and see themselves and their experiences reflected. The teacher also adds some of the ingredients and props for making tamales into the sociodramatic play center (Salinas-González, Arreguín-Anderson, & Alanís 2018) and invites families to share stories about family  tamaladas  (tamale-making parties).

Evidence Supporting Guided Play as a Powerful Pedagogical Tool

Evidence from the science of learning suggests that discovery-based guided play actually results in increased learning for all children relative to both free play and direct instruction (see Alferi et al. 2011). These effects hold across content areas including spatial learning (Fisher et al. 2013), literacy (Han et al. 2010; Nicolopoulou et al. 2015; Hassinger-Das et al. 2016; Cavanaugh et al. 2017; Toub et al. 2018; Moedt & Holmes 2020), and mathematics (Zosh et al. 2016).

There are several possible reasons for guided play’s effectiveness. First, it harnesses the joy that is critical to creativity and learning (e.g., Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki 1987; Resnick 2007). Second, during guided play, the adults help “set the stage for thought and action” by essentially limiting the number of possible outcomes for the children so that the learning goal is discoverable, but children still direct the activity (Weisberg et al. 2014, 276). Teachers work to provide high-quality materials, eliminate distractions, and prepare the space, but then, critically, they let the child play the active role of construction. Third, in guided play, the teacher points the way toward a positive outcome and hence lessens the ambiguity (the degrees of freedom) without directing children to an answer or limiting children to a single discovery (e.g., Bonawitz et al. 2011). And finally, guided play provides the opportunity for new information to be integrated with existing knowledge and updated as children explore.

Reinforcing Numeracy with a Game

The children in Mr. Cohen’s preschool class are at varying levels of understanding in early numeracy skills (e.g., cardinality, one-to-one correspondence, order irrelevance). He knows that his children need some practice with these skills but wants to make the experience joyful while also building these foundational skills. One day, he brings out a new game for them to play—The Great Race. Carla and Michael look up expectantly, and their faces light up when they realize they will be playing a game instead of completing a worksheet. The two quickly pull out the box, setting up the board and choosing their game pieces. Michael begins by flicking the spinner with his finger, landing on 2. “Nice!” Carla exclaims, as Michael moves his game piece, counting “One, two.” Carla takes a turn next, spinning a 1 and promptly counting “one” as she moves her piece one space ahead. “My turn!” Michael says, eager to win the race. As he spins a 2, he pauses. “One . . . two,” he says, hesitating, as he moves his piece to space 4 on the board. Carla corrects him, “I think you mean ‘three, four,’ right? You have to count up from where you are on the board.” Michael nods, remembering the rules Mr. Cohen taught him earlier that day. “Right,” he says, “three, four.”

Similar to guided play, games can be designed in ways that help support learning goals (Hassinger-Das et al. 2017). In this case, instead of adults playing the role of curating the activity, the games themselves provide this type of external scaffolding. The example with Michael and Carla shows how children can learn through games, which is supported by research. In one well-known study, playing a board game (i.e., The Great Race) in which children navigated through a linear, numerical-based game board (i.e., the game board had equally spaced game spaces that go from left to right) resulted in increased numerical development as compared to playing the same game where the numbers were replaced by colors (Siegler & Ramani 2008) or with numbers organized in a circular fashion (Siegler & Ramani 2009). Structuring experiences so that the learning goal is intertwined naturally with children’s play supports their learning. A critical point with both guided play and games is that children are provided with support but still lead their own learning.

Digital educational games have become enormously popular, with tens of thousands of apps marketed as “educational,” although there is no independent review of these apps. Apps and digital games may have educational value when they inspire active, engaged, meaningful, and socially interactive experiences (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2015), but recent research suggests that many of the most downloaded educational apps do not actually align with these characteristics that lead to learning (Meyer et al. 2021). Teachers should exercise caution and evaluate any activity—digital or not—to see how well it harnesses the power of playful learning.

Next Steps for Educators

Educators are uniquely positioned to prepare today’s children for achievement today and success tomorrow. Further, the evidence is mounting that playful pedagogies appear to be an accessible, powerful tool that harnesses the pillars of learning. This approach can be used across ages and is effective in learning across domains.

By leveraging children’s own interests and mindfully creating activities that let children play their way to new understanding and skills, educators can start using this powerful approach today. By harnessing the children’s interests at different ages and engaging them in playful learning activities, educators can help children learn while having fun. And, importantly, educators will have more fun too when they see children happy and engaged.

As the tide begins to change in individual classrooms, educators need to acknowledge that vast inequalities (e.g., socioeconomic achievement gaps) continue to exist (Kearney & Levine 2016). The larger challenge remains in propelling a cultural shift so that administrators, families, and policymakers understand the way in which educators can support the success of all children through high-quality, playful learning experiences.

Consider the following reflection questions as you reflect how to support equitable playful learning experiences for each and every child:

• One of the best places to start is by thinking about your teaching strengths. Perhaps you are great at sparking joy and engagement. Or maybe you are able to frequently leverage children’s home lives in your lessons. How can you expand practices you already use as an educator or are learning about in your courses to incorporate the playful learning described in this article?
• How can you share the information in this chapter with families, administrators, and other educators? How can you help them understand how play can engage children in deep, joyful learning?

This piece is excerpted from NAEYC’s recently published book  Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth Through Age 8,  Fourth Edition. For more information about the book, visit  NAEYC.org/resources/pubs/books/dap-fourth-edition .

Teaching Play Skills

Pamela Brillante

While many young children with autism spectrum disorder enjoy playing, they can have difficulty engaging in traditional play activities. They may engage in activities that do not look like ordinary play, including playing with only a few specific toys or playing in a specific, repetitive way.

Even though most children learn play skills naturally, sometimes families and teachers have to teach children how to play. Learning how to play will help develop many other skills young children need for the future, including

• social skills:  taking turns, sharing, and working cooperatively
• cognitive skills:  problem-solving skills, early academic skills
• communication skills:  responding to others, asking questions
• physical skills:  body awareness, fine and gross motor coordination

Several evidence-based therapeutic approaches to teaching young children with autism focus on teaching play skills, including

• The Play Project:  https://playproject.org
• The Greenspan Floortime approach: https://stanleygreenspan.com
• Integrated Play Group (IPG) Model: www.wolfberg.com

While many children with autism have professionals and therapists working with them, teachers and families should work collaboratively and provide multiple opportunities for children to practice new skills and engage in play at their own level. For example, focus on simple activities that promote engagement between the adult and the child as well as the child and their peers without disabilities, including playing with things such as bubbles, cause-and-effect toys, and interactive books. You can also use the child’s preferred toy in the play, like having the Spider-Man figure be the one popping the bubbles.

Pamela Brillante , EdD, has spent 30 years working as a special education teacher, administrator, consultant, and professor. In addition to her full-time faculty position in the Department of Special Education, Professional Counseling and Disability Studies at William Paterson University of New Jersey, Dr. Brillante continues to consult with school districts and present to teachers and families on the topic of high-quality, inclusive early childhood practices.  

Photographs: © Getty Images Copyright © 2022 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. See Permissions and Reprints online at  NAEYC.org/resources/permissions .

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Souto-Manning, M. 2017. “Is Play a Privilege or a Right? And What’s Our Responsibility? On the Role of Play for Equity in Early Childhood Education.” Foreword. Early Child Development and Care 187 (5–6): 785–87. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03004430.2016.1266588 . 

Toub, T.S., B. Hassinger-Das, K.T. Nesbitt, H. Ilgaz, D.S. Weisberg, K. Hirsh-Pasek, R.M. Golinkoff, A. Nicolopoulou, & D.K. Dickinson. 2018. “The Language of Play: Developing Preschool Vocabulary Through Play Following Shared Book-Reading.” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 45 (4): 1–17.  

Weisberg, D.S., K. Hirsh-Pasek, & R.M. Golinkoff. 2013. “Guided Play: Where Curricular Goals Meet a Playful Pedagogy.” Mind, Brain, and Education 7 (2): 104–12. 

Weisberg, D.S., K. Hirsh-Pasek, R.M. Golinkoff, & B.D. McCandliss. 2014. “Mise en place: Setting the Stage for Thought and Action.” Trends in Cognitive Science 18 (6): 276–78. 

Zosh, J.M., B. Hassinger-Das, T.S. Toub, K. Hirsh-Pasek, & R. Golinkoff. 2016. “Playing with Mathematics: How Play Supports Learning and the Common Core State Standards.” Journal of Mathematics Education at Teachers College 7 (1): 45–49. https://doi.org/10.7916/jmetc.v7i1.787 . 

Zosh, J.M., K. Hirsh-Pasek, E.J. Hopkins, H. Jensen, C. Liu, D. Neale, S.L. Solis, & D. Whitebread. 2018. “Accessing the Inaccessible: Redefining Play as a Spectrum.” Frontiers in Psychology 9: 1–12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01124 . 

Jennifer M. Zosh, PhD, is professor of human development and family studies at Penn State Brandywine. Most recently, her work has focused on technology and its impact on children as well as playful learning as a powerful pedagogy. She publishes journal articles, book chapters, blogs, and white papers and focuses on the dissemination of developmental research.

Caroline Gaudreau, PhD, is a research professional at the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD from the University of Delaware, where she studied how children learn to ask questions and interact with screen media. She is passionate about disseminating research and interventions to families across the country.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PhD, conducts research on language development, the benefits of play, spatial learning, and the effects of media on children. A member of the National Academy of Education, she is a cofounder of Playful Learning Landscapes, Learning Science Exchange, and the Ultimate Playbook for Reimagining Education. Her last book, Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children (American Psychological Association, 2016), reached the New York Times bestseller list.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PhD, is the Lefkowitz Faculty Fellow in the Psychology and Neuroscience department at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  She is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research examines the development of early language and literacy, the role of play in learning, and learning and technology. [email protected]

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Is a Preschool Education Important?

In 2013, President Obama proposed making high-quality preschool education available to every four-year-old in the United States. Since then, early childhood education has been a controversial topic with both parents and policymakers. For the 2014-2015 year, 44 states  offered state-funded pre-Kindergarten education for children beginning at age 4. Prior to age 4, parents are responsible for the full cost of preschool. 

Cost of Preschool

Most preschool fees are comparable to the high costs of daycare centers . Depending on where you live and the quality of the preschool, average costs range from $4,460 to $13,158 per year ($372 to $1,100 monthly), according to the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies (NACCRRA).

In cities, such as New York and Boston, full-day preschool may cost $20,000 for more or school-year tuition, summers not included. Some pre-schools offer aftercare but others end before parents get home from work, which adds another babysitter or nanny cost into the budget. 

Even if you can afford preschool, some parents are unsure about what children learn in preschool and whether their child will be ready for kindergarten following a preschool education.

What Do Kids Learn in Preschool?

Below we look at what children learn in preschool:

Social and Emotional Development

In preschool, children will learn to strengthen their social and emotional development . Children learn how to compromise, be respectful and problem solve. Preschool provides an environment for children to explore, gain a sense of self, play with peers and build self-confidence. Children learn they can accomplish tasks and make decisions without the help of their parents.

School Readiness

Behavior management is a major part of preschool learning. In preschool, children learn how to be students. Children learn patience, how to raise their hands and take turns. Children also learn how to share the teacher's attention.

