Do children’s reading gains differ by the type of kindergarten program they attend?
The additional time that children who attend full-day kindergarten spend in school increases their exposure to a variety of instruction activities—learning phonics, reading books, reading from a basal text, and so forth. Findings from the ECLS–K suggest that public school children who attend full-day classes make greater reading achievement gains during the kindergarten year than their counterparts who attend half-day classes (figure 8). On a reading scale that ranged from 0 to 72,8 the average kindergartner in a full-day program gained 10.6 points over the school year. For children in half-day kindergarten programs, the average gain was 9.4 points. These differences persist when other characteristics associated with kindergarten program type and/or children’s academic success (e.g., race/ethnicity and poverty status), and classroom characteristics that might be related to kindergarten achievement gains (e.g., class size, presence of an instructional aide), are taken into account (Wals
