argumentative essay about preschool education

Kids Need an Early Start: Universal preschool education may be the best investment Americans can make in our children’s education – and our nation’s future.

Subscribe to the economic studies bulletin, isabel v. sawhill isabel v. sawhill senior fellow emeritus - economic studies , center for economic security and opportunity @isawhill.

September 1, 1999

The keys to academic success for disadvantaged children may not be smaller class sizes, better-prepared teachers, tougher standards, more accountability, or greater choice—laudable as these goals may be. They may instead hinge on a single factor: preschool.

Because of their family environments, too many children come to school ill-prepared to learn. They lack language skills, social skills, and motivation. In Oxford, Miss., for example, Superintendent John Jordan reports that 5-year-olds sometimes arrive in kindergarten not knowing their own names—only their nicknames. Almost all experts now agree that a preschool experience or its first cousin—high quality, educationally-oriented child care—is one of the most effective strategies for improving later school performance.

Consider the emphasis on reducing class size. The evidence suggests that its major benefits come from the extra socialization that it allows teachers to provide to children in the early grades. Yet a more cost-effective solution is to provide these same children with appropriate experiences before they enter school. Ironically, by attempting to reduce class size, schools are competing for staff with child care and preschool programs—to the detriment of the latter.

What evidence is there that increased support for pre-kindergarten will have the hoped-for effects on school readiness? The best studies strongly suggest that children benefit greatly from an early learning experience. High-quality programs have produced short-term gains in cognitive functioning and longer-term gains in school achievement and social adjustment. Recent reviews of the literature by the Rand Corporation, by Steven Barnett at Rutgers University, and by a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin conclude that early interventions, especially with disadvantaged children, have produced a variety of positive results. Those results include higher school achievement, less retention in grade, a reduced need for special education at a later age, and less crime. The study estimates that the most effective programs create savings to the government of $13,000 to $19,000 per child above the cost of the pre-school programs themselves. The best results come from programs that begin early, include children from the most disadvantaged homes, and provide intensive education and other services over a lengthy period.

Critics of this literature have emphasized that the purely cognitive gains fade as children age, that the studies are not without their flaws, and that model programs are difficult to take to scale. These critics have tended to focus on IQ improvements and to ignore the improvements in school performance found by most studies. They also expect research to achieve an unobtainable level of certainty about effectiveness.

In the wake of welfare reform, Congress has appropriated substantial sums for child care, recognizing that if we are going to require low-income mothers to work, we must also provide them with a safe place to leave their children. This suggests a world in which both high-quality child care and early education are provided to low-income families. Done right, this would be a two-time winner: enabling mothers to work and ensuring that children from high-risk families were ready for school.

The importance of early education is increasingly recognized at the state level, where public funding of preschool programs is catching on, albeit at an uneven pace. Other countries have also recognized the need to educate children from an early age. In France and Italy, for example, nearly all children 3 to 5 years old are enrolled in publicly funded preschools.

Toward a New Federal Commitment to Early Education

Individual families and some states will undoubtedly continue to make such investments in young children. Some will argue that a federal role is unnecessary or even counterproductive. There is considerable sentiment in this country for keeping education, including preschool, as a state and local responsibility, and this tradition is deeply ingrained. But only the federal government can make sure that all children have equal access to a good education, regardless of the state or community in which they live.

Although providing medical care and retirement benefits to the elderly or even welfare benefits and food stamps to the poor are time-honored federal commitments, these programs are better thought of as picking up the pieces after the education system has failed. Any one state or community that neglects the education of its children imposes large costs on the rest of us.

There are three different ways in which the federal government could intervene:

1. Provide federal funding while allowing states and local communities flexibility to use the money in diverse ways on the condition that they enroll more children in accredited facilities, target modest-income families, and use federal dollars to supplement, not supplant, state spending. Standards for accreditation could be established by states or by the federal government with the advice of professional groups and benchmarked over time against school-readiness scores. A block grant to the states would enable more of them to provide the kind of innovative programs adopted by a number of states in recent years. Georgia and New York, for example, have implemented universal pre-kindergarten programs. California is spending the $750 million a year raised from a tax on tobacco to provide early childhood programs in every community. Some states, such as Indiana and Iowa, are transferring money from their welfare block grant to fund early childhood programs. Federal funding would both accelerate this state-led movement and even out the playing field for children across the country.

2. Provide a more generous (and refundable) tax credit or voucher to lower-income families to be used only in accredited preschool facilities. A tax credit would combine the federal support for education that liberals have supported with the parental choice and competition among providers that conservatives like. Unlike the first option, however, this one doesn’t allow much scope for the investments in provider training and infrastructure that many experts believe are necessary and, in the absence of school choice, makes it more difficult to use the public schools as providers.

3. Build on the existing system. For example, the federally funded Head Start program could be expanded to serve all poor and near-poor children for at least two years. Head Start’s part-day, part-year schedule should be extended to meet the needs of working parents. The current program serves less than half of all eligible poor children, most in part-day programs for one year, typically at age 4. Moreover, as educational historian Diane Ravitch has argued, Head Start lacks a strong educational component. In recent years, middle class and affluent families have enrolled their children in preschool programs in record numbers; twice as many 3- to 5-year-olds are enrolled among families with incomes above $75,000 as among families with incomes below $10,000. Although the original intent of the program was to give children from poor families a “head start,” they are no longer getting one.

All of these options, if done right, would be expensive. For example, a high-quality, two-year program with full subsidies for families earning up to $30,000 could cost as much as $30 billion annually—about $18 billion more than we are currently spending at the federal level. Politics will always argue for serving more children at a lower cost per child. But in the end this politically satisfying strategy is likely to be self-defeating because inexpensive programs are usually ineffective as well. The lesson from decades of research is that with limited resources, it is better to provide fewer children a quality program that promises to improve their school performance and later success than to spread the money more broadly. Recent budget debates have emphasized the importance of using the $2.6 trillion in projected federal budget surpluses to “save” Social Security. But an investment in people, especially in young children, has as large or larger a payoff as investing in tangible capital. Rates of return to education have risen sharply since the late 1970s, and evaluations of early childhood programs suggest that they actually save the taxpayer money over the long haul.

Making today’s children more productive and better able to use emerging technologies can create a much stronger economy than investing all of our resources in financial capital. Yet we are spending a tiny fraction of total federal resources on children under the age of five, a commitment that is likely to wane further given tight budget caps on discretionary spending. If we want to prepare for the retirement of the baby boom generation, we must not only save more both individually and collectively – we must invest more in the only people who will be around to pay the costs of that retirement: today’s young children.

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Ask the Expert: Why is a Preschool Education Important? ‘When Children Attend High-quality Pre-K Programs, They Get a Really Great Boost in Early Skills That Set Them Up for Success in Elementary School,’ Says Assistant Professor Michael Little

This is part of the monthly  “Ask the Expert” series  in which NC State College of Education faculty answer some of the most commonly asked questions about education.

Early childhood is a critical time when a child’s brain is highly impacted by the contexts and environments that surround them. It is for that reason that NC State College of Education Assistant Professor Michael Little, Ph.D. , says a preschool education is important for all students who are able to attend.

“Oftentimes, when children attend high-quality and effective Pre-K programs, they get a really great boost in early skills that set them up for success in elementary school,” said Little, who studies policies and programs that seek to improve early educational outcomes for students with a focus on connections between preschool and early elementary grades.

Decades of research have demonstrated the benefits of preschool, Little said, including a long-term study of an early model Pre-K program that began in the 1960s. Participants in that study, who are now middle aged, have been followed throughout their lives by researchers who have found that those who attended the preschool program demonstrated beneficial outcomes throughout their lives, including having superior health outcomes and being less likely to be incarcerated than those who did not attend preschool.

Studies on scaled up Pre-K programs, including North Carolina’s state-funded Pre-K program, also show that attendance leads to robust benefits for kids that set them up for success in early elementary school grades, Little said.

Despite these initial benefits, Little said that more can be done to help children sustain the academic gains that they make in preschool. Stronger alignment between preschool and the K-12 school system, specifically in kindergarten through third grade, can help prevent “Pre-K fadeout,” a phenomenon in which the early benefits of preschool can diminish in elementary school.

“This is a really critical challenge because, to deliver on the promise and effectiveness of Pre-K, we need to make sure that we’re sustaining the gains of Pre-K throughout elementary school and beyond,” he said. “That means coordinating and creating an aligned system of early learning that builds upon the gains that kids made in Pre-K and sustains them throughout the early grades. This is often referred to as P-3 alignment.”

Little’s own research has demonstrated that school-based preschool programs, which are located within an elementary school rather than in a separate building, could be a crucial element to improving P-3 alignment. When preschools reside in the same location as K-3 teachers, it can create conditions for educators to better collaborate and share student data in order to break down barriers that often exist between the worlds of Pre-K and K-12 learning.

Making sure that preschool and kindergarten teachers are able to communicate and create stronger transition practices from Pre-K to kindergarten can also help support P-3 alignment, Little said.

In addition to helping children to sustain academic gains, P-3 alignment also has the benefit of helping schools to achieve goals of educational equity, as children who attend state-funded preschool programs are often historically marginalized students or students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“If the effects of Pre-K simply fade away once they enter elementary school, we’re not delivering on the promise of preschool as an equity achieving policy intervention. For us to close achievement gaps and really deliver on the promises of Pre-K, we need to ensure through P-3 alignment that the benefits of Pre-K are sustained,” Little said.

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Addressing the need for affordable, high-quality early childhood care and education for all in the United States

February 18, 2020.

Childcare & Early Education

Economic Inequality

Economic Mobility

Economic Wellbeing

Economics of Place

Race & Ethnicity

Wage Stagnation

This essay is part of Vision 2020: Evidence for a stronger economy , a compilation of 21 essays presenting innovative, evidence-based, and concrete ideas to shape the 2020 policy debate. The authors in the new book include preeminent economists, political scientists, and sociologists who use cutting-edge research methods to answer some of the thorniest economic questions facing policymakers today. 

