Full-day vs. half-day kindergarten: In which program do children learn more

This study addresses a major policy question in the area of early childhood education: Do children who attend full-day kindergartens learn more than their counterparts who attend half-day programs? Embedded in this important policy question are issues of social equity. Which children have access to full-day and half-day kindergarten programs? If full-day kindergarten benefits children's learning, are kindergartners in some school settings particularly advantaged by their full-day experience? We address these policy questions with empirical evidence from an important and current data source: The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K). We use the first two waves of data drawn from a nationally representative sample of over 8,000 1998-99 kindergartners in over 500 U.S. public schools that offer either kindergarten option as a school-wide program. We restrict our study to public schools, as changes in public policy about kindergarten are more relevant in such schools. More than half of kindergartners experience (and schools offer) full-day programs, which are most commonly available to less advantaged children in public schools. Using multilevel (HLM) methods, we show that children who attend schools that offer full-day programs learn more in literacy and mathematics over the kindergarten year than their half-day counterparts. We als