Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Study Finds That Kindergarten is Too Easy

I have not read the study yet. It is at http://aer.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/11/25/0002831213513634.full.pdf+html . If it is true that kindergarten is too easy for kids in general, then KG is much too easy for many gifted children.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2014/02/kindergarten_is_too_easy.html
Study Finds That Kindergarten is Too Easy
By Holly Yettick on February 13, 2014 12:35 PM
Education Week

Kindergarten might be the new 1st grade but it is still too easy. A forthcoming study in the peer-refereed American Educational Research Journal finds that students make bigger gains in reading and math when they learn more advanced content such as adding numbers and matching letters to sounds. Yet kindergarten teachers spend nearly twice as much time on basics such as alphabet recognition and counting out loud. Study authors Amy Claessens, Mimi Engel and Chris Curran found that the majority of kindergartners already know how to do these things when they start school.

"If you teach kids what they already know, they're not going to learn as much," said Claessens, an assistant professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and the mother to a kindergartner. "I would go even further and say more time on basic [content] is actually harmful to kids particularly in mathematics. In reading, it is neutral, but math is negative."

In a paper published last year in the peer-refereed Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Engel, Claessens and Maida A. Finch found that even students who started kindergarten lacking basic skills made bigger gains when teachers emphasized advanced material. The American Educational Research Journal findings add a wrinkle by suggesting that kindergarten students learn more when taught advanced content, regardless of whether they have attended preschool or come from low-income families.

Academic Content, Student Learning, and the Persistence of Preschool Effects is based upon a large, nationally representative sample (ECLS-K) representing more than 15,000 students who started kindergarten in 1998-99. The article, which you can read in full for free for the next month, is the most frequently viewed piece on the American Educational Research Journal's website, even though it was just posted November 13th and has not yet appeared in print. (This is relatively rare since it often takes academic articles years to wend their way toward most-viewed status.) Claessens speculates that one reason that the findings have received so much attention is that they have some pretty interesting policy implications.

Interesting. I do feel that K teachers should assess their kids to see what they know already and go from there. Do they really need to spend time on rote counting, colors, letters, etc if everyone already knows them? One could see that creating other issues, I guess.

There are definitely kids in DS's K class who came in not knowing letters at all (he attends a Title 1 school). They are still working on counting to 100. He says they can mostly all do this now, but not all of them.

This study is so old that the subjects are now college juniors. In the meanwhile, K education has changed markedly in our area. However, it is still fair to say that at least as of five years ago (I have fifth graders), that the K curriculum was easy for the majority of the kids at our school. Unfortunately, I think there is also an issue of the goal of somewhat uniform curriculum across schools in the district and perhaps the state.

Good point about the sample age. I'd breezed by that. I'd venture to say that K is not the same now as it was in '98-99.

K 15 years ago used to be about school readiness, phonemic awareness, nursery rhymes, and social skills. Most Title I schools I know did not offer remediation to K classes because K was simply too early to start worrying about reading.

These days, if your child starts K not knowing all letter sounds, letter names, and numbers, he or she may qualify for remedial services. It's not that K teachers expect entering students to be able to read novels but they expect them to be able to read beginning readers.

I haven't noticed much difference in math curriculum, however. From what I hear from moms around me, they find their children to be open to learning letters using flashcards but run away when they try to teach them math.

100% untrue in my district in both schools my children have attended (one of which was very high-scoring, while the other is low-scoring). In both my kids' K classes, there were many kids not knowing all letters--considered totally normal--and very few readers at all. I'm in a city with a weird mix of highly educated people and the poor, though.

In fact, I'm certain my DS was the only entering reader in his K class. DD had one other for sure--possibly one or two more had early decoding skills, but I don't know.

By year's end, they are expected to know all letters, addition and subtraction to 10 (maybe to 20?), counting to 100, and a list of about 25 sight words. This is DS's K. I don't recall expectations for DD's K anymore.