To read more about the Vision 2020 book and download the full collection of essays, click here .

In 2017–2018, most children in the United States under 6 years of age—68 percent of those in single-mother households and 57 percent in married-couple households—lived in homes in which all parents were employed . 1 Most of these families require nonparental early care and education, such as childcare centers, preschools, family childcare homes, or informal arrangements with relatives or neighbors, to care for their children while at work. In a typical week in 2011, the most recent year for which complete data are available from the U.S. Census Bureau, 12.5 million of the 20.4 million children under the age of 5 living in the United States (61 percent) attended some type of regular childcare arrangement . 2

Unfortunately, on average, the early care and education settings attended by many young children, particularly low-income children or children of color, provide quality at levels too low to adequately promote children’s learning and development. 3 This exacerbates socioeconomic and racial and ethnic inequalities. At the same time, in most regions of the country, families with young children are spending more on childcare than they are on housing, food, or healthcare. 4

In this essay, I argue that greater policy attention to early childcare and education is warranted for three reasons:

• High-quality early care and education promotes children’s development and learning, and narrows socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequalities.
• Reliable, affordable childcare promotes parental employment and family self-sufficiency.
• Early care and education is a necessary component of the economic infrastructure.

I then provide the research underlying these three statements, and follow with a discussion of several policy solutions to address the current problems of affordability, quality, and supply of early care and education in the United States. The overwhelming evidence shows that more public investment is needed to help ease the cost burden for families and ensure that a trained, stable workforce has adequate compensation. A universal early care and education plan, particularly one with a sliding income scale to provide progressive benefits, may not pay for itself in the short term, but will very likely do so in the long term by boosting broad-based U.S. economic growth and stability while narrowing economic inequality.

High-quality early care and education promotes children’s development and learning and narrows inequality

Early childhood, especially the first 3 years of life, constitutes a sensitive period of the life course, one during which caregiver warmth, responsiveness, and developmentally appropriate stimulation are vital for development. 5 Experiences during early childhood—whether positive, such as language exposure, or negative, such as high and chronic levels of stress or deprivation— have lasting effects . 6 Research demonstrates that socioeconomic disparities in cognitive skills and physical development are apparent in infancy. 7

Over the past five decades, a wealth of research has examined how early care and education affects children’s development. Most studies find that the majority of the intensive, high-quality, at-scale model programs promote children’s academic school readiness in the short term. These include the Abecedarian project (studying a set of children born between 1972 and 1977 into their adult years), the Perry Preschool project (studying of a select group of children born between 1962 and 1967), the Infant Health and Development Program (a 1980s program that studied low birth-weight children in their first 3 years), and longstanding federal at-scale early care and education programs such as Head Start, state pre-Kindergarten programs, and high-quality center-based programs. 8 Effects are generally strongest for disadvantaged children, suggesting that early care and education may help to narrow socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic disparities in achievement. 9

Among the early care and education programs in existence long enough to have data on long-term effects, research finds substantial and lasting benefits for educational and economic outcomes, including higher rates of high school completion, college attendance, and earnings, and reduced criminal activity and public assistance reliance into adulthood. 10 There also is emerging evidence for intergenerational benefits . 11 Yet the research is somewhat mixed for the mid-term effects of early care and education programs. Research finds benefits of participation for reduced grade retention, or repeating a grade in school. 12 The short-term benefits on test scores, however, appear to “fade out” or converge with children who did not attend early care and education programs as they age. 13 But some research suggests that may be due to the quality of the schools attended after early childhood. 14

A largely separate body of research examines the health effects of early care and education. Studies find that the initial entrance of young children into group care is associated with a short-term increase in the incidence of communicable diseases. 15 But there are substantial and lasting benefits of early care and education participation for health , including increased on-time immunization rates, early screening rates, improved cardiovascular and metabolic health, and reduced smoking. 16

Reliable, affordable childcare promotes parental employment and family self-sufficiency

Early care and education provides a context for child development, as well as temporary relief to parents for childcare, allowing them to work. Indeed, increased access to affordable childcare increases parents’ labor force participation, particularly among single mothers. A recent review of the labor effects of childcare estimates that a 10 percent decrease in childcare costs would lead to a 0.25 percent to 1.25 percent increase in parental labor force participation. 17 Research finds that public preschool programs, which typically offer part-day, school-year programming, have some but potentially limited effects on parental employment. 18 But full-day, full-year early care and education—particularly for infants and toddlers for whom care is expensive and hard to find, and who are less likely to attend center-based care (See Figure 1)—would likely have larger effects on parental labor force participation. 19

Early care and education is a necessary economic infrastructure component

Childcare can be considered an infrastructure component akin to transportation. Without reliable, affordable sources, workers cannot regularly get to work or stay there. In the short term, early care and education settings support the productivity of two types of workers: employed parents and childcare workers. Research by University of Chicago economist and Nobel Laureate James Heckman and others suggests that many early childhood programs pay for themselves before children begin kindergarten via increased maternal employment, which generates both household income and tax revenue. 20 Further, research from the early 2000s suggests that investments in childcare have strong local economic development effects, or multiplier effects, because much of those dollars are spent on childcare worker wages that they, in turn, spend locally. 21

In the long term, early care and education supports the preparedness and skills development of the future workforce of the country. Benefit-cost analyses of several intensive model programs and public early care and education programs indicate that the benefits—such as improved educational, economic, and health outcomes, and reduced criminal activity and receipt of public assistance—outweigh the initial program costs, demonstrating positive returns for participants, as well as the public. 22

Barriers in accessing the promise of early care and education

Unfortunately, families with young children today face barriers in accessing and paying for the opportunities offered by early care and education. High-quality early care and education is expensive and hard to find, particularly for infants and toddlers. 23 Families with young children spend about 10 percent of their incomes on childcare expenses, but families in poverty—families below 100 percent of the Federal Poverty Level of about $12,000 per year for a family of three—spend 30 percent. 24 These expenses represent families’ actual expenses at a mix of regulated centers and homes and informal lower-cost arrangements with relatives, not necessarily what they may choose to spend if more options were available.

In 2017, infant childcare at centers or licensed homes cost an average of $9,000 to $12,000 per year across the country, more than public college tuition in most states. 25 These high childcare costs accrue during a period when parents are at the lowest earning years of their careers and when the financing mechanisms of grants and low-interest loans are unavailable. 26 The public programs that exist to help families access early care and education—namely the Early Head Start/Head Start program and childcare subsidies provided under the federal and state Child Care and Development Block Grant program—serve a small fraction of those eligible. In 2016–2017, 35 percent of 3- to 5-year-old children in poverty attended Head Start, and 10 percent of children under age 3 in poverty attended Early Head Start. 27 In 2015, of the 13.5 million children eligible for childcare subsidies under federal rules, only 15 percent received them. 28

Public investments in preschool contribute to dramatic increases in participation in early learning programs in the year or two prior to children’s entry into kindergarten. Whereas in 1970, about 1.09 million (27 percent) 3- to 5-year old children in the United States attended preschool, by 2016, 4.701 million (60 percent) were enrolled . 29 Yet these overall rates mask disparities in attendance. While income-based gaps in enrollment in preschool narrowed in recent decades, children in low-income families continue to be less likely to attend center-based care than their higher-income peers. 30 As shown in Figure 1, among children under age 5 with employed mothers, only 28 percent of those in homes under the poverty line attend center-based care, versus 39 percent of those above the poverty line. This is problematic, as center-based settings tend to provide higher-quality, more stable care, on average, than unregulated arrangements. 31

Further, centers that low-income children attend provide lower quality care, on average, than those attended by their higher-income peers. 32 Research shows that higher-income families are enrolling children in formal early care and education programs at increasingly younger ages. 33 In 2005, for example , 22 percent of 1-year-olds from families with incomes above 200 percent of the federal poverty line (at that time, about $32,000 per year for a family of three) attended center-based settings, compared to just 11 percent of 1-year-olds from families with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. 34 Our system’s reliance on private family investment in early childhood is a driver of inequality, putting children on unequal playing fields well before they walk through the doors of their kindergarten classrooms. 35

Despite their high expense, early care and education programs should actually cost more, not less. The quality of early care and education depends on the warmth and responsiveness of teachers and caregivers and on the strength and consistency of caregiver-child relationships, which means economies of scale do not apply to childcare in the same way as with other economic sectors. For good reason, state and local regulations set child-adult ratios and group sizes and teacher training requirements. In turn, most childcare costs are directed to labor expenses. 36

Yet, despite parents paying as much (or more) than they can afford, childcare workers are paid little. In 2018, the median hourly wage for childcare workers was $11.17 ($23,240 per year). 37 This is considerably less than the $16.56 median hourly wage for bus drivers ($34,450 per year). 38 What’s more, there are wide racial and ethnic gaps in teacher pay and benefits such as health insurance coverage or paid sick leave. 39 Many workers earn so little that they rely on public assistance. Between 2014 and 2016, more than half (53 percent) of childcare workers lived in families that participated in one or more of four public programs. 40 This compares to 21 percent in the general population . 41

Low pay and few benefits present barriers in attracting and retaining a skilled early care and education workforce. Teacher educational qualifications and stability are associated with the quality of early childhood settings and, in turn, a wide range of children’s outcomes. 42 In 2012, 25 percent of childcare centers had turnover rates of 20 percent or higher. 43 A 2018 study found that 10 percent of children in Head Start (whose teachers average lower pay than those at public preschool programs) had a teacher who left Head Start entirely during the program year, with harmful consequences for children’s outcomes. 44 Adequate caregiver and teacher compensation and training is necessary for supporting quality and stability in, and augmenting the supply of, early care and education.