Children also learn about routine, following directions and waiting. Quality preschools help children find answers through exploration, experimentation, and conversation. Going to preschool also helps children learn to separate from their parent or caregiver.

Language and Cognitive Skills

Children’s language skills are nurtured in a “language-rich” environment. In a classroom setting, teachers help children strengthen their language skills by introducing new vocabulary during art, snack time, and other activities. Teachers engage students with thought-provoking questions to give them opportunities to learn language through singing, talking about books and creative play.

In pre-school pre-math and pre-literacy skills are introduced. Children are taught numbers and letters, but it is taught in a way that is appealing to children at that age. Children sing an alphabet song while following along in a picture book or learn rhymes and chants, which help them to notice the distinct sounds within words.

Teachers read stories to children to encourage their listening , comprehension, and expressive language skills. Matching games, sorting games and counting games build children’s understanding of numbers, and sequences. Putting puzzles together encourages children to notice patterns and to work on problem-solving skills.

Children learn best through activities they find interesting, such as songs, storytime, and imaginative play. Preschool is not about achieving academic success; it is about creating a well-round child who wants to explore and question their surroundings. 

In preschool children will gain the confidence of themselves as capable and independent learners.

Self-Confidence

In pre-school, children learn they can actually do things for themselves. Children will learn to wash their hands, go to the bathroom and take off their shoes without an adult doing it for them. Children may have classroom jobs and take pride in helping out in the classroom. Learning new skills helps builds confidence.

A Word From Verywell

A quality early childhood education provides children with cognitive, behavioral, and social skills they don't learn at home. Teachers find it easier to teach a child who possesses a strong preschool education background in language skills, listening comprehension, attention management skills, and a positive attitude toward learning.

U.S. Department of Education. Obama Administration Investments in Early Learning Have Led to Thousands More Children Enrolled in High-Quality Preschool .

National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies. Parents and the high cost of child care .

By Robin McClure  Robin McClure is a public school administrator and author of 6 parenting books.

10 good reasons your child should attend preschool

by: The GreatSchools Editorial Team | Updated: December 15, 2023

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Preschool provides a foundation for learning both socially and academically that will help your child succeed in elementary school. We have ten good reasons why your youngster can benefit from attending a good preschool.

Preschool is an opportunity for growth

Preparing children for kindergarten.

As kindergarten becomes more academic, many parents l ook to preschool to launch their child on the path to success in schoo l. At the same time, parents may worry that the current trend to focus on pre-math and pre-literacy skills in preschool cuts into important play time and pushes a child to grow up too fast. It’s a confusing issue,especially with friends and family offering different opinions and advice.

Fortunately, in selecting a preschool, parents aren’t forced to choose between protecting a child’s play time and making sure she’s ready for kindergarten. A high-quality early childhood education program will offer children both.

Promoting social and emotional development

In order to learn, a young child needs to feel cared for and secure with a teacher or caregiver. A 3-year-old child is able to spend time away from parents and build trusting relationships with adults outside the family. High-quality preschool programs nurture warm relationships among children, teachers and parents. And teachers build a close personal connection with each child in their care.

Children thrive when there is consistency in care between home and school. In high-quality preschools, teachers value parents as the experts on their children. Parents get daily reports on their child’s activities and regular meetings are scheduled for more in-depth conferences with staff. Teachers strive to understand and respect parents’ child-rearing goals and values.

The preschool environment is structured, although it may not appear that way

Children get to make choices, children learn to take care of themselves and others.

Children’s sense of competence and self-worth grow as they learn to take care of themselves and help others. Teachers appeal to a young child’s desire to engage in “real work” by offering him chances to help out in the classroom, for example, by setting the table at snack time or feeding the classroom hamster. Children are expected to wash their hands before snack time, keep personal belongings in their “cubby,” and put away toys before moving to a new activity.

Teachers also encourage a child to view herself as a resource for other children. For example, a teacher might ask a child who’s more competent at pouring water to help a child who is learning. Or she might ask a “veteran” preschooler to show a newcomer where the sand toys are kept.

Promoting language and cognitive skills

Preschool-age children’s language skills are nurtured in a “language-rich” environment. Between the ages of 3 and 5, a child’s vocabulary grows from 900 to 2,500 words, and her sentences become longer and more complex. In a conversational manner, and without dominating the discussion, teachers help children stretch their language skills by asking thought-provoking questions and introducing new vocabulary during science, art, snack time, and other activities. Children have many opportunities to sing, talk about favorite read-aloud books, and act out stories.

Preschool teachers nurture a child’s curiosity

Teachers observe, ask questions and listen to children’s ideas during these activities — “correct” answers are not the goal. To nurture their curiosity and motivation to learn, teachers use children’s interests and ideas to create activities. And even a simple, chance event – such as a child’s discovery of a snail in the outdoor play area — can be turned into an exciting opportunity to learn.

Preschool-age children have active imaginations and learn through make-believe play. Teachers know that the line between reality and fantasy is often not clear to a young child. Sometimes this results in fears of monsters under the bed. But imagination also fuels learning. For example, when a group of children creates a make-believe pet store, they will practice many social and cognitive skills as they assign roles to each child, figure out categories of pet supplies and how to organize them, make signs to label products; help their “customers” select the right shampoo or cat toy; and take “money” for merchandize.

Preschool activities boost pre-math and literacy skills

Young children show growing interest in pre-math and pre-literacy skills. They are curious and observant, and they want to be competent in the skills that their families and society value — such as reading the instructions for assembling a toy, or selecting the correct bills or coins to pay for a purchase. To prepare children for the academic demands of kindergarten, teachers offer a wide variety of games and activities that help children acquire the pre- math and literacy skills.

Singing an alphabet song while following along in a picture book builds a child’s awareness of the connections between alphabet letters and word sounds. Learning rhymes and chants helps them to notice the distinct sounds within words. Engaging children in a discussion about an exciting read-aloud story encourages their listening, comprehension, and expressive language skills. Playing with magnetic alphabet letters may inspire a child to ask a teacher to help her write the first letter of her name.

Matching games, sorting games, counting games, and board games build children’s understanding of number, categories and sequence, which supports later math learning. Putting together puzzles encourages children to notice patterns, plan ahead and problem-solve.

10. Helping develop motor skills

When you choose a high-quality program that suits your child and family, you can feel assured that your child is well cared for, is enjoying activities and making friends — and is building the knowledge, skills, and confidence to do well in kindergarten.

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Parent Resources for Learning > Core Skills > How Early Childhood Education Improves Kids’ Lives

How Early Childhood Education Improves Kids’ Lives

by Dr. Jody Sherman LeVos | May 21, 2024 | Core Skills

When you imagine your child thriving in high school or as an adult, what do you see as the path that brought them there? 

Does it start with them collecting rocks on a walk with you now? How about pointing at a picture book and naming emotions? Cooking together in the kitchen?

Their early childhood education—whether it’s what they do in preschool or daycare or what they do at home with you—has important impacts down the road. 

Rock collecting can lead to them being more curious in high school. Naming their emotions prepares them to build strong relationships. Cooking can teach them critical thinking and early math skills .

Wonder why, and how you can be an integral part of creating a positive early learning impact on your child? We’ve got some answers for you!

The Short Cut

• Early childhood education, both formal (daycare and preschool) and informal (at home, museum exhibits, library reading hour), is an important part of setting kids up for long-term success
• When kids have high-quality learning experiences in early childhood, especially when combined with secure attachments, they’re more likely to graduate high school, less likely to end up in the criminal justice system, are healthier as adults, and earn more over their lifetimes
• Kids encouraged in Begin’s 5 C’s ( Core Skills , Creativity , Critical Thinking , Curiosity , and Character ) as part of their early childhood learning experiences are more engaged in school and score better in reading and math
• Begin offers a play-based learning membership rooted in the 5 C’s, delivering learning at the right time and in the right way for every child

7 Reasons for the Importance of Early Childhood Education

Offering your child a rich early childhood education gives them the opportunity to fall in love with learning before they go into their first classroom. It also takes advantage of the flexibility of their brain to get them primed for later learning.

Early childhood education is so important that the United Nations recognizes it as a dedicated target in its Sustainable Development Goals . Target 4.2 specifically asks countries to “ensure that, by 2030, all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education.”

Some of the biggest reasons early childhood education is important include:

1. Shaping Growing Brains

Children’s brains develop at an astonishing rate between birth and eight years old. 

During these years, their brains are changing rapidly. They respond to their environment and experiences with the creation of billions of neural connections. 

A rich early childhood education shapes that environment and those experiences in a way that promotes lifelong learning. When kids have healthy, positive, and stimulating early years, it shapes their minds in ways that lead to long-term well-being.

2. Building a Foundation for Literacy and Numeracy

Literacy and numeracy sound like advanced skills—and they can be!—but working on them with even very young kids isn’t outside of your reach. 

Activities like reading books to your child and making up stories together are part of literacy preparation. And playing music, doing puzzles, and counting everyday objects as part of your daily routine are precursors to numeracy.

Having those basic pre-writing and early math skills at school entry sets kids up for long-term academic success.

3. Discovering Learning Challenges and Needs

Some kids are naturally drawn to math concepts or fast to pick up the meaning of phonemes . Others emotionally regulate themselves more easily outside than in your home. And many kids struggle with executive functioning (skills like paying attention and following directions) or with aspects of language.

The earlier you begin to identify your child’s particular skills and needs as they relate to learning, the sooner you can help them find opportunities to practice what they’re good at and help them learn how to face challenges. These skills, in turn, help them throughout their lives.

4. Nurturing Social and Emotional Skills

Whenever you’re dressing up and role-playing with your child , taking them to the park to meet peers, or giving them a chance to practice collaborative play at daycare or a playgroup, you’re encouraging your child to develop social skills. This helps them develop meaningful relationships at all ages. 

And if you help your child identify and express their feelings , you’re paving the way for better relationships, improved conflict resolution, and empathy.

5. Establishing Secure Relationships

As your child practices their social skills with you, they’ll also be forming relationships with various other people in their life, like friends, teachers, and neighbors. As these relationships grow, your child may begin to feel a sense of safety and develop trust with these people. 

Developing these relationships at an early age has far-reaching benefits. If your child feels supported and heard, they can begin to work on skills like cooperation and emotional regulation. These skills make learning in a classroom or community much easier.

6. Developing Good Habits 

You can add intentional learning time into your child’s day by incorporating it as part of a routine. So you might make a point to use your bedtime reading ritual to talk about characters and their emotions or how the plot of the story is sequenced. Or you might practice counting while washing hands before dinner.

Kids feel reassured by a routine. It can reduce their anxiety because they know what to expect. It can also inspire them to practice independence. For example, if they know you always go for a walk together after dinner, one evening they may finish eating and rush to their shoes to attempt to put them on by themselves. 

7. Instilling a Lifelong Love of Learning

Centering your child’s early learning on having fun will go a long way toward cultivating a passion for exploring new things and gaining knowledge. If they enjoy learning at a young age, they’re likely to stay more open to it as they get older. 

Helping your child develop motivation to learn is also an important aspect of early childhood education. If they’ve got the internal drive to explore new ideas and try new things, they’ll go far!

