Chapter 6. Summary and conclusions

This chapter summarises the main findings for Estonia and discusses them in relation to themes such as gender, socio-economic status, and home learning environment.

    

The first five years of a child’s life can be a period of great opportunity, and great vulnerability. The brain’s ability to change in response to experiences reaches its highest levels during this time (Knudsen, 2004[1]), which means that children learn at a faster rate than at any other time in their lives, building the foundations for their future cognitive and social-emotional skills development. Building advanced cognitive and social-emotional skills is far more difficult and less effective at later ages without a strong early foundation (Center on the Developing Child, 2016[2]). The International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS) provides robust and comparable information to participating countries on children’s early learning in a range of domains and in relation to a host of individual and contextual factors. This chapter summarises the main findings from IELS in Estonia.

Children in Estonia have strong self-regulation and social-emotional skills and sound literacy and numeracy skills

The average five-year old child in Estonia showed comparatively stronger early self-regulation and social-emotional skills than their counterparts in England and the United States. At the same time, children in Estonia were at or close to the overall averages for emergent literacy and numeracy skills. Children in Estonia scored significantly higher than children in England and the United States in emotion identification and prosocial behaviour. They also scored significantly higher than children in the United States in emergent literacy, numeracy, working memory and mental flexibility, and significantly higher than children in England on inhibition. However, children in Estonia scored significantly lower than children in the United States and England in non-disruptive behaviour and lower than children in England in emergent numeracy.

IELS data showed that children’s early learning relies on the interrelated development of cognitive and social-emotional skills. While the percentage of explained variance by the socio-economic status index showed variation across countries, the predictive value of social-emotional skills was relatively stable. In Estonia, children’s social-emotional scores accounted for between 5% and 27% of their emergent literacy scores (compared to 13-33% in England and the United States), between 6% and 26% of their numeracy scores (compared to 12-28% in England and 7-22% in the United States), and between 4% and 11% of their working memory scores (compared to 7-18% in England and 5-22% in the United States), after controlling for socio-economic status. IELS data suggest that cognitive skills are a necessary but not sufficient condition to foster early social-emotional learning. For example, children need a minimum level of literacy skills to be able to adequately navigate socially; have rich interactions with peers, friends, and parents; and ultimately, to open the door to social-emotional learning. However, having high levels of literacy does not always ensure having high social-emotional skills, and vice versa.

Conclusion 1: Five-year-olds in Estonia demonstrated balanced strengths across cognitive, self-regulation and social-emotional skills.

Differences between children based on socio-economic background are smaller in Estonia than in England or the United States

The combination of household income, parental occupation and parental educational completion – which together create the socio-economic index applied in this study – were associated with higher literacy, numeracy, working memory, mental flexibility emotion identification, prosocial behaviour and trust. However, relationships between early learning skills and socio-economic background were comparatively smaller in Estonia than in England or the United States. Additionally, the association between socio-economic background and early learning skills was not significant in inhibition, emotion attribution and disruptive behaviour. These results are consistent with findings from PISA (OECD, 2019[3]).

In Estonia, 53% of mothers of five-year-old children had completed tertiary education (i.e. bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, professional degree or doctorate), which is higher than in the other two countries participating in the study (40% in England and 39% in the United States). Children whose mothers had completed tertiary education in Estonia had better cognitive and social-emotional outcomes than those whose mothers had not. A higher proportion of parents in Estonia were described as being strongly or moderately involved in their children’s education than in England or the United States.

Conclusion 2: At age five, gaps in scores for cognitive and social-emotional domains between children from low and high socio-economic backgrounds were already present in Estonia, but were comparatively smaller than in England and the United States.

Early learning among Russian-speaking children, especially girls, is stronger than among Estonian-speaking children, despite coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds

Preschool institutions in Estonia are divided into Estonian, Russian and mixed centres based on the language of instruction. The vast majority of Estonian-speaking and Russian-speaking preschools institutions are public institutions. Russian-speaking five-year-olds represented 21% of the children in Estonia. Despite coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds, Russian-speaking children had significantly higher outcomes than Estonian-speaking children in emergent literacy, numeracy, working memory, emotion identification, emotion attribution, prosocial behaviour and trust, after controlling for socio-economic status. These differences were more prominent after accounting for socio-economic status than before.

In Estonia, there was an overall gender gap in favour of girls in emergent literacy, self-regulation skills and social-emotional skills, but there was no equivalent gender gap for emergent numeracy skills. This result was in line with the patterns observed in England and the United States. However, in Estonia, Russian-speaking children showed more prominent gender differences than Estonian-speaking children. Russian-speaking boys had similar scores to Estonian-speaking boys and girls in literacy, numeracy, working memory, mental flexibility, inhibition, emotion identification, prosocial behaviour and trust, after accounting for socio-economic status. Russian-speaking boys had similar scores to Estonian girls in emotion attribution, but higher than Estonian-speaking boys. Russian-speaking boys had similar scores as Estonian-speaking boys in non-disruptive behaviour, but lower than Estonian-speaking girls.

In Estonia, the assessment language did not necessarily match the language of instruction. Of the 21% of Russian-speaking children in the study, approximately 13% attended a preschool where the language of instruction was Russian, and 8% attended an Estonian or immersion language preschool. It is important to note that children could have attended a different setting prior to the age 5. Nonetheless, the differences by children’s language also hold when comparing language of instruction in favour of Russian preschools after accounting for socioeconomic background. On the other hand, Russian speaking-children attending Estonian or immersion language preschools did not significantly differ from Russian speaking-children attending Russian preschools in any of the study’s early learning outcomes after controlling for socio-economic status.