This lack of reliable, affordable childcare has reverberating effects for parents, employers, and the U.S. economy. Interrupting a career due to a lack of adequate childcare—something more often done by mothers—has both short- and long-term economic ramifications for families in terms of lost wages, retirement savings, and other benefits, with an estimated average reduction of 19 percent in lifetime earnings. 45 Even when maintaining labor force participation, working parents and their employers feel the economic consequences of childcare inadequacy. A 2018 survey found that workers with children under the age of 3 lose an average of 2 hours per week of work time due to childcare problems, such as leaving early or arriving late. One-quarter of respondents reported they reduced regular work hours, turned down further education or training, or turned down a job offer due to childcare problems. 46 One recent study estimated that the childcare crisis results in $57 billion in lost earnings, productivity, and revenue each year. 47

Policy solutions

Most early care and education policies are designed for one or both of two purposes: to provide care while parents work or to promote children’s readiness to enter kindergarten by supporting cognitive, social-emotional, and behavioral development. This is a false dichotomy. As detailed above, high-quality, affordable, reliable programs accomplish both purposes. Yet there are simply too few high-quality, affordable, reliable programs in the United States today, and most are out of reach for low- and middle-income families.

In order to address families’ and employers’ early care and education needs, policies must address the affordability, quality, and supply problems in our current system. More public investment is needed to help ease the cost burden for families and ensure that a trained, stable workforce has adequate compensation, which will promote affordability and quality. Low-income families disproportionately shoulder the economic and other burdens caused by the lack of childcare, although middle-income families are also economically squeezed during the years in which their children are young.

A universal plan, particularly one with a sliding income scale to provide progressive benefits, may not pay for itself in the short term, but will likely do so in the long term. 48 A universal plan that offers benefits such as mixed-income classrooms may have beneficial peer effects . 49 And these kinds of plans have fewer administrative barriers and stigma, and a broader base of political support. 50 Further, an analysis of the Infant Health and Development Program estimates that socioeconomic achievement gaps would be substantially narrowed from universal programs. 51 Policies should be flexible enough to meet families’ diverse needs, address the overall supply of early care and education, and cope with the gaps that are particularly troublesome for families today, such as care during nonstandard hours and for children with special needs. 52

Two examples of universal policy solutions that would improve affordability, quality, and supply are the Child Care for Working Families Act and the Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act. Both of these proposed bills would increase public investment in early care and education to limit families’ out-of-pocket payments to 7 percent of family income (the threshold recommended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), increase childcare worker compensation and training, and expand public preschool and the supply of childcare for infants and toddlers. The Child Care for Working Families Act does so by expanding childcare subsidies, nearly doubling the number of children eligible. 53 The Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act relies more on public provision, expanding a network of early care and education options through federal-state or federal-local partnerships. 54

Both bills, if passed by Congress and signed into law, would lead to substantial increases in the availability of high-quality, affordable early care and education programs. An analysis of the Child Care for Working Families Act estimated that, at full implementation, the availability of new childcare subsidies and reduced childcare costs would lead to 1.6 million more parents joining the labor force, the bill would create 700,000 new jobs in the childcare sector, and pay among teachers and caregivers would increase by 26 percent. 55

The recent increases in state and local paid family leave programs in a handful of states and cities are laudable and help parents manage their own health and their newborns’ needs, while maintaining their jobs and a basic income. 56 Likewise, federal and state public preschool programs and Head Start serve increasing numbers of children, with 44 percent of 4-year-olds and 16 percent of 3-year-olds enrolled in public programs across the country. 57 But in the years following the (relatively brief) period of paid leave and preceding the availability of preschool, families require affordable, high-quality, stable early care and education arrangements that match their working hours.

To ignore early care and education policy means to ignore a major expense and pressing concern for families and employers across the nation. Moreover, the research shows that early care and education can promote children’s cognitive and other outcomes, narrowing disparities and leading to greater economic growth. 58 Our nation’s current lack of investment in early care and education—unique among our peer countries—constitutes a lost economic opportunity to enhance our global competitiveness, as well as a lost opportunity for narrowing pervasive social and economic inequalities among families today.

— Taryn Morrissey is an associate professor at the School of Public Affairs at American University.

Back to Vision 2020 full essay list .

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Characteristics of Families Summary,” Economic News Release (2019), available at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm .

2. Lynda Laughlin, “Who’s Minding the Kids? Child Care Arrangements” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013), available at https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p70-135.pdf .

3. S.W. Helburn and C. Howes, “Child Care Cost and Quality,” The Future of Children / Center for the Future of Children, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation 6 (2) (1996): 62–82, available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18582984 ; National Survey of Early Care and Education, “Measuring Predictors of Quality in Early Care and Education Settings in the National Survey of Early Care and Education” (2015); A. Chaudry and others, Cradle to Kindergarten: A New Plan to Combat Inequality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017).

4. Child Care Aware of America, “The US and the High Cost of Child Care” (2018), available at https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/3957809/costofcare2018.pdf?__hstc=&__hssc=&hsCtaTracking=b4367fa6-f3b9-4e6c-acf4-b5d01d0dc570%7C94d3f065-e4fc-4250-a163-bafc3defaf20 .

5. Board on Children, Youth, and Families and the National Academies of Science, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Programs , J.P. Shonkoff and Deborah A. Phillips, eds. (Washington: National Academies Press, 2000); Douglas E. Sperry, Linda L. Sperry, and Peggy J. Miller, “Reexamining the Verbal Environments of Children From Different Socioeconomic Backgrounds,” Child Development 00 (0) (2018): 1–16, available at https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13072 ; Ruth Feldman and Arthur I. Eidelman, “Biological and Environmental Initial Conditions Shape the Trajectories of Cognitive and Social-Emotional Development across the First Years of Life,” Developmental Science 12 (1) (2009): 194–200, available at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00761.x .

6. Ariel Kalil, “Early Childhood Development.” In Delivering Equitable Growth: Strategies for the next Administration (Washington: Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 2016), available at https://equitablegrowth.org/how-economic-inequality-affects-childrens-outcomes/ ; Jack P. Shonkoff and Andrew S. Garner, “The Lifelong Effects of Early Childhood Adversity and Toxic Stress,” Pediatrics 129 (1) (2012): e232–46, available at https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2011-2663 ; Jack P. Shonkoff, “Capitalizing on Advances in Science to Reduce the Health Consequences of Early Childhood Adversity,” JAMA Pediatrics 170 (10) (2016): 1003–7, available at https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2016.1559 ; Greg J. Duncan, Katherine Magnuson, and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, “Moving Beyond Correlations in Assessing the Consequences of Poverty,” Annual Review of Psychology 68 (2017): 413–34, available at https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044224 ; Greg J. Duncan, Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest, and Ariel Kalil, “Early-Childhood Poverty and Adult Attainment, Behavior, and Health,” Child Development 81 (1) (2010): 306–25, available at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01396.x .

7. Tamara Halle and others, “Disparities in Early Learning and Development: Lessons from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort (ECLS-B)” (Washington: Child Trends, 2009), available at http://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2009-52DisparitiesELExecSumm.pdf ; Lindsey Hutchison, Taryn W. Morrissey, and Kimberly Burgess, “The Early Achievement and Development Gap” (Washington: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2014), available at http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/14/achievementgap/rb_AchievementGap.pdf ; Katherine Magnuson, Jane Waldfogel, and E. Washbrook, “The Development of SES Gradients in Skills during the School Years: Evidence from the United States and England.” In J. Ermisch, M. Jantti, and T. Smeeding, eds., From Parents to Children: The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage (New York: Russell Sage, 2012); Sean F. Reardon, “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations.” In Greg J. Duncan and Richard Murnane, eds., Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011); Anne Fernald, Virginia A. Marchman, and Adriana Weisleder, “SES Differences in Language Processing Skill and Vocabulary Are Evident at 18 Months,” Developmental Science 16 (2) (2013): 234–48, available at https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12019 .

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The Case For Universal Pre-K Just Got Stronger

Greg Rosalsky

Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money 's newsletter. You can sign up here .

According to the National Institute For Early Childhood Research, nearly half of all 3-year-olds and a third of all 4-year-olds in the United States were not enrolled in preschool in 2019. That's in large part because many parents can't afford it. Imagine a future where we changed that. A future where every American child had access to two years of preschool during a critical period of their mental development. How would their lives change? How would society change? If President Biden gets his way, and Congress agrees to spend $200 billion on his proposal for universal preschool, then we may begin to find out.

But it turns out, we kind of already know. In fact, a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research gives us a glimpse of what that world could look like. It adds to a burgeoning amount of high-quality research that shows just how valuable preschool is — and maybe not for the reasons you might think.

An accidental experiment

The story begins back in the mid-to-late 1990s. The Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, wanted to improve the city's schools. One of his big goals was to provide universal, full-day kindergarten for Boston's kids. But the budget was tight, and following a task force's recommendations, he and local lawmakers decided to move resources from preschool (for 4-year-olds) to kindergarten (for 5-year-olds) in order to achieve it.

The result was an even more limited number of slots for city-funded preschool, and the city officials had to figure out how to fairly divvy up those slots. They resorted to a lottery system, randomly selecting kids who would get in.

Fast forward two decades later, and the economists Christopher R. Walters, Guthrie Gray-Lobe and Parag A. Pathak saw this as a golden opportunity to see how preschool can affect people's lives. The fact that Boston's school administrators randomized who got admitted meant there were two virtually identical groups of kids with only one difference: one group got an extra year of education by going to preschool. That gave the researchers the opportunity to compare and contrast the two groups of kids and credibly see how kids' lives changed as a result of getting into preschool.

About 4,000 4-year-olds took part in Boston's preschool lottery between 1997 and 2003. Walters, Gray-Lobe, and Pathak acquired data on them from the Boston school system. And then they were able to get additional data from other sources that gave them insight into ways that the children's lives might have benefited from an additional year of preschool education. These kids are now all twenty-somethings — a fact that should make you feel old.

