The Relation Between Classroom Age Composition and Children’s Language and Behavioral Outcomes: Examining Peer Effects

Abstract

Grouping children of different ages in the same preschool classroom (i.e., mixed age) is widespread, but the evidence supporting this practice is mixed. A factor that may play a role in the relation between classroom age composition and child outcomes is peer skill. This study used a sample of 6,338 preschoolers (ages 3-5) to examine the influence of both classroom age composition and peer skill on children's behavioral and language outcomes. Results supported the growing literature indicating preschoolers' skills are higher when peer skill is higher, but differences related to classroom age composition were not found. These findings further support the view that peer skill plays an important role in preschool children's outcomes. The findings reported here are based on research conducted as part of the Educare Learning Network Implementation Study funded by the Buffett Early Childhood Fund and the George Kaiser Family Foundation under contract to Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute in conjunction with the ELN LEP/ NEP Research Consortium. Generous local sources fund each school's local evaluator. The Consortium consists of representatives from the programs participating in the evaluation, the local research teams, the evaluation contractors, and the Ounce of Prevention Fund.

Instructional support in inquiry-based elementary school science classes: how does it relate to students’ science content knowledge and academic language proficiency?

“…Thus, students whose classmates had, on average, higher language proficiency concerning general academic vocabulary and comprehension of connectives at the beginning of the school year showed larger learning gains over time. On the one hand, this finding adds to a large body of research that provided evidence for compositional effects for different age groups and domains, including language proficiency (e.g., Becker et al, 2022;Foster et al, 2020;Hanushek et al, 2003;Schmerse, 2021). On the other hand, it extends prior research on inquiry-based science instruction, which typically did not adhere to compositional effects.…”

Peer Effects on Early Language Development in Dual Language Learners

“…Furthermore, the research has shown that the association appears to be stronger for children with lower language skills (Justice et al., 2011) and children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds (Ribeiro et al., 2017), although some studies did not find significant effects of peers’ language skills (Choi et al., 2018; Shager, 2012). Recent evidence also suggests that the level of peers’ language skills may partly explain the effects of age composition in preschool classrooms (Foster et al., 2020). Based on the assumption that peer effects depend on the number of opportunities to interact with peers, some authors have suggested extending the compositional approach to peer effects by also incorporating the observed intensities of peer interactions for individual children (Chen et al., 2020).…”

“…With the growing recognition that preschool environments considerably support language development, researchers have begun to examine the contribution of preschool peers to children’s language learning (Chen, Justice, Tambyraja, & Sawyer, 2020; DeLay, Hanish, Martin, & Fabes, 2016; Foster, Burchinal, & Yazejian, 2020; Henry & Rickman, 2007; Justice, Petscher, Schatschneider, & Mashburn, 2011; Mashburn, Justice, Downer, & Pianta, 2009; Reid & Ready, 2013; Ribeiro, Zachrisson, & Dearing, 2017; Weiland & Yoshikawa, 2014). Despite a growing literature on peer effects in ECE, however, relatively little is known about the extent to which peer effects may moderate the differences in majority language skills between DLLs and their monolingual peers.…”

Effects of Conformity Tendencies on Farmers’ Willingness to Take Measures to Respond to Climate Change: Evidence from Sichuan Province, China

“…In daily life, in order to reduce the decision-making risk caused by incomplete information, people tend to learn from other people’s decisions or behaviors to reduce uncertainty [ 34 , 35 ]. At present, relevant theories of peer effects are applied to the investment decisions of enterprises [ 36 ], clean energy use [ 37 ], and social education [ 38 ], and they have been widely used in many fields. At the same time, Chinese scholars combined traditional customs and further localized the “peer group circle”.…”