The Importance of Early Childhood Education Outside of the Home

One of the best ways to get a good early childhood education is through quality daycare and preschool. 

When they go to a high-quality daycare and preschool, kids build stable relationships, experience safe and stable environments, enjoy nutritious meals, and establish health-promoting behaviors. They also work on emotional well-being and literacy skills, creativity and curiosity, and executive functioning skills—all in a safe and dependable place.

These positive effects matter for all kids! It doesn’t matter if you work full-time and rely on daycare or send your child to preschool part-time because you want them to have more social experiences—high-quality formal early childhood education makes a difference for kids and can improve:

• Cognitive skills
• Social and behavior skills
• Language and math skills 
• High school graduation rates
• Chances of not getting involved in the criminal justice system
• Adult health
• Lifelong earnings

Nurturing Early Childhood Education in Your Home

While formal education is helpful, it’s not all that matters. You have an enormous impact on your child’s early education—and you don’t have to follow a curriculum to do it!

As their primary caregiver, you create their first secure bond. This allows them to feel safe in their environment and courageous in their pursuit of what lies outside of it.

Beyond that, because you spend so much time with your child (and they’re so attuned to your interests in their early years), you have lots of chances to help them learn critical skills.

Great learning materials to have on hand include:

• Objects for outdoor play (like sticks, rocks, and shells)
• Toys for outdoor play (like chalk, balls, and bikes)
• Objects for indoor play (like pots and pans, laundry baskets, and tissue boxes)
• Toys for indoor play (like dress-up clothes, blocks, and puzzles)
• Art materials (like paper, tape, and kid-safe markers or paints)

Reading books, cooking, building with blocks, painting a picture, and going on nature scavenger hunts are a few everyday activities that help your child learn important skills. You can also work on:

• Phonemic awareness  
• Emotional regulation  
• Letter recognition  
• Early math  
• Sensory activities  
• Learning shapes  
• Teaching kindness  
• Artistic expression  
• Naming feelings  

And much, much more—all through simple activities and everyday play.

The Begin Approach to Early Childhood Education

Doing early childhood education at home gives kids a head start when they enter a formal school system. They go into school with core academic and critical thinking skills, curiosity and the confidence to share it, comfort with expressing themselves creatively, and the social skills to build their character.

At Begin, we understand the importance of early childhood education, and we make it easy for parents.

Whether your child is learning with you, a daycare provider, or a teacher, Begin can help you (all of you!) build their capacity for learning. Our age- and stage-matched learning membership supports your child every step of the way. 

Take our online quiz today to discover which stage of our membership is best for your family!

Jody has a Ph.D. in Developmental Science and more than a decade of experience in the children’s media and early learning space.

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Dr. Jody Sherman LeVos

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Personal values and social behavior in early childhood: Understanding the contribution of social information processing and attitudes

• Open access
• Published: 25 May 2024

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• Einat Elizarov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7457-9287 1 ,
• Yair Ziv   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2470-0904 1 &
• Maya Benish-Weisman   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0717-6573 2  

Values, defined by Schwartz (1994) as basic motivational cognitive structures, guide life goals, transcend contexts, and affect individuals’ courses of action differently depending on their preferred values. With young children, an important question that emerges is what factors underlie the linkages between their preferred motivations (i.e., preferred values) and their behavior tendencies in key social contexts. This study proposed one potential socio-cognitive mechanism that may explain how children’s values are linked to their prosocial and antisocial behaviors in kindergarten via their values-oriented social information processing patterns (SIP) and their attitudes toward their kindergarten. The sample included 121 children (59 girls; M age = 67.45 months). Children’s values, values-oriented SIP patterns, and attitudes toward kindergarten class were examined in one-on-one interviews. Teachers reported on the children’s social behaviors. Results showed children’s preferences for self-transcendence values were linked to their more prosocial behaviors and less antisocial behaviors in class via their self-transcendence values-oriented SIP patterns and their positive attitudes toward kindergarten. The findings offer important insights into the socio-cognitive elements that drive values-behavior relationships, as well as the links between various facets of young children’s social cognition and their social behavior in kindergarten.

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Introduction

Values are relatively stable motivational cognitive structures that express individuals’ trans-situational goals and guide their daily behaviors as active agents in their own social world (Bardi & Goodwin, 2011 ; Schwartz, 1994 , 2012 ). There is ample evidence of the important role values play in explaining human behavior across contexts and age groups (e.g., Lönnqvist et al., 2011 ; Schwartz et al., 2010 ), including shaping individuals’ prosocial and antisocial behaviors, significant indicators of social adjustment (e.g., Benish-Weisman, 2019 ; Daniel et al., 2020 ; Knafo et al., 2008 ; Sagiv et al., 2011 ). However, our understanding of the socio-cognitive mechanisms underlying how our values influence our social behavior tendencies in a specific social environment (e.g., school or work) remains limited (Sagiv & Roccas, 2021 ).

Therefore, in this study, we explore a socio-cognitive mechanism that may underpin the links between values and social behaviors by examining the involvement of social information processing (SIP) patterns and attitudes. We based our conceptualization on the values theory proposed by Schwartz ( 1994 ) and Crick and Dodge’s ( 1994 ) SIP theoretical model which proposes that individuals’ values, as components of their social schemas, play a role in how they process social information during interactions with others. Further, as individuals prioritize different values (Lee et al., 2022 ; Schwartz, 2012 ), their values are likely to influence their SIP patterns in different ways. Individuals’ diverse SIP patterns, influenced by the different values they endorse, can shape their daily experiences of social occurrences within a specific social environment, such as school or work. In turn, these experiences can differentially influence their attitudes toward that environment and its related activities (e.g., Denham et al., 2013 ; van Vianen, 1997 ; Ziv et al., 2016 ), ultimately influencing how they act and interact with others within that setting (Ajzen et al., 2018 ; Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978 ; see Fig. 1 for the conceptual model).

The study’s conceptual pathway model linking kindergarten children’s preferred values and social behaviors in class via kindergarteners’ values-oriented social information processing (SIP) patterns and their attitudes toward the kindergarten class

Our study examined the proposed socio-cognitive mechanism in 5-year-old children. At this age, children are going through major developmental changes that impact their cognitive capabilities, the way they understand themselves and others, and their social skills and conduct (Benson et al., 2013 ; Dapp & Roebers, 2018 ; Killen et al., 2018 ; Rapp et al., 2019 ). While research has made considerable advances in theory and methods, broadening our understanding of young children’s evolving social cognition, encompassing children’s values schemas (e.g., Benish‐Weisman, 2019 ; Lee et al., 2017 ) and their SIP patterns (e.g., Schultz et al., 2010 ; Ziv & Arbel, 2021 ), as well as their connections to the children’s social behaviors, there is substantial room for further exploration. Specifically, there is a need to explore the mental mechanisms and underlying motivational models guiding children’s social conduct, while considering the complex interplay between different facets of their social cognition. Accordingly, we explored the relationships between kindergarten children’s values and their prosocial and antisocial behaviors in kindergarten via their values-oriented SIP patterns and their attitudes toward kindergarten.

Values and social behavior

The values theory underpinning this research was developed by Schwartz ( 1994 ). According to Schwartz’s theory, values are guiding principles in individuals’ lives that motivate their aspirations to achieve desired goals across different life domains (e.g., to be supportive and considerate of family and friends, to be perceived as successful; Rokeach 1973 ; Schwartz, 1994 , 2012 ). The model differentiates between 10 basic values which can be grouped into four higher-order categorizations divided along two orthogonal bipolar dimensions reflecting opposing motivations (Schwartz & Boehnke, 2004 ). One dimension underscores the motivational conflict between conservation values (tradition, conformity, and security) that emphasize the avoidance of change through the preservation of the status quo and adherence to formal and informal rules and openness-to-change values (self-direction and stimulation) that advocate for excitement, challenges, and life changes by fostering new ideas and actions. The focus of this study is on the second dimension which illustrates the motivational conflict between self-transcendence values (universalism and benevolence) that promote concern for others’ interests and well-being and for nature and self-enhancement values (power and achievement) that advance self-promotion and the aspiration to be successful, dominant, and wealthy.

The associations between conservation and openness-to-change values and prosocial and antisocial behaviors, the behaviors of interest in our study, have been found to be inconsistent (e.g., Benish‐Weisman, 2019 ), varying, for instance, based on individuals’ developmental stage (e.g., Benish‐Weisman et al.,  2019 ). However, the directionality of the associations between self-transcendence and self-enhancement values and individuals’ prosocial and antisocial behaviors remains largely consistent. This values dimension expresses the tension between prioritizing caring for others versus caring for self-interests and thus strongly relates to prosocial and antisocial behaviors. Specifically, self-transcendence values exhibit positive associations with prosocial behaviors and negative associations with antisocial behaviors, while the opposite is true for self-enhancement values (Knafo et al., 2008 ; Misgav et al., 2022 ; Sanderson & McQuilkin, 2017 ; Schwartz, 2010 ). For example, Benish-Weisman and colleagues ( 2019 ) showed that in elementary school children (age range 6–12), self-transcendence values are linked to more prosocial behavior, and self-enhancement values are linked to less prosocial behavior. Most of these previous studies focused on school-aged children and older individuals and investigated direct associations between their values and social behaviors. We extended the examination to younger children (5 years old) and explored the potentially mediating role of other aspects within children’s social cognition, establishing indirect links between values and prosocial and antisocial behaviors.

While values research has made progress in clarifying the dynamic relationships between values and social behavior, the underlying mechanisms are unclear (Bardi & Schwartz, 2003 ; Sagiv & Roccas, 2021 ). Research demonstrates, for example, that contextual and environmental factors (e.g., Bacchini et al., 2015 ; Knafo et al., 2008 ), as well as values accessibility (e.g., Maio et al., 2001 ; Sagiv et al., 2011 ) and level of importance (Lee et al., 2022 ), play a role in values-behavior relationships. It would be useful to determine the socio-cognitive mechanisms driving these relationships. In the current study, we empirically explored a potential underlying mechanism; more specifically, we proposed an indirect path between values and behavior via SIP and attitudes.

SIP and attitudes as an underlying mechanism of values-social behavior relationships

Values and sip.

Based on Crick and Dodge ( 1994 ), the SIP mechanism can be viewed as an operator responsible for the translation of stored knowledge, such as values schemas, into ongoing enactments. Crick and Dodge’s SIP model suggests that as individuals interact socially and encounter social stimuli, they follow a real-time sequence of five mental steps: they (1) encode the social cues, (2) interpret these cues, (3) set related social goals, (4) generate alternative responses, and (5) make evaluations and response decisions. Once a decision is made, they (6) actively enact the chosen response. These core processes are both circular and bidirectional, as each step affects and is affected by old and new social experiences (Ziv & Elizarov, 2019 ). To date, SIP patterns representing children’s inclination to interpret social cues and make social decisions are commonly classified as competent or aggressive, signifying more adaptive or maladaptive patterns, respectively (see Fig. 2 ; Ziv & Elizarov, 2019 ). Furthermore, during the preschool years, the response evaluation and decision-making (RED) step (the fifth mental step) has been identified as the most predictive of children’s outcomes (Fontaine & Dodge, 2006 ; Schultz et al., 2010 ; Ziv, 2012 ; Ziv & Arbel,  2021 ), and therefore, it is employed in the current study.