Consistent with other studies that find preschool has a huge effect on kids, Walters, Gray-Lobe and Pathak find that the kids lucky enough to get accepted into preschools in Boston saw meaningful changes to their lives. These kids were less likely to get suspended from school, less likely to skip class, and less likely to get in trouble and be placed in a juvenile detention facility. They were more likely to take the SATs and prepare for college.

The most eye-popping effects the researchers find are on high school graduation and college enrollment rates. The kids who got accepted into preschool ended up having a high-school graduation rate of 70% — six percentage points higher than the kids who were denied preschool, who saw a graduation rate of only 64%. And 54% of the preschoolers ended up going to college after they graduated — eight percentage points higher than their counterparts who didn't go to preschool. These effects were bigger for boys than for girls. And they're all the more remarkable because the researchers only looked at the effects of a single year of preschool, as opposed to two years of preschool (as President Biden is now proposing for the nation's youth). Moreover, in many cases, the classes were only half a day.

Intriguingly, while attending preschool at age 4 had clear effects on these kids' entire lives, it did not improve their performance on standardized tests. These findings fit into a large body of research that suggests the true value of preschool is helping little ones to develop "non-cognitive skills," like emotional and social intelligence, grit and respect for the rules.

"The combination of findings — that we don't see an impact on test scores, but we do see an impact on these behavioral outcomes and the likelihood of attending college — is consistent with this idea that there's some kind of behavioral or socio-emotional, non-cognitive impact from preschool," says Christopher Walters, an economist at UC Berkeley who co-authored the study.

In other words, there's growing evidence that preschool can permanently improve kids' lives — but it's not necessarily because it makes them smarter. It seems more related to making them more disciplined and motivated, which is just as important (or perhaps even more important) for their future livelihoods as how well they perform on reading or math tests.

The bigger picture

This latest study isn't the first to show the outsized effects of providing a preschool education. The Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman has spent many years studying the results of small, randomized experiments with preschool in the 1960s and 1970s. The most famous such experiment was The Perry Preschool Project, which was conducted in Ypsilanti, Mich. The program provided two years of high-quality preschool for disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-olds.

Heckman and his colleagues found that the Perry Preschool had seismic effects on the kids who participated. They were much less likely to get arrested , go on welfare or be unemployed as adults. They earned significantly more . In a recent study , Heckman and his team found that even the kids of the kids who went to the Perry preschool had significantly better outcomes in life.

All in all, Heckman and his team estimate that every dollar the Perry Preschool project invested in kids had a return on investment of 7-10% per year, through increased economic gains for the kids and decreased public spending on them through other social programs when they got older. That's a substantial return, equal to or greater than the average annual return from the stock market, and much greater than most other things our government spends money on.

Other preschool programs studied by Heckman and his colleagues have had even greater benefits. In the 1970s, a couple of programs in North Carolina experimented with high-quality childcare centers for kids. The centers offered kids aged zero to five education, medical checkups, and nutritious food. Heckman and his team found these centers delivered a 13 percent annual return on investment to the public for every dollar they invested. The program helped Heckman develop what's known as " the Heckman Curve ," which asserts that the government gets more bang for the buck the earlier it provides resources to educate people. Educating toddlers, Heckman says, is much more powerful than educating high-schoolers, college students, or adults in, for example, job-training programs.

As astounding as Heckman's findings about preschool have been, naysayers have long questioned whether such effects could be replicated with larger scale programs, like the one President Biden is now proposing. This new study out of Boston, which looks at a large-scale program conducted across the entire city, is another brick in the growing edifice of evidence that shows preschool is a worthy investment, not just for kids, but for society overall.

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Argumentation in Early Childhood: A Systematic Review

Theoretical grounding, broad features of the reviewed sample of studies, main findings, summarizing discussion, concluding remarks, acknowledgments, statement of ethics, conflict of interest statement, author contributions, data availability statement.

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Jarmila Bubikova-Moan , Margareth Sandvik; Argumentation in Early Childhood: A Systematic Review. Human Development 28 December 2022; 66 (6): 397–413. https://doi.org/10.1159/000527293

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While scientific evidence on argumentation among preschool children is on the rise, it is dispersed over a number of different fields, which may obfuscate its visibility, merit, and potential. The aim of this systematic review was to synthesize the existing research and, as such, shed more concerted theoretical and empirical light on the origins as well as early development of the human capacity to argue. Based on 57 included studies, we show that it has been approached from numerous theoretical perspectives, with the dialogic view of argumentation and a productive eclecticism between argumentation, developmental, learning, and linguistic theories as the main theoretical denominators. The review also documents that young children’s argumentation displays a range of structural-discursive, socio-interactional, and developmental features, positioning them as argumentative agents in their own right. We discuss the implications of our findings in terms of further theory building and their practical significance.

Argumentation and reasoning skills development in educational contexts has in recent years become a top education policy priority. The US framework for K-12 science education, for example, promotes the skill of argument from evidence as part and parcel of scientific and engineering practices that children are to engage in and develop throughout their schooling (National Research Council, 2012). Likewise, in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 conceptual learning framework, “reconciling tensions and dilemmas,” more specifically defined as weighing multiple opposing, contradictory, and even incompatible standpoints, developing arguments with well-supported positions, and finding viable solutions, is considered as one of the transformative competencies of the future (OECD, 2022, pp. 5–6).

This growing policy emphasis can be seen in parallel to mounting scientific evidence on the merits of engaging in argumentative discourse in educational contexts. Argumentation has been framed as one of the most important learning processes that contributes to an active construction of knowledge from early on (Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2009; Perry & Dockett, 1998) and as a core ingredient in critical thinking (Davies, 2015; Siegel, 2010), deemed essential for a successful functioning in technologically advanced, information-dense, late modern democracies (Murphy et al., 2016).

Grounded in socio-constructivist and socio-cultural approaches to learning and development (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch et al., 1995), much research on argumentation in the educational field has focused on school-aged children’s dialogic, collaborative knowledge construction during classroom learning activities (e.g., Driver et al., 2000; Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2009; Rapanta & Felton, 2022; Schwarz & Baker, 2017). This is particularly true of older age groups, attending upper primary and secondary grades (e.g., Gillies & Khan, 2009; Kuhn et al., 2016; Kuhn & Crowell, 2011).

There is generally less research on the youngest age groups of preschool children who may not have been exposed to systematic instructional approaches aimed at honing their argumentative competence in a more targeted fashion. This may be for a variety of reasons of both conceptual and methodological nature (Schwarz & Baker, 2017). Furthermore, the existing research does not form a well-delineated body of scholarship. Rather, it seems dispersed across different scholastic fields, including argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology, linguistics as well as education, among others. This may obfuscate the visibility of the current status of knowledge and, by extension, also its theoretical and practical merit and potential. The aim of this systematic review was, therefore, to synthesize international empirical research on argumentation in preschool children and, as such, shed more concerted theoretical and empirical light on the origins as well as early development of the human capacity to argue. It is, however, of note that, rather than offering a historic panorama of developmental trends in children’s argumentation, we aim at providing a coherent conceptual description of the phenomenon across the set time frame in the form of a viable taxonomy, facilitated here by the adoption of meta-synthesis as our methodological approach. By implication, we also aim to contribute to further theory and practice building in the field. The two main research questions guiding this study were as follows: (a) how is argumentation in preschool children conceptually framed in international research literature? and (b) what characterizes argumentation in preschool children across different interactional settings?

In what follows, we will first ground the study theoretically by reviewing different definitions of argumentation and by providing an overview of the taxonomies that have been proposed to conceptualize this broad field. Upon providing details on our methodological choices, we will delve into presenting our findings based on a meta-synthesis of 57 individual studies identified in our search and deemed as within the set eligibility criteria. We will discuss the identified patterns against the broader canvas of research on young children’s development in formal and informal contexts, draw some theoretical and practical implications thereof, and suggest avenues for further research.

Conceptualizing Argumentation

Argumentation is a diffuse and multifaceted concept with numerous conceptualizations in circulation. Tseronis and Forceville (2017) provide a succinct review of some of the main distinctions made in research on argumentation, including O’Keefe’s (1977) distinction between argumentation as a product and as a process. The former refers to the actual act of communication between parties during which a disagreement or a conflict about an issue arises. In its simplest form, it consists of a claim and a reason for the claim. In fact, as the authors point out, the terms argument and claim are often used interchangeably. Argumentation as a process, on the other hand, is the interactional and communicative act that parties enter into about the argument that is being put forward and defended. As Tseronis and Forceville note, while this broad conceptualization is far from undisputed, it is commonly used in research, not least because of its apparent simplicity. It also underscores a long-established point in scholarship on argumentation in that disagreement, opposition, or conflict are at the core of argumentative discourse and can be regarded as the very minimum for a discursive act to merit the label argumentative (see on this, e.g., Gilbert, 2009). However, as Maynard (1985) points out with a specific reference to children’s arguments, the concept of initial opposition, framed as a multimodal antecedent arguable event, does not, in itself, necessarily constitute an argument and can be seen mostly as a necessary but not sufficient condition for an argument to arise.

In contemporary definitions, much emphasis is placed on the centrality of dialogue in argumentation. Here, argumentative discourse is seen as firmly planted in the situated context of exchange between parties (Schwarz & Baker, 2017; van Eemeren, 2018). Drawing on previous scholarship within argumentation studies and education, Schwarz and Baker (2017), for example, propose a dialogic theory of argumentation in education at the heart of which is the so-called deliberative argumentation. This is defined as “a kind of dialogue that integrates rigorous reasoning and accountability towards the other” (p. 230). It is seen as dialectic and dialogic in that it assumes both collaboration and inter-subjectivity. It is also productive in terms of learning outcomes it may stimulate.

