Do Preschool Peers Create a Sustaining Environment in Kindergarten? - Evidence from the ECLS-K:2011

Oct 15, 2026

Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten Cohort 2011, the study tests whether a higher share of preschool-attending peers in a kindergarten classroom relates to stronger academic and social skills for children who did not attend preschool, and whether peer exposure changes (moderates) the benefits of preschool attendance. It also examines whether peer shares align with teachers’ perceptions of children’s reading skills and teachers’ instructional time on advanced reading content. Results show no association with many child skills, but link peer percentages to teacher-reported reading skills and advanced reading instruction time.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryHealthcare

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Pages20

Reading Time50 min

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Do Preschool Peers Create a Sustaining Environment in Kindergarten?

Evidence from the ECLS-K:2011

Sustaining environments hypothesis and preschool effects

Peer effects and spillover in post-preschool classrooms

AERA Open January-December 2025, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 1–20 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584251318306 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2025. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Do Preschool Peers Create a Sustaining Environment in Kindergarten? Evidence from the ECLS-K:2011 Zhiling Meng Shea University of California, Irvine University of Maine, Farmington Qing Zhang Jade Marcus Jenkins University of California, Irvine Tyler W. Watts Columbia University Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten Cohort 2011, we examine (i) whether more preschool attendees in a kindergarten classroom relate to higher academic and social skills for children who did not go to preschool,(ii) whether more preschool attendees in the classroom moderate the benefits of preschool attendance (child N = 11,360; class N = 2,460; 67% White; 51% males; M = 5.6 years), and (iii) whether more preschool attendees in the classroom relate to teachers’perceptions of children’s aseills and their instructional content. In contrast to prior analyses using the 1998 cohort of the ECLS-K, we found no evidence of an association between the classroom percentage of preschoolattending peers and children’s academic, executive function, and behavioral and prosocial skills. However, we found that the percentage of preschool peers was associated with teachers’perceptions of children’s reading skills and teachers’instructional time spent on advanced reading content. Keywords: child development, classroom research, early childhood, educational policy, kindergarten, peer effect, preschool, quasi-experimental analysis, reading, regression analyses, secondary data analysis, sustained gains, teacher instruction, teacher knowledge, teacher perceptions Early childhood education (ECE) programs can influence a wide array of cognitive and social-emotional outcomes (Bassok et al., 2019; Campbell et al., 2014; Heckman et al., 2013; K. Magnuson & Duncan, 2016; Shea, 2021; Weiland & Yoshikawa, 2013) . However, researchers have often found that the impacts of preschool on skills only last during the early school years and tend to fade in later grades (e.g., Lipseyet al., 2018; Puma et al., 2012; Yoshikawa et al., 2016) . In turn, some emerging literature has attempted to understand the contexts and mechanisms in later schooling environments that may contribute to sustained early learning gains. Bailey et al. (2017) introduced the “sustaining environments hypothesis,” suggesting that the persistence of preschool effects may be more likely when children are exposed to high-quality, aligned learning environments in the years following preschool. These factors encompass child and family-specific aspects (e.g., income), community and neighborhood conditions, as well as later schooling environments (e.g., school and teacher quality, full-day kindergarten, peer environments) . Such elements have been shown tobe powerful predictors of children’s access to preschool, school quality, and early skills (e.g., Bustamante et al., 2022; Chetty et al., 2016; Currie & Thomas, 2000; Gormley & Gayer, 2005) . An expanding body of empirical research testing the sustaining environments hypothesis has examined the moderating effects of school quality indicators, including teacher quality, time spent on advanced instruction, full-day kindergarten, and class size. Although there is a growing set of studies testing this hypothesis, findings on the factors that might influence the sustained development of preschool attendees are inconclusive (e.g., Bailey et al., 2020) . This Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/))

FAQs

What dataset does the article use to study preschool peers in kindergarten?

It uses the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten Cohort 2011 (ECLS-K:2011).

Does a higher classroom percentage of preschool-attending peers improve children’s academic and social skills?

The study finds no evidence of association between preschool-attending peer percentages and children’s academic, executive function, behavioral, and prosocial skills.

How are preschool peers linked to teachers’ reports and instruction?

Preschool peer percentages are associated with teachers’ perceptions of children’s reading skills and with teachers’ instructional time spent on advanced reading content.

Oct 15, 2026

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