Education

Why some kindergarteners don’t make the grade

Did you know that the aggressive, hyperactive children you see in daycares and kindergarten classrooms are four times more likely than other children to drop out of school before obtaining their high-school diploma?

This is one of the conclusions of a study conducted by Prof. Frank Vitaro of the Université de Montréal’s School of Psychoeducation and a researcher with the Research Unit on Children’s Psychosocial Maladjustment. The 20-year study was conducted on thousands of girls and boys from across Quebec. A group of 4330 research subjects, first contacted at the age of six in the 1980s, and re-contacted 15 years later, enabled the researcher to establish a scientific correlation between school success at an adult age and aggression and hyperactivity during early childhood. “Thanks to the help of the Ministère de l’Éducation, we were able to track the evolution of children who demonstrated disruptive behaviour at an early age. In fact, more than half of these children had not completed high school 15 years later. The risk of not obtaining a diploma due to disruptive behaviour is slightly higher than the risk usually associated with poverty. But this risk can be reduced to a certain extent through early preventive measures,” explains Prof. Vitaro.

Based on interviews with kindergarten teachers, Prof. Vitaro was able to evaluate the ‘aggressive’ and ‘hyperactive’ nature of children. On a scale of 0 to 2, the teachers were asked to evaluate six types of behaviour associated with hyperactivity and lack of attention (‘moves,’ ‘fidgets,’ ‘has trouble concentrating,’ etc.), and eight aggressive and confrontational types of behaviour (‘fights,’ ‘intimidates the other children,’ ‘uses physical force,’ ‘disobeys,’ etc.). The children that exhibited these types of behaviour were then contacted at the age of 21.

So how did they fare? Among those who rated high for hyperactivity and lack of attention or aggression and lack of cooperation, 57.3% had still not obtained their high-school diploma. By comparison, 17.7% of students who had received low ratings were in the same situation. Students normally obtain their diploma after 11 years of schooling, at the age of 17. As in other studies, the overall rate of students who did not earn a diploma from among the sample group was 34.5%. When factors generally associated with disruptive behaviour are taken into consideration in a multivariate analysis (i.e., social and family context, the child’s sex, the teaching practices of parents and teachers), the risk of not attaining a diploma is always higher among disruptive children than among their more composed classmates. In scientific terms, the ‘risk ratio’ therefore increases to 4.3, which means that a disruptive child is 4.3 times more likely to attain the age of 20 without having obtained a high-school diploma.

This longitudinal research and its findings, to be published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, provides us with a better understanding of the factors that predispose young people to drop out of school, even before they have embarked on their school career. What Prof. Vitaro calls ‘risk indicators’ can be observed in kindergarten classrooms and probably even in the daycare setting. And theirs effects are cumulative. “A child from a difficult socioeconomic background who demonstrated aggressive behaviour and lack of attention, who does not have many friends and is subjected to questionable parental practices is 12 to 15 times more likely to drop out of high school before the age of 20,” explains Prof. Vitaro.