A recent systematic review of research on instructional approaches to learning to argue (LTA) via dialogue (Rapanta & Felton, 2022) sheds light on the broader patterns in which dialogue across educational classroom settings and levels may foster children’s and young people’s ability to formulate and defend their points of view and structure their argumentation in scientifically valid ways. In the review, an argumentative dialogue is conceptualized as a classroom activity either specifically targeting argumentation skills or leading to argumentation nonintentionally through the promotion of “dialogic norms” (Rapanta & Felton, 2022, p. 481). These two distinct dialogue forms are labeled high- or low-structured, respectively. When mapped onto this analytical distinction, studies identified and systematized in the review are shown to represent a continuum: the low-structured end includes studies targeting mostly whole-class, student-driven, or student-dominant sensemaking, with dialogue being the primary goal and argumentation the nonintentional value added of the dialogic activity; the other, high-structured end comprises studies focusing on mostly small group or one-to-one deliberative dialogue, understood as a dialectic, discursive exchange of differences of opinion with “persuasive deliberation” as a distinct goal. As the authors point out, this latter form may be seen as corresponding to Schwarz and Baker’s (2017) concept of deliberative argumentation. As this suggests, in Rapanta and Felton’s (2022) review, argumentation and dialogue are closely bound, with (argumentative or LTA) dialogue as a tool to promote argumentation in classroom settings, intentionally or nonintentionally, featuring as the focal concept.

There is also a host of related concepts which complicate the theoretical landscape further. One of the most closely related ones is reasoning which can be seen as part of, and is sometimes used interchangeably with, argumentation. Different definitions of reasoning exist. For example, Walton (1990) sees reasoning as something that may or may not occur in the context of a purposive or nonpurposive argument. This again may or may not occur in a larger context of exchange which can be both dialogic and nondialogic and where reasoning represents an essentially inferential endeavor or “the (actual) process of inferring conclusions from statements” (Walton, 1990, p. 401). Inference, reasoning, and argumentation are on this view closely bound.

Relatedly, emphasizing its social dimension, Mercier and Sperber (2011) have developed an argumentative theory of reasoning where reasoning is seen as being of an evolutionary nature and as serving primarily, though not exclusively, argumentative ends. Like Walton, they too see reasoning as an essentially inferential process. At the center, there is a conscious, as opposed to intuitive, reflective effort at providing and assessing reasons for conclusions that are being drawn and that are meant to be persuasive. They propose further that reasoning is meant to aid in the process of constructing one’s own arguments and in evaluating those of others in different interactional settings and across different age groups. As such, reasoning and, by implication, argumentation are not reserved to adult discourse only but extended to children’s discourse as well. Drawing on evidence from developmental psychology and related fields, Mercier (2011) argues that children display emerging reasoning and argumentation competence, engage in as well as benefit from social reasoning and commit similar argumentation fallacies as adults.

Other theoretical constructs applied in early childhood education and development research, such as inferential thinking (Collins, 2016) or sustained shared thinking (Siraj et al., 2015), can also be regarded as related to argumentation and reasoning, in that they either take as a vantage point the process of inferring a conclusion from a statement or by acknowledging educationally productive dialogues around different and potentially opposing views as central in children’s language and cognitive development. Nonetheless, exactly how they map onto argumentation as a theoretical construct has, to our knowledge, not been interrogated in research in any depth.

Approaches to Studying Argumentation

Much like argumentation itself, there have been numerous attempts at conceptualizing the various approaches to studying argumentation. Gilbert (2009), for example, draws attention to the distinction between dialectic and rhetoric approaches which corresponds to what the author refers to as the “ convince/persuade dichotomy” (p. 4). Gilbert argues that to convince is often equated with the use of reason and logic while to persuade suggests an appeal to emotions vis-à-vis an audience. Linking this distinction to the Aristotelian subdivision of rhetoric into logos , ethos , and pathos , Gilbert argues further that these have developed into distinct fields with traditionally little cross-fertilization: (a) formal logic (logos) with its emphasis on the structures of argumentation, the concept of formal validity and syllogism as an ideal form of argument; (b) informal logic, which integrated the concept of ethos in its study of fallacious argumentation, and (c) rhetoric with a focus on pathos or emotionality, deserving traditionally the least attention by argumentation scholars.

In subsequent scholarship, one finds variations of this typology. Tseronis and Forceville (2017), for example, offer a model based on a three-pronged distinction between: (a) logical approaches , focused primarily on logical relations between propositions; (b) dialectic approaches where argumentation is studied as an exchange adjudicated against an ideal (normative) standard of argumentative reasonableness; and (c) rhetorical approaches where attention is directed at the effectiveness of argumentation.

Based on a comprehensive historical overview over major contemporary theoretical models on argumentation, Schwarz and Baker (2017) propose a slightly altered taxonomy with relevance for educational contexts. It is framed in terms of two sets of approaches functioning on a two-dimensional plane. The first dimension distinguishes between discursive and structural approaches, with the former being primarily concerned with the descriptive workings of language and other semiotic modalities in argumentative interactions, and the latter focusing on how argumentative discourse functions in terms of a set of pre-defined structural elements which may or may not have a normative foundation. The second dimension makes a crucial distinction between monologic and dialogic approaches. In the former, the focus is primarily on one single party in the act of argumentation, even though other parties may be present or their presence may at least be assumed, as is the case with speeches or written texts. In the latter, argumentation is conceived of as being of a quintessentially interactional nature that always involves and is shaped by more than just one single voice in “a multiparty process of negotiation of meaning ” (Schwarz & Baker, 2017, p. 74). On our understanding of the model, this distinction is then of an analytical rather than theoretical nature, given that argumentation is presented as always predicated on the explicit or implicit expression of an opposition or a counter-standpoint. Importantly also, Schwarz and Baker (2017) briefly note that the axes should not be seen as exclusionary but rather as gradual.

Combined cross-dimensionally, the model is exemplified by four approaches, representing major contributions to contemporary argumentation theory. While any detailed treatment is beyond the scope of this paper, they can be summarized as follows: on the monological-structural plane, Schwarz and Baker (2017) place Toulmin’s model of argument (1958), given its primary focus on a single arguer and the distinctly structural workings of their argumentation in terms of a set of pre-defined elements. The monological-discursive plane is represented by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s (1973) New Rhetoric, as it targets the discursive techniques of structuring argumentative discourse rather than the structure of that discourse itself. Given its primary interest in the audience at which this discourse is directed by the speaker and the efficiency with which the utilized technique may or may not persuade the audience to accept the speaker’s standpoint, it is placed on the monological plane. The dialogical plane is represented by Plantin’s (2005) theorizing and van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s pragma-dialectic model of argumentation (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1984, 1992; van Eemeren, 2018) with Plantin occupying the discursive and pragma-dialectics the structural position. As Schwarz and Baker (2017) point out, Plantin’s discursive theory of argumentation is predicated on the idea of a “confrontation of discourses” (p. 74) and how a question that arises thereof is debated through justificatory discourse and counter-discourse. While having a distinctly dialectic vantage point, the pragma-dialectic approach, on the other hand, sees argumentation as a set of argumentative moves that discursive parties conduct as part of a critical discussion in a series of stages in order to resolve a difference of opinion on the merit (Table  1 ).

Approaches to argumentation (reproduced from Schwarz & Baker, 2017, p. 68)

In this review, we have taken the reviewed theorizing on argumentation and approaches to argumentation, particularly as conceptualized in educational contexts by Schwarz and Baker (2017), as a vantage point to see its potential fit with the current body of knowledge on argumentation in early childhood but also as a springboard to further theorizing in this emerging field.

We adopted meta-synthesis as our methodological approach. It belongs to the broader family of qualitative systematic syntheses and has as its overarching purpose to provide a description of a given phenomenon, here argumentation in early childhood, based on a systematic and transparent review of an existing body of research (Saini & Shlonsky, 2012). In conducting a meta-synthesis, one aims at the extractions of central themes and concepts which are compared and contrasted across studies and at offering a synthesis of key outcomes in the form of conceptual taxonomies. Importantly, a meta-synthesis is neither aggregative nor interpretative, but rather integrative. This means that one attempts to work with concepts and findings as they are being used in the identified primary studies, interrogating their similarities and differences critically and synthesizing them into an integrated body of new knowledge (Saini & Shlonsky, 2012).

Central in the approach is a rigorous application of specific methodological steps which include a selection of relevant research databases, specification of a search strategy, inclusion/exclusion criteria as well as a strategy for synthesizing identified studies. As with systematic reviews in general, systematicity and transparency are imperative. However, unlike in quantitative reviews, aiming at comprehensiveness of primary source coverage is not necessarily appropriate in qualitative reviews (Petticrew & Roberts, 2006). Instead, much like in qualitative methodology in general, the principle of saturation is key. As such, a search strategy in a qualitative literature review is often guided by and demonstrates the following three principles: (a) identifying major schools of thought while being alert to dissenting and minority views, (b) searching broadly across relevant disciplines, and (c) combining electronic and hand searches to ensure that key work is not excluded due to deficiencies in bibliographic indexing or coverage gaps in individual databases (Petticrew & Roberts, 2006). Below we therefore detail each of these steps as well as necessary methodological considerations and decisions made along the way.

Search Strategy

Given the transdisciplinary nature of argumentation, as argued above, we have opted to perform our search by pursuing several search channels. First, we selected two international research databases that assemble social scientific research within education, psychology, and related fields and conducted searches therein. These were (a) ERIC – Educational Resources Information Center and (b) PsychINFO. To validate these searches, we conducted an additional relevance-based search in Google Scholar following the same procedure as applied in ERIC and PsychINFO as well as individual searches for the work of key authors. To ensure relevance, we also selected and reviewed four journals we considered as thematically central through an electronic search function offered on their digital platforms. These were (a) Argumentation: An International Journal of Reasoning , (b) Argumentation in Context , (c) Argumentation and Advocacy , and (d) Informal Logic .

