The influence of kindergarten on students’ performance: The Spanish case.

Abstract

Most Spanish parents enrol their children in preschool education (ages 3–5)as a way of preparing them for compulsory education. However, not allparents decide to enrol their children in kindergarten (ages 0 to 2). In thiscontext, the aim of the present study is to analyse the influence of kinder-garten attendance on students’ academic performance in third and sixthgrades. In order to address this issue, we employ census and longitudinaldata from the Spanish region of the Canary Islands and an instrumentalvariable approach to go beyond simple correlation. Our results show thatkindergarten attendance improves students’ performance in around onestandard deviation in third grade, but that this influence is reduced andalmost disappears when reaching sixth grade, particularly in reading.