Social‐Emotional Outcomes of Preschool Participation: Are There Associations in Kindergarten and Fourth Grade?

ABSTRACT There is little doubt that children's social‐emotional skills predict better educational outcomes, yet few public preschool evaluation studies have explored associations between public preschool attendance and children's social‐emotional development through elementary school. This is surprising, as the field of preschool evaluation research has recently been consumed by a search for skills in the elementary school years that could be promising mechanisms linking preschool attendance to better adult educational and economic outcomes, especially for children from low‐income backgrounds who are typically the target of public preschool. The current study seeks to fill this knowledge gap, examining whether children who did not attend preschool versus those who attended one of the two primary public preschool programs in the US display more advanced social‐emotional skills in both the immediate aftermath of preschool—kindergarten—and into the mid‐elementary grades. Using propensity score methods, we predict children's social skills and emotional development in kindergarten ( n = 907; M age = 5.52 years) and again in fourth grade ( n = 595; M age = 9.52 years) from public preschool attendance (school‐based pre‐k and Head Start) versus no preschool. In our race‐ethnically diverse sample of children from low‐income families, there were no associations between preschool attendance and social‐emotional outcomes at either the end of kindergarten or in 4th grade. We interpret these results in the context of scientific evidence regarding what it might take to promote early social‐emotional development in typical US preschool settings.