SCHOOL READINESS: DOES IT MATTER IF PARENTS AND CAREGIVERS THINK ALIKE?

Jigjidsuren, Dari

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March 21, 2019

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Jigjidsuren, Dari
- Affiliation: School of Social Work

Abstract

Growing market competition and increasingly high standards for the global workforce have placed a greater emphasis on school readiness, a complex construct that has yet to be understood and achieved. This dissertation study strives to contribute to the body of readiness research by offering new insights into factors associated with improving child outcomes. The study uses the data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) to examine parents' and caregivers' views of school readiness and their relationship to children's cognitive outcomes in preschool and kindergarten. Multiple regression analyses were used to investigate the associations between parents' and caregivers' views and child outcomes, and the moderating effects of race/ethnicity and SES on child outcomes. Also, the study measured congruence of school readiness views between parents and caregivers using advanced statistical methodologies such as absolute congruence index, weighted and unweighted kappa statistic (kw), agreement indices (rWG) and average deviation indices (AD). This dissertation study advances the existing research on school readiness in several ways. This study is the first of its kind to measure congruence of school readiness views using multiple innovative approaches for a large sample (N = 4,500) of individually paired parents and caregivers. Next, the study validated and revised the school readiness measure, initially used in the 1993 National Household Education Survey and subsequently used for the ECLS-B. Third, the study offers insights into the complexity of the meaning of school readiness for practitioners working in diverse cultural contexts. The findings from this study support the notion that parents and caregivers play a critical role in children's early development and reveal the associations between the views of parents and caregivers and children's test scores in math and reading. However, given the magnitude of findings and their conflicting nature, the question about the associations between congruence of views and child outcomes remains inconclusive. The study demonstrates the need for more refined instruments to more accurately measure school readiness, and suggests that future research focus on cultural aspects of school readiness.

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