Crick and Dodge’s ( 1994 ) Model of Social Information Processing

A core assumption of the SIP model is that individuals tend to rely on heuristics or schemas (e.g., values schemas) to make fast decisions and facilitate information processing when they deal with multiple stimuli during social interactions. These mental structures are latent, consolidated by past and new experiences, and represented in the SIP model as a “database” that reciprocally affects each of the SIP steps (Crick & Dodge, 1994 ; Ziv & Elizarov, 2019 ). The relationships between individuals’ latent social mental structures, including hostile knowledge structures and attachment-related knowledge structures, and between their adaptive or maladaptive SIP patterns have previously been studied (Dykas & Cassidy, 2011 ; Salzer Burks et al., 1999 ; van Cappellen et al., 2023 ). In addition, some theoretical studies have suggested ways individuals’ important schemas, such as their moral and gender schemas, may shape their SIP steps (Arsenio & Lemerise, 2004 ; Ostrov & Godleski, 2010 ). However, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have examined the associations between individuals’ values schemas and their SIP patterns. Furthermore, no studies have incorporated elements from both a specific schema’s theoretical domain (e.g., a moral schema’s theoretical domain) and the Crick and Dodge SIP model into a single measurement to empirically test how such schemas are integrated into the processing of social information, potentially leading to the development of schema-driven SIP patterns.

In this regard, an important hypothesis in values research suggests that the more individuals endorse a value, the greater its influence will be on their mental processes and later outcomes (Lee et al., 2022 ; Schwartz, 1994 ). Focusing on SIP as an example of such mental processes, a limited amount of empirical research has demonstrated a link between individuals’ preferred values and relevant processes such as decision-making (e.g., Heilman & Kusev, 2020 ; Sagiv et al., 2011 ). Yet to the best of our knowledge, no studies in the values research domain have investigated the ways values are linked to the sequential SIP steps (see Fig. 2 ) taken by individuals when they are faced with a specific ambiguous social situation that requires a response, certainly not in children as young as five. We addressed the gap by examining how kindergarten children’s preferred values, which are part of their database, relate to how they process social information. Specifically, we explored how children’s preferences for self-transcendence values are reflected in the ways they tend to interpret the social occurrences they engage in and in how they evaluate and make decisions on their social responses to these occurrences, ultimately leading to self-transcendence values-oriented SIP patterns. We also investigated how children’s SIP patterns, which are derived from the values they endorse, relate to their more context-specific internal structures, more precisely, their attitudes toward kindergarten, which can then be linked to their social behavior tendencies.

SIP, attitudes, and social behavior

As mentioned, individuals’ SIP is shaped by their social mental structures (i.e., their database). Yet real-world experiences, which are influenced by how individuals process the social information around them, can also lead to the formation of memory structures or alter existing mental representations (Crick & Dodge, 1994 ). For instance, the way individuals tend to process social information can ultimately affect their attitudes toward a key social environment they are part of, based on how they daily experience and react to social stimuli in that setting (e.g., Denham et al., 2013 ; Zalesny & Ford, 1990 ; Ziv et al.,  2016 ). This claim was supported by Salancik and Pfeffer ( 1978 ) who defined attitudes as constructs that are the product of the information processing performed by individuals when they are attaching meaning to what is happening in their social surroundings.

To illustrate, within the kindergarten class, young children who have a self-transcendence values-oriented SIP pattern (driven by a preference for self-transcendence values) are likely to interpret and perceive their social surroundings in a more prosocial and other-focused manner. This means that during interactions, they may tend to interpret their classmates’ and teachers’ intentions in more positive or benign ways and set more self-transcendence values-oriented goals, such as prosocial or relational goals, within an ongoing situation (Nelson & Crick, 1999 ). Subsequently, they may tend to evaluate responses that prioritize the well-being and needs of others more favorably. Eventually, they are also likely to decide to react in a more self-transcendence values-oriented manner, one that will benefit the well-being of others in the class, including making compromises, while promoting close and loving relationships (Rose & Asher, 1999 ; Wentzel et al., 2018 ). Given their reactions to others in the class, these children are likely to elicit positive responses (Barry & Wentzel, 2006 ; Ogelman & Seven, 2012 ; Rodkin et al., 2013 ). This kind of social reality, in which children experience others in the class more positively, and others, in turn, perceive them more positively, can ultimately be associated with their more positive attitudes toward their class (Armstrong et al., 2010 ).

The linkage between SIP and attitudes is even more relevant when considering additional essential components such as the impact that attitudes may have on individuals’ behavior. Attitudes, which reflect how individuals generally feel about a particular person, event, or environment, have long been considered a key factor in explaining human behaviors (Ajzen et al., 2018 ; Albarracín et al., 2005 ; Kraus, 1995 ; Wilson et al., 2000 ), including prosocial and antisocial behaviors (e.g., Davis, 2020 ; Rutten et al., 2011 ). To continue the preceding example, children who endorse self-transcendence values (over self-enhancement values) may have more positive attitudes toward their class, given the impact their values may have on how they process social cues in the class environment. We consider this trajectory to be crucial: previous studies have shown children’s positive attitudes toward the educational context are associated with more prosocial and less antisocial behavior (e.g., Longobardi et al., 2021 ; Way et al., 2007 ; Wilson, 2004 ).

Current study

This study aims to explore a potential mechanism underlying the associations between young children’s values and their social behavior in kindergarten. The mechanism includes the children’s values-oriented SIP patterns and their attitudes toward kindergarten (see Fig. 1 ). We employed a pathways model to examine the hypothesized indirect paths. Specifically, we proposed that children exhibiting a preference for self-transcendence values will demonstrate self-transcendence values-oriented SIP patterns, which will relate to their more positive attitudes toward kindergarten, which further (Path 1/H1:) will correlate with more prosocial behavior and (Path 2/H2:) with less antisocial behavior among the children.

Participants and procedures

One hundred and twenty-one kindergarten children (59 girls; M age = 67.45 months, i.e., 5.62 years, SD = 6.56 months) took part in the study. All participating children spoke Hebrew as their primary language. Based on the parents’ reports, 70 percent of the children came from households where the mothers had a college degree or higher. Families in the sample had monthly household incomes ranging from US$4000 and US$5400, slightly above the Israeli average (the 2017 census found families in Israel had an average monthly income of around US$4300). The participating children lived in the North and Haifa districts of Israel; they attended 35 kindergarten classes located in various settings, ranging from more urban to more rural areas. On average, each of the 35 teachers assessed around 3 children, mirroring also the median count of 3 children per teacher. The distribution of ratings exhibited variation among teachers; for instance, 17 teachers rated 1–2 children, and 14 teachers evaluated 4–5 students, with only one instance where a teacher reported on a maximum of 13 children. Using the Gpower program and assuming a moderate effect size of 0.25 in a correlation metric, the power of an indirect effect, given the current sample size ( n = 121), was determined to be 0.80. Consequently, the present study exhibits adequate statistical power.

Data reported here are from a larger study undertaken between 2016 and 2019. Following the required IRB approvals (see below), we contacted kindergarten supervisors and teachers to obtain their consent to conduct the study in the classes under their supervision. As a next step, teachers notified parents about the study via fliers with necessary information and requests for consent and contact information. After obtaining permission from the parents, the research team visited each kindergarten class twice with a gap of one to two weeks between visits. The day before each visit, research assistants contacted the parents of the participating children by phone to request that they inform their children about the scheduled visit the following day. Upon approaching the participating child, the research assistants initially introduced themselves and inquired if the child would like to participate in a one-on-one session. In all instances, the children had already been informed by their parents and teacher and expressed interest in participating in the activity. During these one-on-one sessions, the research assistants interviewed the children to assess their personal values, their values-oriented SIP patterns (using a new preschoolers’ version of the SIP measurement), and their attitudes toward kindergarten. The team also assessed the children’s competent and aggressive SIP patterns using the original SIP measurement for preschoolers, the Social Information Processing Interview, Preschool Version (SIPI-P; Ziv & Sorongon, 2011 ). The original SIPI-P evaluation was carried out in preparation for the validation of the new version of the SIP measurement created for this study, the Social Information Processing and Values Interview (described below). The interviews lasted 30 to 40 minutes, on average. In addition, the teachers were asked to complete several questionnaires, including assessments of the children’s behavior in the classroom. The study protocol received approval from the third author’s university IRB (approval # 464/16) and from the Ministry of Education Chief Scientist Office (approval # 9312). To obtain the materials and analysis codes used in this study, please contact the corresponding author. 

Values preferences

We used the Animated Values Instrument (AVI; Lee et al., 2017 ) to examine kindergarten children’s values preferences. The AVI was designed to be suitable for use with young children. It employs a multi-sensory approach, integrating verbal, visual, and auditory information for each value, thereby enhancing young children’s understanding of the essence of each value. The AVI is structured as a web survey with 21 short values-expressive animations, each representing one of the four higher-order categories: self-transcendence, self-enhancement, conservation, and openness to change (Schwartz, 1994 ). For example, “I want to help people who have less than me” is an item that represents self-transcendence values, specifically universalism. The “I want to be the best” item represents self-enhancement values, specifically achievement. The survey applies the best-worse scaling method in a multiple-choice situation (see Louviere et al., 2013 ). In a one-on-one session, the researchers presented children with a total of 21 subsets, each showing five values-expressive animations. They asked the children which animation was the most (and the least) like them (see Fig. 3 ).

Screenshot of subset number 5 of 21 from the Animated Values Instrument

Children’s value importance scores were calculated for each of the 21 values items by subtracting the number of times a values item was chosen as “least like me” from the number of times; it was chosen as “most like me.” These scores were standardized by dividing them by five, i.e., the total number of times each animation appeared. This resulted in scores ranging from −1 to +1, where zero represented the midpoint of the scale. As we aimed to have only positive scores, we changed the scale from 1 to 11. The higher the score, the greater the importance of the value. To obtain the final score used in the study’s model, the self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values score, we created a self-transcendence values category by averaging all items representing the universalism and benevolence values (creating a mean score of all the items) and the self-enhancement values category by averaging all items representing the power and achievement values. Then, we subtracted the self-enhancement values score from the self-transcendence values score, as was done in previous studies focusing on one of the two values dimensions (e.g., Abramson et al., 2018 , Sagiv et al., 2011 ).

The survey was developed in English and was originally used with English-speaking children (e.g., Benish-Weisman et al.,  2019 ). We adapted it to Hebrew and Israeli culture. As part of the adaptation procedure, we translated it from English to Hebrew and back to English. Furthermore, as we wanted to ensure that the meaning of the animations and audio was clear to Israeli kindergarten children, we initiated a focus group comprised of six kindergarten children. We received approval for the final translation from Professor Shalom Schwartz, the developer of the values theory (personal communication, July 2018). As a final step, the Hebrew audio was recorded and sent to a programmer who incorporated the Hebrew audio and script and edited the tradition-values animation by replacing the picture of a church with a synagogue. The entire process was carried out in collaboration with the AVI developers.

