The Associations of Individual Characteristics and Kindergarten Context with Student Positional Math Achievement Trajectories in Ontario

Abstract

Educational policymakers need to understand individual and contextual predictors of children’s achievement to inform their decision-making and guide their interventions' timing, type, and target populations. The Bronfenbrenner model provides a useful guide for generating quality research on the topic; it takes a developmental approach to children’s outcomes and highlights both proximate factors, such as early capacities and attributes of families, as well as distal factors, such as neighbourhoods, schools, and regions. American educational research has supported this model by demonstrating that achievement disparities emerge by age six, persist through primary and secondary grades, and are influenced by both proximate and distal factors. In Canada, research is limited on the emergence of achievement disparities and their continuation over children’s schooling careers, as well as the key predictors of those trajectories. Comparing magnitudes of individual versus contextual predictors is crucial to inform targeted policy interventions. Canada lacks a population-level national longitudinal dataset tracking students from primary to secondary grades. While some provinces have linked administrative databases to create longitudinal datasets, Ontario has lacked quality data on long-term achievement trajectories. My dissertation uses a unique Ontario-wide dataset created by linking several provincial databases, tracking math achievement from kindergarten through grades 3, 6, and 9 for 30,000 students using a retrospective longitudinal approach and various statistical methods. Multilevel growth models and multiple regression models suggest three key findings. First, kindergarten capacities, especially language/cognitive readiness, significantly impact their math achievements through to grade 9, surpassing the influence of school type and size in kindergarten. Second, aggregate-level disparities by sex and socioeconomic status are relatively stable and persist over all grades. Third, comparisons of the amount of variance in achievement across levels of aggregation suggest that most variation emerges between students rather than between school types or boards. These findings suggest that early grades, including preschool years, are critical periods for academic development. As such, I recommend interventions aimed at ameliorating educational disparities that i) target students’ cognitive/language capacities, along with some non-cognitive capacities, ii) are implemented during student early grades, and iii) are delivered universally across all schools, targeting all lower achievers.