While it is also a common practice to review reference lists of thematically relevant systematic reviews, no such review was located. During each search, we applied the two following truncated keywords combined through the Boolean operator AND as follows: (argument* AND child*). We also reviewed combinations based on what we saw as either synonyms or closely related concepts. For “argument,” these were “reasoning” and “inference,” while for “child” these were “preschooler” and “toddler.” While, as laid out above, there is a host of other concepts which could be regarded as potentially related to or overlapping with argumentation in early childhood, such as Siraj and colleagues’ (2015) sustained shared thinking, Rapanta and Felton’s (2022) (low-structured) sensemaking, or the concept of (educational) dialogue, our aim was to map out the use of the concept of argumentation per se and, hence, we did not search for studies based on these related concepts.

Inclusion Criteria

We started off targeting studies of children in the age group 0–6 years. We expected that most studies would be located in either home or preschool as institutional contexts. However, age at compulsory school entry can vary between countries. Additionally, a number of the identified studies had a longitudinal and/or comparative design. As such, they were located in both home/preschool and early grades of school. Vigilant to the potential importance of such studies in capturing developmental trends in the early years and in need of a cut-off point, we therefore set the upper age limit at 8 which complies with UNESCO’s (2022) definition of early childhood education. Studies with samples of school children only were excluded, while studies targeting mixed age groups were assessed for inclusion on a case-by-case basis. This resulted in a handful of studies where the oldest participating children, in most cases older siblings, were 9 or, in school settings, grade 4, if age was not specified by the authors.

Publication Period

While we expected that most studies would be published within roughly the last two decades, all studies published since 1970 and up to the present were included so as to capture potential historical research trends.

We set no restrictions on the geographical location of studies.

Language of Reporting

We included only studies in English. While this decision was partly due to our shared linguistic competence and may potentially have led to an exclusion of important publications in other languages, we considered it justifiable given our aim of thematic and conceptual saturation rather than comprehensiveness.

Study Design

We included only peer-reviewed qualitative and quantitative empirical studies published in digitally available scientific journals. Books, book chapters, scientific reports, conference papers, as well as master and PhD thesis were excluded. This decision was partly guided by pragmatic reasons related to issues of digital access, and while it may have led to the exclusion of important innovations in the field, we assumed that recent key findings would simultaneously be disseminated through peer-reviewed journal publications, potentially captured through our search.

Study Quality

While the issue of scientific quality of studies included in systematic reviews is an important one, it is also far from controversial (see on this, Bubikova-Moan et al., 2019). Given our decision to include peer-reviewed studies only, guaranteeing a certain degree of quality assurance in itself, we considered it sufficient for our purposes to assess an overall coherence between research aims, methods employed, and reported findings in each study. While qualitative assessment rubrics are available (see, e.g., CASP, 2019), we did not consider their employment as imperative for reasons given above.

Review Strategy

The database search, described above, led to the identification of altogether 1,051 individual studies. Our ensuing review strategy consisted of primarily three steps: (a) an initial systematic screening of all study titles and abstracts, leading to the exclusion of 853 studies that did not meet our eligibility criteria, primarily that of thematic focus and/or children’s age; (b) a full-text review of 180 studies that remained upon the removal of 18 duplicates; this included an extended data extraction and a quality appraisal of methodological soundness according to the set criteria, as described above, leading to the exclusion of further 123 studies, first and foremost due to a misfit with the age criterion; and, finally, (c) an in-depth analysis of all 57 included studies. The last step included a content analysis that allowed us to identify major themes and outcomes, systematize these, and arrive at conceptual taxonomies. Aiming at an in-depth data extraction, steps (b) and (c) were conducted with the aid of an Excel spreadsheet, considered essential for keeping a detailed, transparent, and easily accessible record trail of all key information and decisions made along the way. By coding major themes vis-à-vis both of our research questions across the included studies, we could trace patterns in the data corpus in a rigorous and systematic manner upon the completion of step (c). The first author coded the entire sample of included studies, arriving at a preliminary conceptual taxonomy. At this stage of the analytical process, the first author conducted a validation coding on a random 15% of the sample with the second author. In line with validation procedures pursued in qualitative research (Creswell & Miller, 2000), rather than aiming at calculating interrater agreement, the validation coding round provided an opportunity for peer debriefing and reflexivity that led to further refinement and a finalization of our conceptual taxonomy. In addition to keeping a detailed audit of all our steps, as described here, we considered this satisfactory in ensuring analytical soundness. The entire review process is visualized in Figure 1 . It is of note that one additional study was identified by hand search upon the completion of all steps in the review round, as described above. It was assessed following the same review strategy and, since it met our eligibility criteria, added to the sample. Rather than necessitating an adjustment of our conceptual taxonomy, this additional step validated it. In the figure, this study appears as part of the process and is included in the total of 1,051 studies.

Flowchart of the review strategy.

Methodological Design and Publication-Related Features

The identified sample of studies bears witness to a wide range of methodological approaches that have been employed in studying argumentation in the youngest age groups. There is a clear preference for applying qualitative methodological designs, with more than a half of the sample falling into this category. In these studies, video observations were the most frequently adopted data collection method. Furthermore, about a third of the sample adopted quantitative methodological designs, including experimental, quasi-experimental, or, in a few cases, longitudinal designs. The remaining studies adopted mixed methods designs, combining mostly, but not exclusively, longitudinal qualitative observational methods with other methods such as interviews as well as cross-sectional data collections on specific argumentation-related outcome measures.

In terms of the publication period, an overwhelming majority of the sample was published after the year 2000 with a significant publication activity increase in roughly the last decade. Based on the provided information on the geographical setting of the data collection, most studies were conducted in European countries, followed by North and South American countries, middle- and far-eastern Asian countries, or in a cross-continental combination of geographical locations. See Table  2 for a numerical overview.

Adopted methodological designs, publication period, and geographical location of the included studies

Participant Features and Structures

In terms of the participating children’s age, the included studies range from involving children as young as 1 month and up to 9 years of age. The majority of studies have participants in mixed age groups or in the age bracket 3–6 years. A few studies do not provide specific information on children’s age but, given the study setting, it can be assumed that in all cases they involved children in kindergarten and/or early school grades.

The sample as a whole has looked into a range of settings, with the home environment and its close neighborhood as well as experimental and quasi-experimental study settings as the most prevalent ones. Kindergartens were represented in a quarter of studies. The remaining studies combined home and kindergarten or kindergarten and early school settings.

Lastly, we were interested to see what participant structures were interrogated, focusing in particular on the choice of adult and peer involvement. We note that in the majority of the included studies, there was adult involvement either in the form of active participation in play or other child-adult activities or, alternatively, as a function of the experimental or quasi-experimental methodological designs of the study. The studies pursued mostly group participant structures, here defined as larger than dyads, followed by dyadic structures or combinations of dyads and groups. In one case, the study focus was on individual child writing. See Table  3 for a numerical overview.

Children’s age, study settings, participant structures and adult involvement

Framing Argumentation

Our analysis shows that, when it comes to framing argumentation as a theoretical concept, there are several common denominators of the corpus as a whole. First, the sample displays a variable degree of specificity in the way argumentation is conceptualized or theorized, ranging from highly specific and theoretically elaborated positions to more diffuse and less theoretically specific positions. Following Schwarz and Baker’s (2017) overarching, two-pronged discursive-structural dimension, our analysis revealed the following more detailed patterns.

In studies where children’s argumentation was analyzed with the aid of pre-defined structural elements and/or relations between these and hence meriting Schwarz and Baker’s (2017) label structural, we identified four distinct approaches. The majority of studies adopted as their main theoretical lens either the pragma-dialectic theory of argumentation (e.g., Bova, 2015a–c; Bova & Arcidiacono, 2013b, 2014, 2018; Convertini, 2021a,b; Greco et al., 2018) or, with a variable degree of elaboration, Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory of reasoning (e.g., Domberg et al., 2018; Köymen et al., 2014, 2020a,b; Mammen et al., 2019; Mascaro et al., 2019; Mercier et al., 2014, 2018). A handful of studies drew also on Toulmin’s (1958) theorizing (e.g., Kosko & Zimmerman, 2019; Köymen et al., 2016; Mammen et al., 2018). The last subcategory comprised studies where theoretical positions were not elaborated beyond a specific interest in identifying the basic building blocks of arguments and their characteristics, such as distinctions between types of initial oppositions and types of justifications (e.g., Dunn & Munn, 1987; Tesla & Dunn, 1992). It is of note that studies in our sample may also represent more nuanced theoretical positions within these broader categories, as is, for example, the case with several studies working within the pragma-dialectic tradition and specifically applying Rigotti and Greco’s (2019) Argumentum Model of Topics, an approach developed to aid with the reconstruction of implicit inferential reasoning (e.g., Convertini, 2021a; Greco et al., 2018).

In studies with a distinct focus on the interactional, situated, and, often, sequential patterning of children’s argumentative discourse, categorized as Schwarz and Baker’s (2017) discursive approaches, we detected as the common vantage point an interest in the oppositional nature of children’s argumentation in most studies. A notable nuancing in this regard was provided by Hannken-Illjes & Bose (2018, 2019) who specifically broadened the argumentative vantage point to include both opposition/dissent and cooperativity. Also, in many of these studies, the oppositional nature of argumentation was not further elaborated explicitly but was explored in depth in line with sequential, interactional, or conversation-analytic approaches (e.g., Arcidiacono & Perret-Clermont, 2009; Arendt, 2019; Arendt & Ehrlich, 2020; Bova & Arcidiacono, 2013a; Dovigo, 2016; Ehrlich, 2011, 2019; Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981; Howe & McWilliam, 2001; Shiro et al., 2019). In some cases, more specific argumentation-theoretical and rhetorical positions were adopted (e.g., Bose & Hannken-Illjes, 2020; Hannken-Illjes & Bose, 2018, 2019).

