Relationships between Young Children’s School Readiness and Primary School Enrollment, Grade Retention and Completion in Rural Cambodia

Abstract

  The present study examines the relationships between young children’s school readiness and primary school enrollment, grade retention and completion through a panel study in rural Cambodia. School readiness refers to young children’s foundations necessary for their learning in school environments.

  With the backdrop of a recent emphasis on early childhood education in developing countries lies an expectation that improving school readiness during the early years contributes to children’s increased educational attainment in later life. Such policies sound promising, particularly for those developing countries in the last stage of universalizing primary education, in tackling the remaining issues of educationally disadvantaged children in rural and impoverished areas. Yet, the argument rests on weak empirical footings, wherea majority of evidence comes from developed countries and the few longitudinal studies in developing countries have generated mixed results thus far. This study therefore poses the following four questions to accomplish the above research purpose: 1) What is the level of young children’s school readiness in rural Cambodia?; 2) What determines their school readiness?; 3) Are there differences in school readiness between on-time enrolled students at the official school-staring age and those who did not, grade repeaters and non-repeaters during primary school years, and graduates and non-graduates from primary school?; and 4) What are the relationships between school readiness and primary school on-time entry, grade retention and completion after controlling for children’s and their families’ background characteristics?

  A panel of 252 children in two rural districts of Province A in Cambodia was first studied in November 2008 when they were around 5 years old and later tracked through four instances of fieldwork in the years of 2009, 2010, 2017, and 2018. In the sampling of 2008, 25 villages with community preschools were first selected by systematic random sampling, which was followed by the selection of three public kindergartens located in their neighborhood and 20 other villages of similar socio-economic levels without access to any preschool education. All children born in 2003 in these villages and kindergartens participated in the study in principle, and only those who did not change their preschooling status during 2008 and 2009 remained in the sample. School readiness of individual children was measured twice at the ages of 5 and 6 before primary schooling, using the “Cambodian Development Assessment Test” developed by Unicef based on the government’s “Early Learning and Development Standards” for children aged 5. Other data were also collected, such as children’s demographic characteristics, their families’ socio-economic status, along with past schooling records in the follow-up fieldwork. In the sample, 47% had preschool experience at the age of 4, and 75% received preschool education either at a public kindergarten or a community preschool at the age of 5.

  The study’s uniqueness is found not only in its longitudinal design, but also in the accuracy of the sampled children’s chronological age, which often constitutes a serious challenge in education research in rural areas of developing countries where people are not particularly age conscious. In fact, the original sample size as of 2008 was 378; however, 56 children were later confirmed not to be in the targeted age group, reducing the original sample to 322. With the final sample of 252 children for analysis, the retention rate after the ten years of follow-up was 78%. Change of residence accounted for the majority of the sample loss. (View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)