Students’ gains from Pre-K converge with similar students who did not attend Pre-K in elementary school. One theory for convergence is that students who attend Pre-K enter kindergarten classrooms that are skill heterogeneous, and these students are positioned near the top of the classroom skill distribution. Kindergarten teachers, however, focus their instruction on students toward the bottom of the skill distribution, which generates observed convergence. We explore this theory by analyzing data from six rural school districts in North Carolina ( = 655, aged 4–6, 51 % female, 77 % non-White). We find mixed evidence in support of this hypothesis. Our measures of kindergarten classroom heterogeneity were inconsistently related to skill convergence based on both the outcome measure and the specific construction of the heterogeneity measure, but all significant associations were in the predicted direction.

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幼儿园课堂的技能异质性与学前教育持续进步有关吗？来自 IES 早期学习网络的证据

学生从学前班中获得的收益与小学未参加学前班的类似学生的收益一致。趋同的一种理论是，参加学前班的学生进入技能异质的幼儿园教室，这些学生的位置接近教室技能分布的顶部。然而，幼儿园教师将教学重点放在技能分布底部的学生上，这会产生可观察到的趋同现象。我们通过分析北卡罗来纳州六个农村学区的数据（= 655，4-6 岁，51% 女性，77% 非白人）来探索这一理论。我们发现了支持这一假设的混合证据。根据结果​​测量和异质性测量的具体构建，我们对幼儿园课堂异质性的测量与技能收敛的相关性不一致，但所有显着的关联都在预测的方向上。