Is your 5 yr old already as smart as you were at 7?
If your answer is âyesâ, then you are not alone. Lot of other parents also have similar notions. It is a common discussion topic among parents these days, a topic that makes them feel proud and good about their child.
Itâs not an anecdote anymore, solid empirical data is coming out in favor of such beliefs. A recent article published at nprEd quotes results from a study done in the US and quantifies how students understanding of concepts is improving with age. University of Virginia scholars have published this using US Department of Educationâs interviews of Teachers who work with kindergarten & grade One students.
Authors claim, learning is becoming faster, studentsâ understanding is higher on average and concepts that are being taught in schools are more complex vs 12 years ago. Not only this, teaching methodologies which are being followed in classrooms today would be considered âtoo advancedâ for kindergarten students 12 years ago.
While on one hand studies like these make parents feel proud, on the other hand they also raise questions around âthe needâ to speed up learning like this. Especially since countries like Finland which are widely believed to have the best schools & Edu system on the planet, do the opposite. That is, focus on experiential learning and no or less homework for first few years in school.
Original article as it got published, is produced here
Why Kindergarten Is The New First Grade
âWhat are some of the things that the monsters like to eat in this story?â teacher Marisa McGee asks a trio of girls sitting at her table.
McGee teaches kindergarten at Walker Jones Elementary in Washington, D.C. Todayâs lesson: a close reading of the book What Do Monsters Eat?
âThey like to eat cake,â says one girl.
âI noticed you answered in a complete sentence,â McGee says. âCan you tell me something else?â
McGee follows with a line you might not expect in a kindergarten class: âCan you show me the page where you found that?â
Textual evidence. Complete sentences. Welcome to kindergarten in 2016. Itâs not quite what McGee, 29, says she was expecting when she started.
âWhen I came into kindergarten, down from first grade, I was like: Yes! What can I order for dramatic play?â McGee says. âAnd I was told: Kindergartners donât do dramatic play anymore.â
If you have young kids in school, or talk with teachers of young children, youâve likely heard the refrain â that somethingâs changed in the early grades. Schools seem to expect more of their youngest students academically, while giving them less time to spend in self-directed and creative play.
A big new study provides the first national, empirical data to back up the anecdotes. University of Virginia researchers Daphna Bassok, Scott Latham and Anna Rorem analyzed the U.S. Department of Educationâs Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which includes a nationally representative annual sample of roughly 2,500 teachers of kindergarten and first grade who answer detailed questions. Their answers can tell us a lot about what they believe and expect of their students and what they actually do in their classrooms.
The authors chose to compare teachersâ responses from two years, 1998 and 2010. Why 1998? Because the federal No Child Left Behind law hadnât yet changed the school landscape with its annual tests and emphasis on the achievement gap.
With the caveat that this is a sample, not a comprehensive survey, hereâs what they found. Among the differences:
In 2010, prekindergarten prep was expected. One-third more teachers believed that students should know the alphabet and how to hold a pencil before beginning kindergarten.
Everyone should read. In 1998, 31 percent of teachers believed their students should learn to read during the kindergarten year. That figure jumped to 80 percent by 2010.
More testing. In 2010, 73 percent of kindergartners took some kind of standardized test. One-third took tests at least once a month. In 1998, they didnât even ask kindergarten teachers that question. But the first-grade teachers in 1998 reported giving far fewer tests than the kindergarten teachers did in 2010.
Less music and art. The percentage of teachers who reported offering music every day in kindergarten dropped by half, from 34 percent to 16 percent. Daily art dropped from 27 to 11 percent.
Bye, bye brontosaurus. âWe saw notable drops in teachers saying they covered science topics like dinosaurs and outer space, which kids this age find really engaging,â says Bassok, the studyâs lead author.
Less âcenter time.â There were large, double-digit decreases in the percentage of teachers who said their classrooms had areas for dress-up, a water or sand table, an art area or a science/nature area.
Less choice. And teachers who offered at least an hour a day of student-driven activities dropped from 54 to 40 percent. At the same time, whole-class, teacher-led instruction rose along with the use of textbooks and worksheets.
Not all playtime is trending down, though. Perhaps because of national anti-obesity campaigns, daily recess is actually up by 9 points, and PE has held steady.
Bassok was surprised by her results. âWe went into the study seeing a lot of anecdotal evidenceâ about the ratcheting up of expectations in kindergarten, she says. âI thought part of this was a nostalgia for what we imagined kindergarten may have been. Itâs pretty amazing to me that, over a 12-year period, we see such drastic changes in teachers reporting what they expect and how they spend their time.â
But what do these findings mean? And are they inherently bad?
Sonja Santelises, vice president for K-12 policy and practice at the Education Trust, which focuses on efforts to reduce the achievement gap, says rising expectations are a good thing, though ârigid instructionâ is not.
âThe report clearly raises important questions about how we are teaching our youngest learners,â Santelises says. âBut we need to be careful that weâre not conflating the challenge of high-quality, engaging instruction and the actual target of learning to read.â
Bassok agrees. âThe changes that seem potentially troubling are more around how kids are learning, not what kids should be learning,â she says. âThere are classrooms that are very hands-on and allow kids to explore and also have terrific focus on math and are language-rich. Those things donât need to be at odds at all.â
Itâs easy to make this a story about teachersâ responses to high-stakes testing. Especially when you consider that, for every one of these indicators, the trend was even stronger in high-poverty classrooms and in schools with more nonwhite children â schools that no doubt felt accountability pressure under NCLB.
However, the authors caution that there are lots of factors at play here. Since 1998, the number of children attending public preschool has jumped dramatically. Thereâs been an even bigger leap in students attending full-day versus half-day kindergarten, which gives teachers more time to cover every subject. Parents also appear to be spending more time reading to kids and otherwise introducing language and math. In short, itâs possible teachersâ academic expectations have risen, at least in part, because more kids are coming to kindergarten better prepared.
Also, kindergartners are older than they used to be: 1 in 5 is 6 years old, in part due to the practice of âredshirting.â
It should be said: The data in this study are five years old. It doesnât capture changes that may have taken place in schools since the adoption of the Common Core, for example. Kindergarten changed dramatically in just over a decade; as policies continue to shift, so too could practice. For now, itâs less pretend time and more reading for the kids at Walker Jones Elementary.