Second, in terms of Schwarz and Baker’s (2017) monologic-dialogic dimension, we note a near-exclusive reliance on the dialogic view of argumentation. In most studies, this was made explicitly clear in the way study authors presented their theoretical and analytical grounding, including studies that drew on discursive approaches to argumentation (e.g., Arendt, 2019; Ehrlich, 2019; Hannken-Illjes & Bose, 2018, 2019; Shiro et al., 2019) as well as studies that pursued structural ends in line with established dialogic theories of argumentation, such as pragma-dialectics (e.g., Bova, 2015a–c; Bova & Arcidiacono, 2013b, 2018; Convertini, 2021a,b; Greco et al., 2018). However, the sample also comprises studies, where the dialogic view was not explicitly thematized or laid out. These were studies where the oppositional nature of argumentation was taken as a vantage point and where an a priori orchestration of more than a single voice in an argumentative exchange could only be assumed. Although these studies could be seen as having the dialogic perspective, at least in part, implicitly weaved in their theoretical texture, they may be described as oscillating between a monologic and dialogic view of argumentation at best. This subcategory is represented primarily by some of the earlier studies in our sample, conducted primarily in the 1970s through to the 1990s (e.g., Dunn & Munn, 1987; Przetacznikowa, 1971; Slomkowski & Dunn, 1992; Tesla & Dunn, 1992).

Third, the included studies displayed a productive eclecticism between argumentation theory and other theorizing, primarily within developmental psychology, the learning sciences, and linguistics. Furthermore, the theoretical pool was represented by different levels of theorizing, including more overarching, meta-theoretical perspectives as well as more specific, lower level theorizing within and across the above subfields. The former, meta-level theories most often included Piagetian and neo-Piagetian theorizing, particularly Piaget’s work on the role of conflict in development and his work on the development of moral reasoning (e.g., Howe & McWilliam, 2001; Mammen et al., 2019) as well as socio-cultural developmental perspectives, rooted in Vygotskian theorizing, most notably his work on the role of language in cognitive development (e.g., Arendt, 2019; Ehrlich, 2019; Ehrlich & Blum-Kulka, 2010) and in Dewey’s experiential learning (Arendt, 2019). The latter, lower level theorizing, was represented by scholarship on issues such as learning designs within science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) research (e.g., Convertini, 2021a, 2021b). A number of studies drew also on language socialization perspectives, more specifically in terms of family interactional research (e.g., Bova, 2015c; Bova & Arcidiacono, 2013a,b, 2015, 2018). Another, more specifically pronounced theoretical dimension was linguistic and discourse-theoretical, particularly as applied to child language development. It was represented by conceptual grounding in as diverse perspectives as systemic-functional grammar in combination with Peircean semiotics (Kosko & Zimmerman, 2019), interactional scholarship on peer talk and child-adult talk (e.g., Ehrlich, 2011, 2019), exploratory talk and sustained shared thinking (Dovigo, 2016), and the more overarching Bakhtinian lens on language acquisition (de Vasconcelos & Leitão, 2016).

Features of Children’s Argumentation

The identified studies bear witness to a wide range of distinct features of young children’s argumentative discourse. We have categorized these as either (a) structural-discursive features, (b) features relating specifically to socio-interactional aspects of children’s argumentation, and (c) developmental features reported in studies with a comparative, longitudinal, or cross-sectional design on different aspects of the first two categories. As this suggests, the categories and subcategories are not discreet, since one and the same study may have pursued more than one single analytical end and, as such, may have been placed under several headings and subheadings, such as structural-discursive and developmental. We elaborate on and exemplify each category, with their corresponding subcategories, below. For additional clarity, the entire taxonomy is also visualized in Figure 2 .

Taxonomy of features of children’s argumentation.

Structural-Discursive Features

More than a half of the identified studies reported on various structural-discursive features, further subcategorized as relating to one of the following three dimensions: (a) children’s argument construction, (b) children’s argument evaluation, and (c) other meta-features, concerning primarily sources and functions of children’s argumentation. In general, the sample showcases a broad range of these features, attesting to the versatility and heterogeneity of children’s argumentation as well as to children’s capacities as arguers and argumentative agents.

The first dimension predominates in the sample. It comprises findings on children’s use of various linguistic, discursive and argumentative elements, reasoning strategies as well as specific patterns of their use. Przetacz­nikowa’s study (1971), for example, drew early attention to the dominance of situational and functional reasoning in preschool children’s argumentative discourse concerning manipulative and constructional tasks. Pontecorvo & Arcidiacono (2010) on the other hand, document children’s variable use of different argumentative strategies, such as contrafactual reasoning, hypothesizing, and categorization, when they engage in disputes about narratives. The study shows that some of these strategies, such as rhetorical ones, can be transferred across different interactional contexts. Several other studies have interrogated specific types of argumentation schemes in children’s argumentative discourse. Convertini & Arcidiacono (2021) for example, provide empirical evidence on the predominance of causal argumentation in children’s play-based activities with scientific content. Interrogating arguments from authority, Bova’s (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) studies underscore that in child-adult argumentative discourse, it is adults, rather than other children, that represent sources of expertise. Zooming specifically in on the degree of children’s adaptation of their conflict resolution strategies and how it may affect the outcome of argumentative episodes, Eisenberg & Garvey (1981) show that the least adaptive strategies are likely to result in a termination of argumentative episodes, while insistence and nonresponse be reciprocated as such by their interactional partners. More adaptive strategies of reason-giving may lead to concession. Studies also document that children may draw on multimodal resources to put forward different structural elements of arguments, including standpoints, reasons, and conclusions in order to drive their reasoning forward (Convertini & Arcidiacono, 2021; Sumpter & Hedefalk, 2015).

Several studies in the sample pay specific attention to children’s justifications. They attest to children’s early, nonverbal sensitivity to the role of evidence and opponents’ informational access in argumentation (Mascaro et al., 2019) as well as children’s budding competence to differentiate hypothesis from evidence (Koksal-Tuncer & Sodian, 2018). That children’s use of evidence displays both complexity and variation is underscored by Orsolini (1993) and Dunn & Munn (1987). Looking at 3-year-old children, the latter study, for example, nuances the types of justifications children may use as ranging from emotional justifications, to references to social rules and material consequences of different courses of action.

Researchers have also mapped out the functioning of a range of specific linguistic and discursive elements in children’s argumentative discourse. One such element, explored in several studies, is the use of repetitions as an argumentative resource (Arendt, 2019; Arendt & Ehrlich, 2020) and as, in fact, the most frequent strategy, along with insistence, pursued by children vis-à-vis their opponents (Eisenberg, 1987). Rocci et al.’s (2020) study on children’s employment of adversative connectives ( aber, mais, ma – “but” ) in their counterarguments documents its functional versatility, ranging from connecting previous actions to the propositional content of arguments, refuting but also externalizing inner dialogue. Studies by Ehrlich (2019) as well as Ehrlich & Blum-Kulka (2010) explore the use of oral and paradigmatic features in children’s argumentation, showcasing among other things how they may function in establishing criteria of argument relevance, certainty, and acceptance (Ehrlich, 2019). Bova & Arcidiacono’s (2013a) study on children’s why questions in child-adult discourse shows that these serve mostly explanatory rather than argumentative purposes. Investigating children’s use of evaluative and evidential language markers in their stance-taking in peer confrontational discourse, Shiro et al. (2019) found a high occurrence of references to intention and obligation, in the latter case expressed through the use of various deontic expressions, as well as a high degree of assertiveness expressed by the children through negative polarity.

The second dimension concerns children’s argument evaluation, explored experimentally in only two individual studies in our sample (Castelain et al., 2018; Mercier et al., 2018). Both confirm that children display sensitivity to information that may be provided in arguments by their opponents. Mercier et al.’s (2018) findings also offer evidence that children’s capacity to evaluate their opponent’s weak and strong arguments may be affected by linguistic markers in different languages and, hence, be in part linguistically conditioned.

The third dimension comprises findings on what we have termed as meta-features of children’s argumentation. These branch further into two thematic subcategories. First, several studies were preoccupied with interrogating and reporting on the specific functions argumentation may have in children’s discourse. These ranged from an epistemic function, where the establishment of validity rather than simply conflict resolution was explored through children’s activation of multimodal means of communication (Hannken-Illjes & Bose, 2018) or through the use of paradigmatic discursive resources, such as verification or analogy (Ehrlich & Blum-Kulka, 2010). In addition, children’s argumentation was also shown to have a distinct socialization function, for example, in family mealtime exchanges (Bova & Arcidiacono, 2015). A further nuancing of the social function of children’s argumentation was specifically offered by Rytel (1996) who drew attention to its interactional conflict resolution rather than merely content resolution dimension.

In addition to the functions of children’s argumentation, several studies explored explicitly the sources of disagreement that may unleash children’s argumentative exchanges. Findings confirmed that there are numerous issues that may lead to argumentation, including children’s requests (Bova & Arcidiacono, 2013b, 2015), specific issues such as food and behavioral norms (Bova & Arcidiacono, 2015, 2018), or plans and intentions rather than factual information and truth assertions (Sprott, 1992). Importantly, however, while children may not always be the main initiators of argumentative interactions (Bova & Arcidiacono, 2013b, 2015), they are also shown to display argumentative agency by raising discussion issues that matter to them (Schär & Greco, 2018).

Socio-Interactional Features

Nearly two thirds of the sample reported on findings concerning socio-interactional aspects of children’s argumentation, relating primarily to how different contextual features may affect the analyzed argumentative exchanges. Interrogating their nature and prominence, our analysis led to a more nuanced two-pronged subcategorization into (a) the role of the interactional partners and (b) the role of other contextual features. On the whole, the included studies point clearly toward children’s great sensitivity to interactional aspects of context when they engage in argumentative discourse.