The results in IELS were generally aligned with existing evidence that showed that girls whose language of instruction was Russian had better outcomes in sixth grade (i.e. 11 or 12-year-old), followed by girls who studied in Estonian, Russian-speaking boys, and Estonian-speaking boys (Leino et al., 2006[4]). However, data from 15-years old students in PISA showed a performance gap between schools with different languages of instruction. Estonia’s first PISA assessment in 2006 showed that the average science, reading and mathematics scores of students in Russian-language schools were significantly lower than those of students in Estonian-language schools. The gap with Estonian-medium schools was still approximately one school year in PISA 2015. In PISA 2018, the performance gap between schools with different languages of instruction remained. An in-depth analysis also showed that Russian-speaking children at Estonian-language schools scored better than their Russian-language school counterparts (Windzio, 2013[5]; Lindemann and Saar, 2012[6]).

Conclusion 3: Russian-speaking girls had a comparatively stronger start than other children in Estonia, as assessed in IELS.

Children with a home language other than the assessment language have poorer early literacy and self-regulation skills in the assessment language

In Estonia, around 6% of children lived in homes where at least one parent mostly spoke a language other than the assessment language at home, which is lower than in the other two countries participating in the study (16% in England and 20% in the United States). Children with a home language other than the assessment languages of Estonian or Russian had similar emergent numeracy and social-emotional skills to other children, but poorer early literacy and self-regulation skills.

Conclusion 4: At age five, children with a home language other than the assessment language had significantly lower literacy and self-regulation skills, indicating additional support may be needed for these children.

Parents’ activities with their children matter for children’s learning

Findings from IELS showed that parents’ activities make a significant difference for their children’s learning, regardless of their socio-economic background. For example, children whose parents were more involved in the centre their child attended had higher outcomes across cognitive and social-emotional domains than children whose parents were less involved, after accounting for socio-economic status.

In addition, the number of children’s book at home and the frequency with which children were read to by their parents were significantly related to cognitive and social-emotional outcomes. Similarly, regularly taking the child to special activities outside of the home (such as sport, dance lessons, scouts) was significantly associated with both cognitive and social-emotional skills.

Some activities parents do at home were more strongly associated with some skills than others. For example, regularly role-playing with children was positively associated with children’s lower disruptive behaviour but less so with emergent literacy and numeracy or self-regulation skills.

In Estonia, there were positive associations between the use of digital devices and self-regulation but negative associations with trust scores. However, scores in emergent literacy and prosocial behaviour were higher for children who used devices at least once a week rather than every day, supporting an approach towards moderate rather than frequent use. Similarly, the results in the United States showed that moderate use of digital devices is associated with higher emergent literacy, mental flexibility, and emotion identification scores. In England, moderate use of digital devices is associated with higher emergent literacy, working memory, and trust scores. The challenge, therefore, remains in how to take advantage of technology, while minimising the risks (Burns and Gottschalk, 2019[7]).

Conclusion 5: Parental involvement and activities were significantly associated with children’s early learning scores in IELS, regardless of their socio-economic background.

Conclusion 6: IELS findings suggested that a variety of activities within and outside the home best support children’s early learning.

Parents and educators are not fully aligned when evaluating children’s early development

Parents and educators are important sources of information about children’s early learning. In IELS, parents and educators were asked to evaluate their children’s development in a number of cognitive and social-emotional areas. Across countries participating in IELS, parents gave more positive ratings of their children’s early learning than educators. Overall, the data showed that parent and educator ratings were not fully aligned.

Children’s parents were substantially more likely to describe them as developed above in a wide range of cognitive and social-emotional domains than their educators were. This may reflect educators’ greater experience with children in the target age group, leading to them having a more accurate understanding of the average development of five-year-olds. Alternatively, it may reflect differences in how children display early skills in the school environment and how they do so at home, with the people who know them best.

Conclusion 7: Continued communication between the home and the preschool about children’s progress is likely to be beneficial for all parties.

References

[7] Burns, T. and F. Gottschalk (eds.) (2019), Educating 21st Century Children: Emotional Well-being in the Digital Age, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/b7f33425-en.

[2] Center on the Developing Child (2016), From Best Practices to Breakthrough Impacts, Harvard University, http://www.developingchild.harvard.edu (accessed on 30 July 2019).

[1] Knudsen, E. (2004), “Sensitive Periods in the Development of the Brain and Behavior”, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 16/8, pp. 1412-1425, https://doi.org/10.1162/0898929042304796.

[4] Leino, M. et al. (2006), New Identity of Russian Speaking Children in Estonian Society, https://www.socwork.net/sws/article/view/184/572 (accessed on 8 December 2019).

[6] Lindemann, K. and E. Saar (2012), “Ethnic inequalities in education: second-generation Russians in Estonia”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 35/11, pp. 1974-1998, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.611890.

[3] OECD (2019), PISA 2018 Results (Volume I): What Students Know and Can Do, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5f07c754-en.

[5] Windzio, M. (ed.) (2013), Integration and Inequality in Educational Institutions, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6119-3.