The reliability of the AVI is determined by measuring the consistency of the children’s choices (see Collins et al., 2017 ). When a value is chosen four or five times (over the four other values-items in a particular subset), it is considered highly consistent because each value appears five times during the interview: the child has consistently chosen it over all the other values-items in each of the five times it appeared. Choosing a value three times out of five is still considered to be consistent. If no values-item is selected three times or more, the values-item choice is inconsistent. The same applies to the “least like me” values-item choice. In our sample, 62% of children made highly consistent values choices, and 32% made consistent values choices. Only 6% of children showed inconsistency. On the least important values choice, 57% of children were highly consistent, and 36% were consistent. Only 7% of children were inconsistent. Compared to previous AVI scores of 5-year-old children (see Collins et al., 2017 ), our sample’s consistencies were very good. Applying a confirmatory multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) analysis to random data (Spence and Ogilvie, 1973 ), we obtained the values structure of our sample; it closely resembled Schwartz’s initial model (see MDS results in Elizarov et al., 2023 ; Schwartz, 1994 ).

Values-oriented SIP

For this study, we modified the Social Information Processing Interview, Preschool Version (SIPI-P; see Ziv & Sorongon, 2011 ), to create the Social Information Processing and Values Interview (SIP-VI). The SIPI-P includes four stories illustrating challenging social scenarios where the intentions of the other peers are depicted as ambiguous or non-hostile. Two of these scenarios revolve around rejection (e.g., the protagonist seeks to join a game, but others remain unresponsive), while the other two focus on provocation (e.g., the protagonist is watching television, and another child takes the remote control, changing the channel). Similarly, the SIP-VI presents challenging social scenarios with ambiguous peer intentions. However, unlike the SIPI-P, which aims to provoke competent, aggressive, or inept information processing tendencies, the scenarios developed for the SIP-VI are tailored to elicit patterns of information processing observable within the framework of values research. The ambiguous scenarios in the SIP-VI subtly integrate content from the values research domain, such that the presented ambiguous provocations reflect potential conflicts in values in a nuanced manner, thereby facilitating subsequent coding and interpretation of children’s diverse responses within the context of values. Additionally, in the section of the interview dedicated to the children’s response evaluation stage of SIP, while the SIPI-P offers three alternative responses for each scenario categorized as competent, aggressive, or inept, the SIP-VI provides four alternative responses. Each of these four alternative responses, which the children later evaluate and select from, represents one of the four higher-order value categories (refer to Fig. 4 and Table 1 for an illustration). Thus, throughout the entire interview, considering both the content of the presented social scenarios and the subsequent alternative responses presented to the children, the children’s responses allowed us to differentiate between four values-oriented SIP patterns, corresponding to the four higher-order values categories (see Schwartz, 1994 ). As previously mentioned, we focused on the self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values; therefore, we employed two values-oriented SIP patterns, the self-transcendence values-oriented SIP pattern, and the opposing self-enhancement values-oriented SIP pattern.

“The Cookie from the Teacher” story: Illustrations

The SIP-VI is a 20-min semi-structured interview designed for young children. It does not rely on reading or writing abilities; instead, it includes two pictorial short stories describing social situations that resonate with the experiences of 5-year-old children. These stories are accompanied by pictures of bears representing characters from the original SIPI-P. While the children are listening to the stories, the interviewer stops the story-telling at fixed points and asks questions (open and closed) that address their values-oriented SIP patterns. There are similar versions for boys and girls. Both stories include an ambiguous hypothetical social scenario that does not provide an ending for the interactions between the protagonists and their classmates. By creating these indefinite imaginative scenarios and incorporating values-related content, we enabled the manifestation of differences in children’s personal characteristics (Roccas & Sagiv, 2010 ). This process specifically reveals their implicit values-related motives that underlie their social information processing (Schattke et al., 2011 ). Simultaneously, the interview questions posed to the children explicitly inquire about their SIP patterns, ultimately revealing distinctions in their values-oriented response evaluation and decision-making (RED) patterns, the SIP model’s steps as explored in prior studies (Arbel et al., 2021 ; Fontaine & Dodge, 2006 ; Schultz et al., 2010 ; Ziv, 2012 ; Ziv & Arbel, 2021 ) and in the current study to predict child outcomes.

We obtained two opposing scores: the first was the self-transcendence values-oriented RED; the second was the self-enhancement values-oriented RED. These scores included the children’s responses to seven RED-related questions asked after each of the two social scenarios (see Fig. 4 and Table 1 for an example). For the self-transcendence values-oriented RED score, each of the seven questions was scored “0” for an answer that was not coded as self-transcendence values-oriented and “1” for an answer that was coded as self-transcendence values-oriented. The total aggregated self-transcendence values-oriented RED score ranged from 0 to 14, taking account of the children’s answers in both social scenarios. The self-enhancement values-oriented RED score also ranged from 0 to 14. Then, as we did for the self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values scores, and to get a parsimonious model, we subtracted the self-enhancement values-oriented RED score from the self-transcendence values-oriented RED score, resulting in the self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values-oriented RED.

Finally, for the three RED-related open questions (see Table 1 , Q1 and Q6–Q7), the first author and a trained assistant performed an inter-rater reliability process for 30% of the cases to make a decision about the quality of the response classifications (e.g., self-transcendence values-oriented or self-enhancement values-oriented classifications). The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), a statistical measure used to assess the consistency or agreement between raters, was calculated for each question. ICC values range from 0 to 1, where higher values indicate greater agreement between raters. For the first question (Q1), the ICC for the self-transcendence classification ranged from .92 to .94, indicating excellent agreement between raters, and for the self-enhancement classification, it ranged from .84 to .86, indicating very good agreement between raters. Similarly, for the outcome expectancy questions (Q6 and Q7), the ICC ranged from .94 to .96 for the self-transcendence classification and from .95 to .99 for the self-enhancement classification, both demonstrating excellent agreement between raters.

Attitudes toward kindergarten

Using the Feelings About School (FAS; Valeski & Stipek, 2001 ) scale, we assessed children’s attitudes toward kindergarten. The FAS is administered to children and is a direct assessment composed of four subscales: attitudes toward school (e.g., “How fun are things at school?”), feelings about the relationship with the teacher (e.g., “How do you feel about your teacher?”), perceived competence in literacy (e.g., “How much do you know about reading?”), perceived competence in math (e.g., “Are you good at math?”). As the measure is applied to young children who are not yet able to read, the 5-point Likert-type scale is illustrated to facilitate responses. It includes five circles with increasing size; the first circle is the smallest, indicating the lowest score, and the fifth circle is the largest, indicating the highest score. Each item is read aloud, and children are asked to point to the circle that reflects their response. Higher scores indicate more positive attitudes and perceptions. Since we were interested in the children’s socially-oriented attitudes toward kindergarten, we used their scores for attitudes toward the class and toward the teacher, as teachers are a crucial part of the class as a social environment. Previous studies reported Cronbach’s alphas ranging from .57 to .85 for the internal consistency of these two subscales (class and teacher attitudes) (e.g., Daniels, 2014 ; Hong et al., 2022 ; Longobardi et al., 2021 ). In this study, the Cronbach’s alpha for the two subscales ranged from .62 to .81, and when these were combined into a general score for socially-oriented attitudes toward kindergarten, the score showed good internal consistency ( α = .76).

Prosocial and antisocial behaviors

Children’s prosocial and antisocial behaviors in class were measured using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 1997 ), teacher report version. The SDQ contains five subscales. As in previous studies using this measure (e.g., Eivers et al., 2010 ; Eivers et al., 2012 ; Larsson et al., 2008 ), we only used two: the prosocial behavior scale (e.g., “Shares readily with other children”; “Often volunteers to help others”) and the conduct problem scale (e.g., “Often fights with other children or bullies them”; “Often lies or cheats”; i.e., the antisocial behavior score). Each scale includes five items which are rated by the children’s teachers on a 3-point scale: 0 “not true,” 1 “somewhat true,” and 2 “certainly true.” The final scores were calculated by averaging the five items under the prosocial subscale and the four items under the conduct problem subscale (the fifth item in this subscale, “Steals from home, school or elsewhere”, was omitted due to a lack of variance in answers). These scales were previously found to have satisfactory internal consistency ( α = .70–.85 for prosocial behavior; α = .63–.71 for problem behavior; see Eivers et al., 2010 ; Houltberg et al., 2016 ; Larsson et al., 2008 ; Longobardi et al., 2021 ). The internal consistencies in our study were acceptable: α = .78 for prosocial behavior; α = .72 for conduct problems.

Analytic strategy

To ensure the validity and reliability of the SIP-VI, we first compared the separate values-oriented RED scores with the children’s relevant and separate values scores to assess whether the SIP-VI successfully incorporated values-oriented content while examining children’s SIP patterns. Then, we examined the correlations between the self-transcendence values-oriented RED and the self-enhancement values-oriented RED. As these constructs relate to opposing values orientations (the self-transcendence versus self-enhancement dimension), we anticipated negative correlations between them. We also examined the correlations between the self-transcendence and self-enhancement values-oriented RED patterns generated from the SIP-VI and between the competent and aggressive RED patterns generated from the SIPI-P (see the elaborated SIPI-P measurement description in Ziv & Sorongon, 2011 ). By so doing, we aimed to ensure that the new values-oriented RED patterns were indeed differentiated from the RED patterns generated from the original SIPI-P measurement (Ziv & Sorongon, 2011 ). Finally, we evaluated the internal consistency of each values-oriented RED scale to determine the reliability of the scales.

To test the hypothesized model, we utilized a pathway analysis that included indirect paths between children’s values and their social behaviors in class via their values-oriented RED patterns and their attitudes toward kindergarten. A path analysis was performed using the R package lavaan (Rosseel, 2012 ), and the maximum likelihood estimation method was applied to handle missing data. The model was analyzed with and without the control variables (child gender, SES, a variable consisting of mother’s education level and household income, and the children’s openness-to-change versus conservation values dimension). Analyses with and without covariates provide non-biased information on how the presence of a covariate influences a result (Simmons et al., 2011 ). We also calculated the 95% confidence intervals (CIs) to determine if indirect effects were significant. To verify the non-independence of teachers’ ratings regarding children’s prosocial and antisocial behaviors, we employed the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC). This statistical measure assesses the degree of agreement among ratings provided by different reporters. In the case of non-independence assessment, a low ICC value indicates there is a small between-group variance in the dependent variable, implying that concerns regarding non-independence are relatively diminished (Gelman & Hill, 2006 ). In our analysis, the ICC for both variables, as reported by the teachers, approached zero, indicating concerns about non-independence were minimal, and multilevel modeling (MLM) was not required.

Preliminary analysis

To address the validity of the SIP-VI, we initially analyzed the correlations between the values-oriented RED scores and the children’s corresponding values scores. As expected, children’s self-transcendence values positively correlated with their self-transcendence values-oriented RED ( r = .22, p < .05) and negatively correlated with their self-enhancement values-oriented RED ( r = −.17, p = .05). Similarly, the children’s self-enhancement values had a negative correlation with their self-transcendence values-oriented RED scores ( r = −.19, p < .05) and a positive but not significant correlation with their self-enhancement values-oriented RED scores ( r = .14, p = .12). We also examined the correlation between the two types of values-oriented RED scores, namely self-transcendence values-oriented RED and self-enhancement values-oriented RED, and found they were negatively correlated, as anticipated ( r = −.45, p < .001).

