Primary school performance predictable from early childhood

(Image: Pixabay CC0) Tests carried out on children aged 3 to 5 predict many of the differences in later school performance. Some 84,000 children are entering Grade 1 this week in Quebec, and the same question is on all their parents' minds: will my child do well in school? There may be a way to get a good idea of the answer to this question long before students receive their first report card, suggests a study conducted by an inter-university research team. In fact, tests used to assess certain cognitive skills, as well as knowledge of language and numbers, can be used to predict school performance in early childhood, reports the team in a study published in Plos One . "The results of these tests explain about half of the differences observed between children in their academic performance at the start of primary school. In psychology, tools that have such a predictive value for academic success are rare," comments study leader Michel Boivin , professor at Université Laval's School of Psychology. To demonstrate this, the researchers studied two cohorts totalling over 2,600 subjects. These children are participants in two longitudinal studies undertaken in the mid-1990s: the Quebec Newborn Twins Study and the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development.