Full-day preschool may prepare children better for learning and social development than part- time programs, new research showed, bolstering the case for putting kids in classrooms at younger ages.
The findings from a study of 982 low-income and ethnic-minority 3- and 4-year-olds, enrolled in Chicago's Child-Parent Center Education Program, are reported in recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. They found that full-day programs improved four of six measures of school readiness as well as attendance.
"You can just go so much further in all the domains of learning in a seven-hour program," said Arthur J. Reynolds, a researcher at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis who led the study. "These 30 to 40 percent differences in preschool turn into bigger benefits over time."