Our next step was to examine the correlations between the newly introduced values-based RED patterns (self-transcendence and self-enhancement) and the RED patterns generated by Ziv & Sorongon ( 2011 ) original SIPI-P measurement (competent and aggressive behavior). Our goal was to establish that these two types of RED patterns, the ones from the original measurement and those from the new version, were distinct. We assumed the only significant correlation we would observe would be between the children’s self-enhancement values-oriented RED and their aggressive RED patterns, as the self-enhancement values category encompasses power values often associated with aggressiveness (Benish-Weisman, 2019 ). Although the aggressive RED patterns do not capture the entirety of self-enhancement values, they have some similarities. We found no significant correlations between the children’s self-transcendence values-oriented RED and their competent ( r = .10, p = .27) or aggressive ( r = −.00, p = .97) RED patterns. There was no significant correlation between the children’s self-enhancement values-oriented RED and their competent RED patterns ( r = −.08, p = .38), but as we had assumed, it was positively and significantly correlated with their aggressive RED patterns ( r = .28, p < .01).

Finally, we evaluated the internal consistency of the values-oriented RED scores. The internal consistencies of both the self-transcendence values-oriented RED and the self-enhancement values-oriented RED were satisfactory, with values of α = .73 and α = .74, respectively.

The descriptive statistics and all study variables are presented in Table 2 , along with their means, standard deviations, and correlations. No significant correlations were found between the study variables and SES. Gender was positively related to children’s self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values, their attitudes toward kindergarten, and their prosocial behaviors ( r = .26, p < .01; r = .22, p < .05; r = .24, p < .01, respectively). No significant associations were found between gender and children’s self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values-oriented RED and their antisocial behaviors.

Path analysis

Using path analysis, we assessed the overall fit of the conceptual model linking kindergarten children’s values to their social behaviors in class via their values-oriented SIP patterns (RED) and their attitudes toward class (see Fig. 5 ). The study’s overall model fitted the data: NFI = .94, CFI = .98, RMSEA = .06, SRMR = .04, which is considered a good fit (Kline, 2011 , 2016 ).

Pathways analysis model linking kindergarteners’ values and social behaviors in class via kindergarteners’ values-oriented SIP patterns (RED) and their attitudes toward the kindergarten class

The results demonstrated that children’s self-transcendence (over self-enhancement) values had a significant indirect effect on their social behavior in class through their values-oriented RED and their attitudes toward kindergarten. The model incorporates the significant paths between (1) children’s self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values and children’s self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values-oriented RED ( β = .23, p = < .01), (2) children’s self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values-oriented RED and their attitudes toward class ( β = .32, p = < .001), and (3) children’s attitudes toward class and their prosocial behaviors ( β = .23, p = < .05; 95% CI = .000, .008) and antisocial behaviors ( β = −.24, p = < .01; 95% CI = −.007, .000; see Fig. 5 ).

To ensure the robustness of the analysis, we examined a model which included the last possible path, namely, the path between self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values and children’s attitudes toward class ( β = .14, p = .12), as well as the paths between self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values-oriented RED and children’s prosocial and antisocial behaviors ( β = −.13 p = .17; β = .06, p = .56, respectively). These additional paths were not significant and did not change the patterns of the results. We then tested two possible alternative models. In the first, we examined the possibility that children’s self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values positively relate to their attitudes toward class, which then positively relate to their self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values-oriented RED, which in turn relates to their more prosocial and less antisocial behaviors. The model did not fit the data ( p <.01), and the goodness-of-fit indicators were insufficient, NFI = .78, CFI = .80, RMSEA = 0.18, and SRMR = .08. In the second alternative model, we examined the possibility that children’s self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values-oriented RED positively relates to their attitudes toward class, which then positively relate to their self-transcendence versus self-enhancement values, which in turn relate to their more prosocial and less antisocial behaviors. As before, the alternative model did not fit the data ( p < .01), and the goodness-of-fit indicators were insufficient, NFI = .78, CFI = .80, RMSEA = 0.18, and SRMR = .08.

Finally, we tested alternative models that included children’s gender, SES, and openness-to-change versus conservation values to examine whether these demographic factors and the second values dimension affected our results. When controlling for gender, we found significant paths between gender and children’s attitudes toward class ( β = .18, p = < .05) and children’s prosocial behaviors ( β = .2, p = < .05). No significant paths were found between SES and the study’s variables. When controlling for openness-to-change versus conservation values, we found a significant path between this values dimension and children’s attitudes toward class ( β = −.18, p = < .05). Overall, the control variables did not alter the pattern of results; therefore, they were dropped for parsimony. The significance of the pathways in all the alternative models mentioned above is explained in Supplementary Tables S1 and S2 .

Values-behavior relationships are evident in different social contexts and across age groups and include a wide range of behaviors (Arieli et al., 2020 ; Benish-Weisman et al., 2022 ; Schwartz et al., 2010 ), thus emphasizing the essential role of values in human behavior. Despite advances in understanding the interplay between values and social behavior, the underlying mechanisms driving these relationships are not fully understood (Bardi & Schwartz, 2003 ; Sagiv & Roccas, 2021 ). Moreover, knowledge about the development of values in the critical preschool years is especially lacking. Accordingly, in this study, we explored a socio-cognitive mechanism linking values and social behavior among 5-year-old kindergarten children. Our main purpose was to examine the indirect links between kindergarten children’s preferred values and their prosocial and antisocial behavioral tendencies in kindergarten through their values-oriented social response evaluation and decision-making (RED) patterns (Fontaine & Dodge, 2006 ) and their attitudes toward their kindergarten.

The hypothesized model of significant indirect paths between kindergarten children’s self-transcendence (over self-enhancement) values and their prosocial and antisocial behaviors in kindergarten was supported by the results. Findings indicated that children who favored self-transcendence values over self-enhancement values were more prone to display self-transcendence values-oriented RED (over self-enhancement values-oriented RED). That is, when confronting different social scenarios, they were likely to more positively evaluate alternative responses prioritizing the well-being and interests of others and to decide on a response driven by the needs and interests of others. These findings contribute to the growing body of scientific evidence that reinforces the fundamental concept of Crick and Dodge’s ( 1994 ) SIP model which states that an individual’s database, represented in the present study by values as social schemas (Milner, 1993 ; Schwartz, 1994 ), helps shape how the individual processes social information in social interactions (e.g., Calvete & Orue, 2010 , 2012 ; Salzer Burks et al., 1999 ; Zelli et al., 1999 ). In other words, when children encounter a social situation and must evaluate various responses and choose one, their preferred values are likely to serve as guiding motivators that help them determine more rapidly and efficiently between alternatives and outcomes that are subjectively perceived as more or less desirable also based on these values (Benish-Weisman, 2015 ; Rokeach, 1973 ). Evidence of a link between children’s values and their SIP patterns may prompt educators to pay closer attention to children’s guiding motivations and to the ways these motivations are manifested in their everyday interactions with peers and teachers. Educators can enhance self-transcendence values among children; this, in turn, may foster positive social behaviors and a supportive social climate in the kindergarten setting.

In our sample, children’s inclination toward self-transcendence values-oriented RED was linked to their more positive attitudes toward kindergarten. Thus, the results support the theoretical notion that SIP is associated with attitudes toward a social context and is an indicator of social adjustment (Crick & Dodge, 1994 ; Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ). Little empirical research has actually tested this notion, and existing studies focus on adults’ social settings, such as the workplace (see Zalesny & Ford, 1990 ). Our study brings attention to young children and the kindergarten environment. It also provides important initial empirical evidence indicating that the ways children process social information during their daily experiences in kindergarten are linked to their attitudes, namely their overall feelings and thoughts, toward the class. Furthermore, considering the significant path between children’s SIP patterns and their attitudes, along with the earlier findings of a significant path between children’s values and their SIP patterns, our results endorse the SIP model’s hypothesis (Crick & Dodge, 1994 ) of a bidirectional influence between the database and the SIP steps. Essentially, the significant model we observed in the current study may imply that while a broad mental structure, such as values, impacts individuals’ SIP steps, another, more context-specific mental structure, such as attitudes toward a specific social setting, is simultaneously influenced by the individuals’ SIP patterns.

When viewed from the perspective of values research, another intriguing aspect of our results pertains to the indirect associations between values and attitudes. In the tested model, when we included children’s SIP patterns, the direct associations between values and attitudes were non-significant (see Supplementary Table S1 ). Given previous studies that provide strong evidence for the ways individuals’ values influence their related attitudes (e.g., Grigoryan et al., 2018 ; Grigoryan & Schwartz, 2021 ; Kulin & Svallfors, 2013 ), our findings offer a new perspective on a potential mechanism linking values and attitudes, specifically individuals’ SIP patterns.

The final hypothesized paths were also supported. Children who held more positive attitudes toward their kindergarten were likely to demonstrate more prosocial behaviors and fewer antisocial behaviors in kindergarten. The experience children have in kindergarten can play a crucial role in their motivation to be engaged and to participate in social interactions and activities there (Mashburn et al., 2008 ). When their overall experience is more positive, as reflected by their positive attitudes toward kindergarten, they are likely to engage more with peers and teachers, building closer and more positive relationships (Furrer & Skinner, 2003 ). A positive engagement with their social surroundings in kindergarten is likely to result in more prosocial behaviors, as children feel more accepted and loved. Simultaneously, their antisocial behaviors are likely to be reduced, as children who feel more related to and supported by their social surroundings tend to act in ways that benefit the others who are part of those surroundings rather than in ways that cause harm (Henricsson & Rydell, 2006 ; Wentzel & Caldwell, 1997 ). Moreover, previous studies investigating attitudes toward the educational context and their correlation with social behaviors in class have centered on school-aged children (e.g., Luengo Kanacri et al., 2017 ; Wang & Dishion, 2012 ; Way et al., 2007 ). The current study’s findings add to this work and contribute to a more developmental perspective by illustrating an early existence of associations between attitudes and behavior in early education settings.

Educational implications

This study’s results point to possible practical applications in the school environment. More specifically, the findings suggest the relevance of promoting the preference for self-transcendence values (over self-enhancement values) in early childhood as a means to foster more prosocial and fewer antisocial behaviors among young children (see also Elizarov et al., 2023 ). This approach also holds promise for improving the overall social climate within classrooms (Allodi, 2010 ; Barth et al., 2004 ). Prior research similarly highlights that striving for self-transcendence values-oriented goals, including prosocial and social responsibility goals, correlates with increased prosocial behavior in the classroom (e.g., Collie 2022 ; Wentzel et al., 2018 ). To facilitate this objective, teachers could incorporate various activities and practices that emphasize the benefits and positive outcomes, both for self and others, of pursuing goals aligned with self-transcendence values. These may include exhibiting increased awareness of and consideration for others’ needs, fostering a more helpful and supportive attitude, and dedicating time and effort to benefit nature and animals. Activities aiming to promote self-transcendence values among young children should be designed in a playful and appealing manner (Rantala & Määttä, 2012 ) and include opportunities for reflection and discussion to help children understand the impact of their actions (Denton, 2011 ).

