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Empirical Economics

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20.08.2016

Extracurricular educational programs and school readiness: evidence from a quasi-experiment with preschool children

verfasst von: Anna Makles, Kerstin Schneider

Erschienen in: Empirical Economics | Ausgabe 4/2017

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Abstract

This paper adds to the literature on extracurricular early childhood education and child development by exploiting unique data on an educational project in Germany, the Junior University (JU). Utilizing a quasi-experimental study design, we estimate the causal short-run effect of JU enrollment on ability measures and show that attending extra science courses with preschool classes leads to significantly higher school readiness. Attending classes at JU increases school readiness by approximately 2.18 percentage points which corresponds to 1/5 of a standard deviation of the ability score. The result passes various robustness checks.

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The ‘Haus der kleinen Forscher’ is a joint initiative of the BMBF and the Telekom foundation (the annual reports are available at: http://www.haus-der-kleinen-forscher.de).

For example, HandsOn Science in the UK and US, ScienceLab Kinder.Wissen.Mehr in Germany (Schettler 2010). Children’s universities can be found across Europe, especially in Germany and the UK.

Full name: Junior Uni-Wuppertaler Kinder- und Jugend-Universität für das Bergische Land gGmbH (gGmbH = nonprofit company with limited liability). More information (in German) is available at www.junioruni-wuppertal.de.

Courses can also be organized in six or eight 90-min units or as full-day courses. The fee for these courses may be higher, up to €10. Kindergarten courses run for four weeks only, and the course fee is always €5. The fee for preschool classes is generally paid for by the kindergartens.

The first cohort comprises 2809 children born between September 1, 2003, and August 31, 2004, whose SEnMed took place between mid-August 2009 and mid-July 2010. The second cohort comprises 2860 children born between September 1, 2004, and September 30, 2005, whose SEnMed took place between September 2010 and July 2011.

The tests are confidential and the test items are not publicly available.

The overall KMO criterion is 0.8285; item KMO criteria lie between 0.7070 and 0.9251.

Since 1996 (2013) children in Germany are entitled to a place in kindergarten at the age of 3 (after their first birthday).

The data are provided by the microm GmbH.

In total, 14 of 84 kindergartens were eliminated from the analysis as only one participant or non-participant in the two cohorts could be merged to the SEnMed data. This mainly results from incorrect entries of the kindergarten number by the physicians or assistants during the SEnMed and is uncorrelated with treatment status.

As noted in footnote 10, missing values are uncorrelated with the treatment status and occur at random. A large set of missing values results from incorrect entries (implausible coding) by the physicians or assistants during the SEnMed.

In total, 35 children (13 from the pre-treatment group, 22 from the treatment group) are excluded from this analysis, because they are either too old (possibly due to migration) or too young (due to early enrollment) to be in the cohort.

We decide to use a fixed effects approach instead of a random effects model because, as argued above, observations within kindergartens are likely to be correlated. Consequently, the random effects model is rejected by a Hausman test.

In further specifications, not reported here, we allow for nonlinear age effects and group-specific age effects. Neither the results nor the marginal age effect changes considerably.

Since boys are underrepresented in preschool classes at JU (cf. Sect. 4.1), we checked for group-specific effects of JU attendance and find no significant differences in JU effect for boys and girls. Both groups benefit equally from attending JU classes.

In October 2015, 4400 kindergartens in Germany were accredited. With about 60 children reached per year and kindergarten this amounts to 264,000 children (estimation is based on figures provided by the Wonderlabz Network for a densely populated region in North Rhine-Westphalia http://wonderlabz.org/netzwerk/). Excluding preschool teacher salaries, accreditation fees and training costs the public expenses of the program amount to €35 per child (cf. Sect. 1).

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Titel: Extracurricular educational programs and school readiness: evidence from a quasi-experiment with preschool children
verfasst von: Anna Makles
Kerstin Schneider
Publikationsdatum: 20.08.2016
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Erschienen in: Empirical Economics / Ausgabe 4/2017
Print ISSN: 0377-7332
Elektronische ISSN: 1435-8921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-016-1119-z

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