By Karen Rivedal, Office of Research & Scholarship
For the first time since full-day, four-year-old kindergarten (4K) began in the Madison Metropolitan School District, a new evaluation by researchers from UW–Madison and the district shows “strong evidence” suggesting students in the full-day 4K program learn more over the school year than their peers attending half-day 4K.
The report from the Madison Education Partnership (MEP) — a research collaboration between the district and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research in the university’s School of Education — revealed “significantly greater” learning growth in the 2023–2024 school year for full-day 4K students in assessments of literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional skills, such as managing emotions and relating well with others.
The difference in learning growth between full-day and half-day 4K students in the district during the school year was most pronounced in literacy and for students who began the year at lower achievement levels, MEP determined. In contrast, previous evaluations since the district began offering full-day 4K in fall 2021 showed little difference between full- and half-day 4K students’ learning outcomes. Researchers can’t be sure yet what’s driving the change or if it will continue.
The report described the district’s full-day 4K program as a “promising strategy to achieve equity, as it provides significant benefits to students with lower initial achievement levels and a lower level of social-emotional skills.”
The 2023-2024 school year was the third year of the full-day 4K program, now about halfway through its fifth consecutive year. The district has added full-day 4K spaces each year since 2021, offering nearly 1,000 full-day seats now.
The new MEP evaluation uses assessment data routinely collected by district teachers and staff. Students’ skills are measured using a performance-based assessment known as Teaching Strategies-GOLD, which is aligned with the district’s early learning curriculum and used by all 4K teachers in MMSD schools. It is based on teachers’ observations of their students in class.
The analysis, paid for by MMSD, accounted for key student characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, parent education, and family income. Because the results of the latest evaluation were a change from earlier MEP analyses, the report recommends continued reviews of learning outcomes in future student cohorts to understand if differences between the full-day and half-day 4K programs continue to hold or were unique to the 2023-2024 cohort.
Authors of the report are Olga Murasova, Eric Grodsky, Beth Vaade, Culleen Witthuhn, and Brianne Monahan. Learn more about the evaluation’s findings and background in the full research brief online.