The impact of early childhood education on the development of children's mathematical skills: A longitudinal meta-analysis and review

There is a robust consensus that early childhood education and care (ECEC) has supportive beneficial effects on the cognitive development of children. For this reason, the idea that all children should access ECEC services has been widely accepted both in developed and developing countries. However, it is difficult to assert that a similar consensus has been reached on whether the positive effects of ECEC are long lasting. The main aim of this study was to examine the short- and medium-term effects of ECEC centres on the development of mathematical skills of children. Conflicting findings regarding the persistent effects of ECEC on children's mathematical skills were combined via meta-analysis method. In accordance with three main research questions of the study, five meta-analyses were conducted with the effects sizes obtained from 20 studies including a total of 48.656 children. The persisting effect of having ECEC experience on children's sixth-grade math outcomes was found to be quite limited (d=0.18). Both the findings of the review section and that minimal main effect pointed out that the effects of ECEC experience tend to fade out. The results also demonstrated that starting kindergarten with prior ECEC experience had a positive impact on kindergarten math skills beyond the maturation and teacher effects (d=0.4), however, this advantage decreased expeditiously in the first year of primary school (d=0.13). The effects sizes from the last two meta-analyses which included only children attending ECEC indicated that, children's kindergarten math skills were highly correlated with their first- (r=0.68) and second-grade math skills (r=0.63). The meta-analytic effect sizes that draw attention to the persistence of individual achievement differences during the transition from preschool to primary school were evaluated. The possible causes of the fade out phenomenon revealed in the first three meta-analyses were discussed and the findings were explained through a causal framework. Keywords: Early Childhood Education and Care, Mathematical Skills, Meta-Analysis