REL Southwest Ask A REL Response
Early Childhood:
Benefits of Transitional Kindergarten Programs
February 2021
Question:
What are the benefits of transitional kindergarten programs?
Response:
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Thank you for the question you submitted to our REL Reference Desk. We have prepared the following memo with research references to help answer your question. For each reference, we provide an abstract, excerpt, or summary written by the study’s author or publisher. Following an established Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southwest research protocol, we conducted a search for research reports as well as descriptive study articles on transitional kindergarten programs.
We have not evaluated the quality of references and the resources provided in this response. We offer them only for your reference. Also, we searched the references in the response from the most commonly used resources of research, but they are not comprehensive, and other relevant references and resources may exist. References provided are listed in sections with sources in each section in alphabetical order, not necessarily in order of relevance. We do not include sources that are not freely available to the requestor.
Research References
Berlin, L. J., Dunning, R. D., & Dodge, K. A. (2011). Enhancing the transition to kindergarten: A randomized trial to test the efficacy of the “Stars” summer kindergarten orientation program. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 26(2), 247–254. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ918774. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51691426
Doss, C. (2019). How much regulation? A fuzzy regression discontinuity analysis of student literacy skills in prekindergarten vs. transitional kindergarten. Education Finance and Policy, 14(2), 178–209. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1211693
Little, M. H., Cohen-Vogel, L., & Curran, F. C. (2016). Facilitating the transition to kindergarten: What ECLS-K data tell us about school practices then and now. AERA Open, 2(3), 1–18. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1194396
Additional Organizations to Consult
TKCalifornia – https://tkcalifornia.org/
California Department of Education (CDE) – https://www.cde.ca.gov/
Methods
Keywords and Search Strings
The following keywords and search strings were used to search the reference databases and other sources:
- “transitional kindergarten” benefits
- “transitional kindergarten” value
- “transitional kindergarten” effects
- “transitional kindergarten” impact
- “transitional kindergarten” outcomes
- Effects (transitional kindergarten)
- transitional kindergarten
Databases and Resources
We searched ERIC for relevant, peer-reviewed research references. ERIC is a free online library of more than 1.8 million citations of education research sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Additionally, we searched the What Works Clearinghouse.
Reference Search and Selection Criteria
When we were searching and reviewing resources, we considered the following criteria:
- Date of the publication: References and resources published from 2006 to present, were include in the search and review.
- Search priorities of reference sources: Search priority is given to study reports, briefs, and other documents that are published and/or reviewed by IES and other federal or federally funded organizations, academic databases, including ERIC, EBSCO databases, JSTOR database, PsychInfo, PsychArticle, and Google Scholar.
- Methodology: The following methodological priorities/considerations were given in the review and selection of the references: (a) study types—randomized control trials, quasi-experiments, surveys, descriptive data analyses, literature reviews, policy briefs, and so forth, generally in this order; (b) target population, samples (representativeness of the target population, sample size, volunteered or randomly selected, and so forth), study duration, and so forth; and (c) limitations, generalizability of the findings and conclusions, and so forth.