Time use in half-day vs. full-day pre-kindergarten

By Susan Davis, Johns Hopkins University

The Westminster Public School District in Colorado instituted a full-day pre-kindergarten program in 2016 while also continuing to run half-day pre-kindergarten, and conducted a randomized control trial to examine the impacts of full- vs. half-day pre-K on end-of-pre-K student outcomes. To supplement the study, Denker & Atteberry examined how teachers utilized the extra time in full-day pre-K in order to better inform other educational stakeholders who might be considering the full-day pre-K model.

Half-day pre-K ran 4 days/wk for 3 hrs/day and full-day ran 5 days/wk for 7 hrs/day, more than double the half-day option. Subjects were students whose families were interested in the full-day pre-K option, and they were randomly assigned to conditions with 16 students per class in 34 pre-K classrooms. Most students were from low-SES households, 77% were Hispanic, and many spoke English as a second language. Researchers looked at both subject taught and activity types (for example teacher-directed groupwork vs child choice activity) during 114 observations from 2017-2019, with some teachers being observed up to 14 times. WPS used a play-based program that also included comprehensive, writing, and social-emotional learning curricula, although time allotments were not specified for the curricula used.

Results showed that the proportion of time spent in most activities was similar for half-day vs full-day classes. Both half- and full-day models spent 40% of their time devoted to non-instructional activities, but the time in minutes on each activity was accordingly longer in the full-day classes. The extra three hours in the full-day model were devoted to napping (1 hour) and then to 10-20 minutes more per activity than in the half-day model, yielding 180 more hours a year spent on instruction in full-day vs. half-day pre-K, most of which addressed ELA rather than math. In both options, teachers addressed more than one content area simultaneously instead of teaching subjects like math or ELA separately. These results offer important considerations for schools considering full-day pre-K.