In addition, to maximize the effectiveness of attempts to improve the class social environment, teachers should focus not only on motivating children to be more helpful and considerate of the needs of others in their classroom, but also on teaching them how to apply these self-transcendence values-oriented motivations when they are faced with social challenges in the kindergarten setting. This can be done by assisting children to become more aware of how they can express their self-transcendence aspirations as they process social information. For example, as part of daily conversational activities, teachers can present common social scenarios or ask children to share challenging social occurrences they have experienced and engage in discussions about these situations. These discussions can involve exploring the meaning behind what happened, and teachers and children can suggest alternative behavioral responses (Wilson & Lipsey, 2006 ) while considering the consequences of each response and whether it benefits oneself and the other peers. Then, they can decide on the responses that are more suitable for the situation while taking into account the feelings and interests of the others in the situation. This way of fostering empathic consideration of others’ perspectives and interests was found to positively influence children’s prosocial behaviors (Eisenberg et al., 2006 ). It is also crucial to encourage children to independently propose interpretations for situations that consider others’ perspectives and generate alternative responses oriented toward others. By suggesting these alternatives themselves, children may exhibit a stronger commitment to applying these SIP patterns in real, ongoing situations (see Spivak, 2016 ). Fostering children’s self-transcendence values and their self-transcendence values-oriented SIP patterns can eventually lead to positive attitudes toward the class as a social setting and then to more prosocial and less antisocial behaviors.

Theoretical and methodological contribution

This study contributes to a better comprehension of the factors, dynamics, and mechanisms that intervene in or underlie values-behavior relationships, which are evident from early childhood and continue throughout the life course (Sagiv & Roccas, 2021 ). It is the first study to address this issue among very young children. The findings contribute to the field of SIP by demonstrating for the first time the associations between young children’s values, which serve as social schemas in their mental database, and their SIP patterns. This includes unique evidence of how children’s preferred values can be expressed in their response generation, evaluation, and decision-making processes, resulting in values-driven SIP patterns.

The investigation was enabled by a new version of the SIP-P (Ziv & Sorongon, 2011 ) incorporating elements from Schwartz’s values model and Crick and Doge’s SIP model into a single measurement. This measure allowed us to address an important gap in the SIP research and provide preliminary insights into how social mental structures, like values, are expressed in and linked to children’s social information processing (see Arsenio & Lemerise, 2004 ).

Limitations and future directions

While the study provides novel insights, certain limitations should be acknowledged. First, it was conducted with a relatively small sample of 5-year-old children who mostly came from Israeli middle-class families. More extensive research is necessary to replicate the results and apply them to larger and more diverse participant samples. It is essential to examine these dynamics across age groups and cultural contexts, especially as distinct patterns have been observed in the relationship between values and behaviors across age (e.g., Benish-Weisman et al.,  2019 ).

Second, the study presented a socio-cognitive mechanism to explain the values-behavior relationships in a specific social context, an Israeli kindergarten. We investigated how values, as broad motivational factors, influence socio-cognitive and behavioral outcomes in the context of kindergarten, which is an important social context for young children. We examined variables specific to this context, including the children’s attitudes toward kindergarten and their prosocial and antisocial behaviors during kindergarten hours. It is important for future research to explore how our proposed mechanism operates in other significant contexts, such as the home environment or other social groups.

Third, our hypotheses targeted a specific sequence of events in which children’s values are connected to how they process social information; this is related to their attitudes toward kindergarten, which, in turn, affect their social behavior in kindergarten. Despite our theoretical basis for these proposed pathways and the supporting results, the study provides only correlational evidence and goodness of fit indicators of the overall model, and causal conclusions cannot be drawn. Experimental and longitudinal designs should be employed to replicate the suggested sequence or to offer alternative directionalities.

This study’s results emphasize the importance of young children’s social cognition, i.e., their values, SIP patterns, and attitudes, in shaping their social behavior in a kindergarten setting. As such, they provide new insights into the interplay between various social mental structures and mechanisms in the developing social cognition of kindergarten children. These different aspects in social cognition interact and influence children’s social behavioral tendencies, key factors for positive social development. The findings may lead to the development of targeted educational interventions and practices to foster healthy social development outcomes for children as they continue to grow and interact with others in various social settings.

Data availability

Materials and analysis codes for this study are available by emailing the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all who participated in the study. The correspondence author, Einat Elizarov, is grateful to the Azrieli Foundation for supporting her academic work.

Open access funding provided by University of Haifa. This research was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 492/16) to the second author.

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Values. Prosocial behavior. Antisocial behavior. Social information processing. Attitudes. Kindergarten children.

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Elizarov, E., Benish-Weisman, M., & Ziv, y. (2023). Teacher–child relational conflict and maladaptive social behaviors: The moderating role of children’s values. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 233, 105689. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105689 .

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Elizarov, E., Ziv, Y. & Benish-Weisman, M. Personal values and social behavior in early childhood: Understanding the contribution of social information processing and attitudes. Eur J Psychol Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-024-00841-6

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Greetings from the Office of the Headmaster!

As a school we have re-assessed the impact of the transport strike and its subsequent effect on all members of our community to come to school.

Reedley International School will revert back to face-to-face classes for the remainder of this week, starting Thursday, March 9.

The various Department Principals will communicate with you and keep you updated on the arrangements for the various Reedley’s programs and activities scheduled for the remainder of this week.

I want to thank you for your support and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the relevant departments for any further information.

Thank you for your continued support and understanding.

The Importance of Kindergarten Education in the Philippines

The importance of kindergarten education in the Philippines is often overlooked by parents. However, this stage of education is crucial for your child’s future development. 

Attending kindergarten helps set a strong foundation for your children’s development by placing them in a nurturing, non-competitive environment, and using engaging activities that help children learn about fundamental knowledge. It is also in kindergarten that your child will learn various cognitive, emotional, and social skills that will set them up for future academic and interpersonal success. 

The value of providing quality kindergarten education should not be ignored. Here is a more in-depth look at how sending your little one to kindergarten will provide them with numerous positive nurturing experiences.

Introduces basic literacy and numeracy skills

Learning the basics of literacy and numeracy is crucial for your child’s early development, which is why they are emphasized in kindergarten. 

Here, they are introduced to basic numbers, shapes, and words, which are important in helping them grow as a learner. For learning literacy, lessons are done through drawing, coloring, listening to stories, word cards, and other engaging activities. 

For learning math, children are given sorting toys, matching activities, counting games, and other tasks that help them become familiar with the concepts of counting and numbers. 

Using these learning vehicles helps to keep the child’s focus on the lesson and helps make learning fun and enjoyable. Learning these skills at an early age sets the tone for their education and helps put them firmly on the road to greater academic success in the future. 

Builds emotional resilience

Kindergarten teaches more than just words and numbers. It provides countless opportunities for children to form relationships with their peers. This plays a significant role in building your child’s social and emotional development. In turn, this introduces and reinforces positive social behaviors.

As their friendships develop throughout their kindergarten program, your child inevitably learns how to interact with others with care, empathy, respect, and cooperation. They grow with their peers and begin to adopt new social habits such as taking turns, communicating their needs and ideas, and more. As a result, they become more emotionally resilient through their exposure to other children, social experiences, and emotions. 

Allows them to connect with the world

Through kindergarten programs, your child will be able to connect with people and things outside of their home. Kindergarten education achieves this by allowing them to learn more about the environment, cultures, and heritage of others. In turn, they will begin to grasp the concept that not only are they connected, but they can also contribute and interact with the world around them. 

Through these lessons, children can become more effective communicators and become more receptive to new concepts, through their immersion in a wider range of contexts and materials. They also start to develop a stronger sense of identity and are provided with opportunities to explore their personality, feelings, and thoughts with others.

Instills a love for learning

Children become confident, involved, and happy learners when they are introduced to engaging lessons and encouraged to investigate and explore. This is exactly what kindergarten does — it gives important lessons through positive and fun methods. 

Your young one will develop a positive attitude towards learning thanks to their introduction to new concepts through fun and playful activities. Thus, attending kindergarten can help them settle in primary school later on with motivation , confidence, and a love for learning. 

Develops good life habits

Kindergarten not only helps your child develop new cognitive and social skills, but also personal skills. This is because attending early education, as we mentioned, helps your child establish a better sense of self. Kindergarten is also a structured yet nurturing environment, which helps them get into a routine. These two factors help them become more independent and gain a sense of confidence.

In a few short months, you may notice that your child wants to complete more and more small tasks by themselves. From brushing their teeth, feeding themselves, washing their hands, and more, they start to take charge of their daily routine. This independence will gradually lead to them becoming more responsible and self-assured. 

Key Takeaway

Quality kindergarten education in the Philippines will provide the necessary experiences for your young one to grow up holistically. This is because it allows them to become confident learners in a safe and supported environment, through a framework of belonging, being, and becoming.

As part of our institution, we at Reedley dedicate ourselves to providing child-centered learning and a secure and nurturing environment for our kindergarteners. We support our students and their families at every step of the way during this stage of education. To learn more about our program and our curriculum, send us a message here .  

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Progress reports in early childhood education

With Famly since

In a rush? Here's a quick breakdown.

• Progress reports in early childhood are very important to each child's unique growth and development.
• By observing and tracking progress in various areas of development, all adults and caregivers can be on the same page and work together to support a child's learning and skill development.
• Read on to see specific benefits of progress reports and how to write effective progress reports.
• Plus, free downloadable templates for you to use!

Families and educators share a common goal: to support and nurture their children into confident, curious, capable and unique individuals. And one of the important tools in early childhood growth and development is the preschool or daycare progress report.

What is a preschool progress report?

A preschool progress report is a detailed account of a child's development progress in various domains - cognitive, social, emotional, and physical growth. They provide a comprehensive picture of a child's strengths, areas for improvement, and milestones achieved within a specific period.

Unlike the traditional report cards we received in our school days, progress reports in early childhood education (ECE) are more narrative and observational. In other words, I am not talking about giving letter grades in their early years. But instead, simply observing and tracking their learning journey and process - from showing signs of trying to stand up themselves, to sharing their toys without screaming or crying, to learning how to count to ten.

Why is a daycare progress report so important? 

Let’s dive into the purposes and benefits of early childhood progress reports.

Focus on the individual as a whole

Preschool progress reports support a holistic view of a child's development. Instead of focusing solely on academic achievements - or what you think of when you imagine a traditional report card - they touch on a broad range of developmental areas. 

From motor skills, social skills, emotional development, creativity, problem solving and physical development to so much more. This ensures that all aspects of each unique child are nurtured and encouraged to flourish. 

Recognize and celebrate development and growth

By observing and tracking a child’s developmental progress - from picking up a crayon to going down the playground slide alone - teachers and families are given an informative summary of their growth over time. 

But more than just being informational, preschool progress reports offer a place to celebrate achievements. And no matter how small, acknowledging and celebrating is essential in building a child's confidence and self-esteem, and encouraging a love for learning.

Identifying each child’s needs

Of course, specific milestones typically occur at certain ages, but a children’s developmental pace can vary significantly, and it is important to refrain from comparing children. 

Daycare progress reports enable ECE staff and families to really understand each child’s unique strengths, interests and areas that require a bit more support. This is beneficial for planning future learning activities and setting developmental goals. 

