Study: Pandemic reduced children’s readiness for kindergarten
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Key takeaways:
- Only 30% of Cincinnati public school kindergartners were assessed as kindergarten-ready in 2021.
- Parental depressive symptoms and housing insecurity were not associated with a child’s readiness score.
The COVID-19 pandemic reduced children’s readiness for kindergarten, researchers reported in JAMA Pediatrics.
The study was led by researchers from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Cincinnati Public Schools.
“We saw an opportunity to explore what data we capture in primary care visits that might predict or signal a child’s readiness for kindergarten, with the goal of ensuring that children who are at risk for not being ready to succeed are connected to needed and wanted services such as preschool, speech therapy, food pantries and legal aid,” Kristen A. Copeland, MD, FAAP, professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's, told Healio. “The timing of the study allowed us to explore what happened before and after the year in which local schools were closed or operating at reduced capacity.”
Copeland and colleagues studied Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA) scores — a metric with a range of 0 to 300, with a passing score being 270 — for all kindergartners in the public school district in the fall of 2018, 2019 and 2021. They matched KRA scores with 3,204 patients seen for well-child checks from 2014 onward. They collected information on patients’ food insecurity, housing insecurity, caregiver depressive symptoms and problems receiving public benefits.
“We also had demographic information about our patients in the electronic medical record, such as child sex, caregiver-reported child race and ethnicity, insurance coverage, language used at home and need for an interpreter,” Copeland said. “Using linear regression, we were able to determine the independent association of each of these variables with the child’s KRA score.”
Mean KRA scores were 260 in 2021, significantly lower compared with 2019 (262.7) and 2018 (263.5). Only 30% of Cincinnati public schools kindergartners were assessed as kindergarten-ready in 2021, a decline from 40% in 2018.
Researchers found a similar pattern in the 3,200 children who receive care through Cincinnati Children’s primary care sites: 21.5% were deemed ready to learn in 2021 compared with 32% in 2018.
Parental depressive symptoms and housing insecurity were not associated with KRA scores — a surprise, Copeland said.
“We were also surprised to find such a strong negative effect of the 2021 year, after a year of school closures, on a population that was not necessarily yet in school,” Copeland said. “It did not surprise us that a child’s developmental screeners, non-English speaking primary language, [being] rarely read to and [experiencing] food insecurity were related to lower kindergarten readiness scores. But it was perhaps surprising that a single failed developmental screen or food insecurity screen could be associated with a risk for not being ready for kindergarten.”
Copeland is interested in examining the effects of the pandemic on socio-emotional screening results.
“Since we know that a child’s socio-emotional skills — things like self-regulation, attention, staying on task — are strongly associated with kindergarten readiness and success in learning, we would like to examine the association of these variables with KRA scores in the future,” Copeland said.
References:
Copeland KA, et al. JAMA Pediatr. 2024;doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.6458.
Study confirms fears that COVID pandemic reduced kindergarten readiness. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1033425. Published Feb. 5, 2024. Accessed Feb. 7, 2024.
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Copeland KA, et al. JAMA Pediatr. 2024;doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.6458.
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