Peer-reviewed article
Social‐Emotional Outcomes of Preschool Participation: Are There Associations in Kindergarten and Fourth Grade?
Deborah A Phillips, Ann Wright, Anne Martin, Diane M. Horm, Anna D. Johnson et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This study asks whether attending public preschool (school-based pre-k or Head Start) is linked to better social and emotional skills in kindergarten and in fourth grade. It followed children from low-income families, using statistical matching (propensity scores) to compare preschool attenders with children who did not attend preschool. No associations were found between preschool attendance and social-emotional outcomes at the end of kindergarten or in fourth grade. The authors discuss what it might take to build social-emotional skills in typical US preschool settings.
Key points
- Few public preschool evaluations have looked at social-emotional development through the elementary years.
- The sample was race-ethnically diverse and came from low-income families.
- Kindergarten analyses included 907 children and fourth-grade analyses included 595 children.
- No associations were found between preschool attendance (pre-k or Head Start) and social-emotional outcomes at the end of kindergarten.
- No associations were found at fourth grade either.
Limitations
Only the abstract is available, so details of the measures, the matching, sample loss between kindergarten and fourth grade, and the specific differences between pre-k and Head Start are unknown. Propensity score matching cannot fully rule out differences between children who did and did not attend preschool. The countries hint includes Canada, but the abstract refers only to the US.
Abstract
ABSTRACT There is little doubt that children's social‐emotional skills predict better educational outcomes, yet few public preschool evaluation studies have explored associations between public preschool attendance and children's social‐emotional development through elementary school. This is surprising, as the field of preschool evaluation research has recently been consumed by a search for skills in the elementary school years that could be promising mechanisms linking preschool attendance to better adult educational and economic outcomes, especially for children from low‐income backgrounds who are typically the target of public preschool. The current study seeks to fill this knowledge gap, examining whether children who did not attend preschool versus those who attended one of the two primary public preschool programs in the US display more advanced social‐emotional skills in both the immediate aftermath of preschool—kindergarten—and into the mid‐elementary grades. Using propensity score methods, we predict children's social skills and emotional development in kindergarten ( n = 907; M age = 5.52 years) and again in fourth grade ( n = 595; M age = 9.52 years) from public preschool attendance (school‐based pre‐k and Head Start) versus no preschool. In our race‐ethnically diverse sample of children from low‐income families, there were no associations between preschool attendance and social‐emotional outcomes at either the end of kindergarten or in 4th grade. We interpret these results in the context of scientific evidence regarding what it might take to promote early social‐emotional development in typical US preschool settings.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Attendance at public preschool in the US (school-based pre-k or Head Start) compared with no preschool
- Population
- Race-ethnically diverse children from low-income families in the US, followed to kindergarten (n = 907) and fourth grade (n = 595)
Key finding
No associations between preschool attendance and social-emotional outcomes at the end of kindergarten (n = 907)
Phillips et al. · OpenAlex - Early Childhood · 6 Oct 2026