Progress reports in ECE enable educators to tailor their teaching methods and activities to suit individual needs. This personalized approach ensures that each child receives the attention and resources they need to thrive.

For example, does Emily love to sing songs, but is struggling to pay attention to one activity at a time when she is playing alone? Maybe you can find a toy that incorporates music with it. Or maybe, when it is time to learn how to count to 10, teaching her a song to sing will help. 

Set realistic goals

Preschool progress reports can help with personalized lesson planning. But more importantly, it sets realistic expectations of, and goals for, each child’s development across a variety of areas.

By understanding how a child is developing in each area, educators can set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. Clear goals and action plans provide direction and ensure everyone is on the same page.

These SMART goals should be incorporated into each child’s preschool progress report, with a clear outline of what steps will be taken to support the child's development and how families can contribute at home. 

Also, as you document progress reports over time, it will be easy to see whether goals were achieved, or whether the goals that you thought were attainable actually were not. Again, this is really beneficial in helping individualize learning journeys and activities to each child. And also as mentioned above, when children achieve different goals they are able to build their self-confidence and independence.

Additional support when needed

Identifying potential developmental delays or challenges early on is essential. (But again, remember that development is individualized and not every delay should be considered a problem or issue that needs fixing). 

However, when a child is truly struggling, daycare progress reports can identify which areas additional support is needed. This allows ECE staff and families to provide the necessary resources and strategies to help. 

Strengthen teacher and parent partnerships

Frequent communication between families and ECE staff is vital for a child's successful development. Preschool progress reports are one way to foster that partnership by providing a structured way to share observations and insights. When parents are actively engaged in their child's education, it creates a collaborative environment that benefits the child's overall development.

Daycare progress reports encourage family engagement and involvement by keeping them informed about their child's progress and areas where they can provide support at home. A child’s home and childcare center should not feel like two distinct environments to a child, but rather should feel like they complement each other and build off of one another.

They are also helpful frameworks for conversations, like parent-teacher conferences .

Build a strong foundation for future learning

Preschool is children’s first “formal” introduction to education and learning. Therefore, early childhood education can have a big influence on a child's future academic and social success. Their experience in the classroom, with their teacher, with activities and peers will influence their excitement and eagerness to learn. 

By using progress reports to monitor and support development, educators and families can ensure that children build a strong foundation of skills and knowledge, and also a positive learning experience, so children can continue to thrive in their education journey. 

How to create effective progress reports?

• ‍ Detailed observations : Take detailed notes on each child's activities and behaviors. Observations should be specific and based on concrete examples. For instance, instead of saying "Jane is good at art," you could note "Jane demonstrated fine motor skills by carefully coloring within the lines and using a variety of colors in her artwork."
• ‍ Clear and simple language : Preschool progress reports should be easy for families to understand. Avoid educational jargon and use clear, simple language. This ensures that teachers and families will be on the same page to support their child's development. ‍
• A balance of strengths and areas for improvement: A balanced approach is crucial. Don’t just spend too much time focusing on the areas for improvement. Highlight the child's strengths and achievements while also noting areas that need improvement. This provides a complete picture and helps parents and educators work together to support the child's growth.
• ‍ Use examples : Include photos or samples of the child's work to support your written observations and report. If there is nothing tangible, being able to talk about specific instances or activities is also recommended. These examples provide tangible evidence of the child's progress and make the report more engaging, understandable and meaningful.

As promised, here are your 7 (!) free downloadable and editable preschool progress report templates.

The big ideas

Official Danish Government Reopening Advice

Guidance from the Danish Health Ministry, translated in full to English.

UK Nursery Covid-19 Response Group Recommendations

The full recommendations from a working group of over 70 nursery chains in the UK.

Please note: here at Famly we love sharing creative activities for you to try with the children at your setting, but you know them best. Take the time to consider adaptions you might need to make so these activities are accessible and developmentally appropriate for the children you work with. Just as you ordinarily would, conduct risk assessments for your children and your setting before undertaking new activities, and ensure you and your staff are following your own health and safety guidelines.

Adrienne Shannon

Adrienne is the US Early Childhood Editor. She is excited to apply her interests in psychology and communication with her values for family and education.

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Toledo Early Learning Coalition stresses importance of early education

T OLEDO, Ohio (WTVG) - With preschool enrollment rates taking a dramatic dip in the last decade, the Toledo Early Learning Coalition is doing its part to encourage families to set their little ones up for future success.

There has been a substantial drop since the COVID-19 pandemic in both public and private schools with enrollment down almost 10% in the last decade.

Channon Craig, the administrate assistant with the Toledo Early Learning Coalition, says preschool can dramatically change a child’s education experience.

“It goes well beyond kindergarten - it shows up in third grade when they’re taking their proficiency tests, it shows up in high school, it shows up in the community when they’re adults as well,” Craig says.

Part of that jump-start children gain from preschool can often include specialists noticing a learning disability or delay, which allows for early intervention.

“Once you realize, you know, a kid needs a little more help in this area or that area while they’re in preschool, it again helps them when they get into kindergarten,” Craig says.

Preschool allows children to develop not just intellectually, but emotionally, according to Craig.

“They just perform better when it comes to social skills, academic skills, kids knowing how to properly hold a pencil, or how to get along with their classmates,” Craig says.

In preschool, Craig says kids also gain coping skills and learn how to self-regulate.

“If you spend your 3-year-old and 4-year-old years going to preschool, adjusting to new adults, adjusting to new kids - by the time you get to kindergarten it’s something you’re already ready for,” Craig says.

For those who may be concerned about the cost of preschool, there are scholarships available for students. For more information, visit their website .

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What Skills are Important for a Successful Career in Preschool Education?

Posted On June 26,2023

If you want to be a preschool teacher, you know that a degree in early childhood education is the first step. A successful career in preschool education is so much more than having a degree. Great preschool teachers share specific skills that make them successful, and while some of those skills are developed and refined in the classroom, others are innate to those who are drawn to teaching young children.

Successful Preschool Teachers Have a Passion for Working with Children

Without a passion for working with young children, you can be an adequate preschool teacher, but you won’t achieve the same level of success as someone who is fully dedicated to teaching preschool. Passion for working with young children can’t be taught. To be a successful preschool teacher, you should enjoy watching children of all backgrounds grow, learn, explore, as well as possess the desire to help them succeed. Seeing a young child learn and develop skills and helping to build that strong foundation is one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching preschool.

Preschool Teachers Have Strong Organizational Skills

When you are working with a large group of young children, organization is a necessity. You’ll need to have well-planned lessons, easily accessible materials, and an organized classroom with designated spaces. Preschool teachers need to always manage their space and time wisely. When everything is structured and organized, children feel comfortable and safe, and when they feel comfortable and safe, they can focus on learning. Keeping the class on track with students who know what to expect will make your classroom a successful one.

Preschool Teachers are Excellent at Communication

Communicating with young children is a skill. A successful preschool teacher will be able to clearly and concisely explain activities, rules, and expectations to very young students. They need to be good listeners to meet the needs of their students, especially as children are developing language skills themselves. In addition to communicating with students, successful teachers know how to best reach the families of their students, keeping them involved and up to date. Not only that, but communication is evolving. Many preschools are now using digital sites to share and communicate with families, so good digital communication skills and the ability to work with technology are now just as important as being able to communicate face to face. 

Successful Teachers Have Strong Classroom Management Skills

Without strong classroom management, it won’t matter how strong you are in lesson planning or teaching concepts. If the students are off task and undisciplined, they aren’t learning. Keeping a class of preschool children focused and engaged is a challenge, and a skill that will need to be developed. The best way to build this skill is to avoid downtime and create consistent daily schedules with structured routines. Young children are not always predictable and can act out when frustrated, so successful preschool teachers will need to develop a system to respond to challenging behavior. Patience, compassion, and clear expectations with consequences are all necessary for a well-managed classroom.

Great Preschool Teachers Combine Excellent Planning Skills with Flexibility

Great preschool teachers are creative with a high level of energy, but these skills aren’t enough on their own. A good preschool teacher will be able to plan developmentally appropriate lessons that will meet the needs of each child. They need to know what skills need to be taught and teach them in an engaging way. Your early childhood education classes can help you develop the skills to plan a good lesson, but you also need to do that with a great degree of flexibility. Successful teachers are able to adjust on the fly as needed.

How a Degree in Early Childhood Education Can Help You Hone These Skills

When you pursue a degree in early childhood education , you will develop knowledge of how children grow and learn during the formative years. You will develop strategies to hone this development, strategies for classroom management, instruction in how to build a lesson plan, and how best to structure a day as a preschool teacher. But being a successful preschool teacher is more than just mastering your coursework. In a good early childhood education program, you will also get the chance to work on skills such as organization, flexibility, and communication, and most importantly, you’ll understand why working with young children is so important. 

With a degree in early childhood education and the right skills, you can be a successful preschool teacher with a fulfilling career. Not only that, you will know that you are making a difference in the lives of young children and their families. If you have always felt like you’d be a great teacher, contact Athena Career Academy . We offer a comprehensive early childhood education degree program, and our caring staff and faculty are here to support you and help you succeed.

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Home > ETD > Doctoral > 5631

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

A phenomenological investigation of north carolina's general pre-kindergarten teachers' attitudes and perceived self-efficacy toward inclusion.

Susanne Williamson Carter , Liberty University Follow

School of Education

Doctor of Philosophy

Garnia Holman

Teachers, attitudes, self-efficacy, inclusion, pre-kindergarten, early childhood education, special needs

Disciplines

Education | Special Education and Teaching

Recommended Citation

Carter, Susanne Williamson, "A Phenomenological Investigation of North Carolina's General Pre-Kindergarten Teachers' Attitudes and Perceived Self-Efficacy Toward Inclusion" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects . 5631. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/5631

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to investigate and describe North Carolina’s general Pre-Kindergarten teachers’ lived experiences concerning their attitudes and perceived self-efficacy towards inclusion. The theories guiding this research study were Bandura’s social learning theory and Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior. The social learning theory laid the foundation for the importance of positive attitudes and a high sense of self-efficacy toward inclusion. The theory of planned behavior grounded the idea that teachers’ attitudes influence their behaviors and actions. Therefore, negative attitudes can cause teachers to be negative towards including special needs children. Ten general NC Pre-K teachers were selected to participate in this study through purposeful sampling. The study took place in two school districts in North Carolina. Data were collected through individual interviews, a focus group interview, and document artifacts. The data was analyzed and coded into themes. Four major themes emerged from the data: Pre-K teachers define and describe inclusion, the main influences of teacher attitudes towards inclusion, the main influences of perceived self-efficacy regarding inclusion, and barriers to successful inclusion. The results from the data showed that NC Pre-K teachers had positive attitudes towards including children with mild and medium special needs but a negative attitude towards including children with severe special needs. The findings also revealed that support, training, and resources were the main influences of negative attitudes, low perceived self-efficacy, and barriers to successful inclusion. The findings from this study can assist those that govern the NC Pre-K program by addressing factors that influence negative teacher attitudes and low self-efficacy toward inclusion among NC Pre-K teachers.

Since May 22, 2024

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