IMO, your DS's K teachers are interrupting the CC standards correctly. I don't get the point of labeling K students who can't read basic phonic readers as remedial. Math expectations sound about the same.

(I personally think we need to get rid of desks in K, make it 1/2 day with optional after school care, and let the kids play. I didn't start learning formal math until I was 6.5 and I don't see how that hurt me in any way.)

At a near-by public school, about half of K students come in as "beginning readers" and a handful are fluent readers. We live in a city populated with competitive parents. A lot of them want their children in one of the top two private prep schools and are already plotting on how their children can get a spot in the highly coveted 6 year MD program. Having a child like DD makes us a target because they think they have to get their children to her level for them to be competitive. We've learned to hide DD's precociousness and so relieved that we found a program that is outside of the mainstream culture here.

I have to say in our experience K is NOT "easy" ... From what we got to see during the 1 trimester of K DS5.6 spent at the public school before we pulled him out to homeschool, there are a lot of kids who need remedial services (a lot of our friends' kids are receiving those services). It's not that expectations would be so high ... it's very much like what ultramarina said. What IS hard, is the inconsistent way thing are being taught. The kids spent (rough estimates) 6 weeks working on numbers 0 to 10, 2 weeks on 10 to 20 (if at all?), 1 week on numbers 20 to 30, and the next week they were expected to count to 100 (and this I know only from my friend because at that point we were pulling DS out). DS is a mathy kid so it was no big deal for us (he was bored in math the whole time he was in public school) but it was/is a serious issue from many of our friends. The harder the topics get, the less time is spent on them and if anyone doesn't get the concept right away, there's no time to stop. No flexibility in staying on a particular topic till more kids get it.
Writing was quite demanding for DS who's been always lacking in fine motor skills. He could had used a lot more time just having fun writing basic letters but instead it went from letters, letters, letters to suddenly writing words, labeling pictures, "write a sentence about" ... I doubt very many kids were able to do it but it was very frustrating for me as a parent when I knew my son needed to spend another 2 weeks learning to write the first letter of his name so he'd stop reversing it all the time.
As for reading, I'm still confused about how exactly what they were doing was supposed to work.
So, basically we had a kid who tested well on letter awareness (yet was very frustrated and seemed quite behind in reading skills), who was well ahead in math yet struggling to follow changes in what and how they were doing week to week, and who was lashing out at the OT in therapy for writing because he felt under too much pressure. And because he was the youngest in class, a lot of it was blamed on simple "immaturity".

We pulled him out, gave him ITBS for Kindergartners just to see where he might be at, he got 98 - 99% on all the subtests, he's been working on 1-2nd grade curriculum in Math and reading (now reading easy readers and understanding the concept of reading more every day, and he's our kid who we have been suspecting might have dyslexia, so he has made huge improvements since we started homeschooling), and as for writing, we are doing it little by little. As his motor skills improve, we will be adding more work. We want him to have fun with it.

So, to me, K is not easy. It's hard. Not so much academically as it is emotionally. Those kids who need more academics should have access to it but for the rest of the kids it should be about fun and flexibility and meeting those kids needs. And it's very far from that.

Oh and I should add, this was half day Kinder. So there was pretty much zero time for any kind of play during the school day. It was all push for learning with no breaks and once the kids got home they had to think about homework and projects and other stuff for school. I want my 5 year old to play. He's a kid, he should be allowed to play. And quite frankly, I am not interested in spending hours weekly doing "family projects" for school. I get that it's the schools push for the parents to be involved in their children's lives but we are already involved, a lot and it was taking away time that we wanted to spend doing things we as parents found important.

All I can say is Kindergarten left a very bitter taste in my mouth.

This is highly dependent on the SES of the district. In our high-SES district of largely well-educated parents, many (not all) kids are reading somewhat in K. In the neighboring urban one, I think they simply can't expect that as a given. What the families can do for the kids is, on average, different in different places, and the schools have to work with what the kids know coming in.