Zooming in on the first, most clearly pronounced dimension, the included studies bear concerted witness to children’s sensitivity to the identity, power, and status of their interactional partners. It also asserts their capacities to adjust and accommodate their argumentative strategies and moves accordingly (Arcidiacono & Perret-Clermont, 2009; Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981; Slomkowski & Dunn, 1992). Studies interrogating specifically child-adult argumentative exchanges report, among other things, on children’s sensitivity to adults’ interactional involvement and leadership (Dovigo, 2016; Vasconcelos & Leitão, 2016), underscoring adults’ crucial role in scaffolding and guiding children’s development. Also, Bova & Arcidiacono’s (2013b, 2015, 2018) studies on family mealtime exchanges confirm that age differences as well as differences in competence and roles affect child-adult argumentative discourse, with the adult often taking the lead role in initiating argumentation and by being seen as an authority therein by the child. These studies also corroborate that the types of adults’ and children’s arguments have a close correspondence, a finding also reported with a specific reference to mothers’ and children’s justifications in an earlier study by Dunn & Munn (1987). Interestingly, Mammen et al.’s (2019) study shows that it is not only children who display great sensitivity in acting and interacting as arguers with adults; adults too adjust the way they may challenge children of different ages in their argumentative exchanges, in this particular study manifested in their mutual discussions about picture book stories on moral dilemmas.

Studies on specifically peer interactions attest to similar sensitivity children display toward other children in argumentation and how their argumentative exchanges may provide a platform for a collaborative construction and negotiation of power and status within children’s peer cultures (Meyer, 1992). Additionally, scholars have underscored the key role argumentative peer exchanges may play in fostering a range of skills, including social, cognitive, and linguistic (Arendt, 2019; Ehrlich & Blum-Kulka, 2010; Köymen et al., 2014; Shiro et al., 2019).

The reported findings also specifically thematize the functional and discursive differences between peer and child-adult argumentation. Eisenberg (1987) points out that in terms of argumentation strategies, children display less adaptability and more aggressive argumentative behavior with peers than in argumentative interactions with adults. Ehrlich (2011) documents that peer argumentation displays a high degree of contextualized talk, offering opportunities for building and nurturing interpersonal relations and solidarity. Child-adult talk, on the other hand, was in Ehrlich’s study characterized as decontextualized talk, displaying features associated with school literacy. Looking specifically at the duration of peer and child-adult argumentative discussions, Mammen et al. (2019) provide scientific evidence on their differences, with peer discussions being of a shorter duration. Importantly, researchers have also thematized the misalignments between children and adults in their mutual argumentative exchanges, for example, in terms of implicit premises (Greco et al., 2018) but also in terms of their interpretative worlds (Iannaccone et al., 2019). As the authors underscore, this may lead to misunderstandings as well as underestimation of children’s capacities and agency as arguers.

Moving on to the second, less clearly pronounced dimension, the sample shows that also other features of context, such as the nature of the instructional task (Kosko & Zimmerman, 2019), the specific type of interactional setting (Ehrlich, 2019; Orsolini, 1993; Pontecorvo & Arcidiacono, 2010) but also methodological aspects concerning the study design and choice of data collection methods (Arcidiacono & Perret-Clermont, 2009) may affect what argumentative resources children may activate and how they will be utilized in their argumentative discussions. Furthermore, studies have also shown that the very nature of the interactional framing of children’s argumentative discourse may result in different argumentative activities. Hannken-Illjes & Bose (2019) underscore this very point in their study of peer argumentation established multimodally as either cooperative or agonistic. They show that cooperative situations display interactional synchronicity while uncooperative ones bear witness to the opposite. A correspondence between the frequency of arguments and the degree of cooperativity is also corroborated in Domberg et al.’s (2018) experimental study. Investigating specifically the influence of group competition on children’s argumentative behavior in a subsequent study, Domberg et al. (2021) offer evidence that it may be inconsistent and subject to the task and its nature.

Developmental Features

Studies in our sample also shed light on a range of structural-discursive and socio-interactional features of children’s argumentation in a comparative light through the employment of comparison age groups. We have subcategorized the relevant findings as either thematizing (a) the developing complexity, variation, and sophistication of children’s argumentation and (b) the frequency of children’s use of argumentation or its specific elements. On the whole, the sample attests to a clear developmental trajectory in terms of both the complexity and frequency with which children engage in argumentative discourse.

In terms of the first subcategory, the developmental tendency is reported on aspects concerning both argument construction and argument evaluation. Studies interrogating specifically the use of various argumentative strategies show that children’s competence to offer a more varied range of perspectives on conflictual issues, as opposed to solely offering an oppositive standpoint, grows with age (Rytel, 1996). Furthermore, children become more skilled in identifying and producing relevant and valid counterarguments with age, although the skill can be fostered even in very young children through training (Köymen et al., 2020b). With time, children’s argumentative strategies also become more complex (Arcidiacono & Bova, 2015) as well as more varied and more strategically applied (Domberg et al., 2018). Studies looking at children’s mathematical reasoning strategies also attest to an increasing sophistication (Kosko & Zimmerman, 2019; Krummheuer, 2013).

Studies thematizing specifically children’s justifications and their use of evidence report that some aspects may show a developmental tendency, such as children’s capacity to adjudicate the quality of justifications and to apply them more correctly and consistently (Mammen et al., 2018). Also, children’s reasoning based on perceptual and verbal evidence may grow in sophistication and variation with age (Przetacznikowa, 1971). Sprott (1992) reports age differences in children’s use of justifications in different disputes, showing a greater engagement by older children in factual disputes as opposed to more personal disputes. Nonetheless, studies also report no significant age differences in terms of children’s sensitivity to adjusting the informativeness of their justifications based on shared common ground (Köymen et al., 2016) or in their use of direct evidence (Köymen et al., 2020a).

In terms of comparative findings on socio-emotional aspects of children’s argumentation, studies show growing social sensitivity to reasoning, such as children’s increasing persuasion skills in order to reach an agreement (Köymen et al., 2014), older children’s preference to signal dominance when evaluating arguments (Mercier et al., 2014), and their preference to use argumentation for self-interest promotion rather than reaching an agreement (Tesla & Dunn, 1992). However, studies also report no age differences when it comes to constructing more balanced arguments in cooperative settings or when offering different argument positions (Rytel, 1996). Furthermore, children show increasing sensitivity to the quality of their opponents’ argument (Domberg et al., 2019; Mercier et al., 2014), such as in preferring strong (perceptual) rather than weak (circular) arguments as they grow older.

Lastly, the sample also attests to the growing frequency of children’s arguments with age. This concerns both production of reasons to justify claims (Domberg et al., 2021), the use of indirect evidence under certain conditions (Köymen et al., 2020a), the more explicit use of warrants and justifications as well as children’s increasing tendency to reach mutual agreement (Köymen et al., 2014), or express conflicting positions in disputes (Rytel, 1996). That an increasing frequency in children’s argument construction may be a function of context confirm studies investigating argumentation in peer play (e.g., Arendt, 2019) and in specifically cooperative experimental group settings, where a greater rate of arguments was observed across age groups (Domberg et al., 2018). As Mammen et al.’s (2019) study shows, frequency may also be related to the identity of children’s interactional partners rather than children’s increasing age per se.

Based on a meta-synthesis of 57 individual empirical studies, our review offers a systematic insight on a range of aspects concerning argumentation in the youngest age groups. Showcasing a range of methodological designs adopted over the last five decades of research, the study systematically documents an increasing scientific interest in exploring this budding field across different continents, national contexts, interactional settings, and participant structures. While these descriptive features are necessarily a reflection of our methodological choices and, as such, cannot be taken to provide a complete or authoritative picture of the field, the review does, in our view, shed light on a number of salient tendencies and patterns. With necessary caution, we note that the field displays great methodological, thematic, and conceptual heterogeneity that we see as both productive and necessary, particularly if we are to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to argue in the early years.

More specifically, with reference to our first research question, we note that the existing scholarship on young children’s argumentation is profoundly interdisciplinary, drawing on different traditions within argumentation theory as well as a range of other scholastic fields, including developmental psychology, education, linguistics, and discourse studies as the most prominent ones. As such, the review brings systematic scientific evidence on board regarding our initial assumption on the dispersion of studies across different scholastic areas. The construction of any overarching conceptual taxonomy of such a broad and heterogeneous field necessitates a certain degree of simplification. In this endeavor, Schwarz and Baker’s (2017) two-dimensional taxonomy offered a productive springboard to a more nuanced exploration of conceptual patterns in the sample.

In terms of the monologic-dialogic dimension, we found the dialogic view explicitly or implicitly present in most of the included studies. In fact, these were in some cases hard to disentangle and positions were found to be oscillating rather than clearly delineated. This in itself underscores the point that argumentation as a specific form of discourse is per definition predicated on the presence of more than one voice. Indeed, as in other meaning-making processes, polyphony or heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981) is weaved in its very theoretical texture. Hence, the monologic view represents at best an analytical distinction, not least in the field of argumentation in the early years.

In terms of the structural-discursive dimension, the included studies can be seen as following either more distinctly structural or discursive aims. While some draw on theoretically elaborated positions, on a broad level represented by pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren, 2018), the argumentative theory of reasoning (Mercier & Sperber, 2011) and, to a lesser degree, Toulmin’s (1958) argumentation model, others operate with the basic structural elements of standpoint and justification/reason as inherent in the concept. Moreover, these broader categories may themselves branch into more nuanced approaches to investigate specific features of children’s argumentation, such as children’s implicit reasoning (Convertini, 2021a; Greco et al., 2018) through the application of the Argumentum Model of Topics approach (Rigotti & Greco, 2019). This then bears witness to a considerable theoretical variation within the field. We note further that the common denominator of the sample as a whole is a view of opposition, disagreement, or a difference of opinion as a defining minimal feature of children’s argumentation. We will argue that this is the case even in studies that propose to see cooperativity as representing a possible initial argumentative framing (e.g., Hannken-Illjes & Bose, 2018, 2019), since opposition is, on our reading, not denied but rather presupposed here as well. Hence, given that the structural aspect, subsuming the oppositional antecedent, is inherent in all argumentation, one can argue that, within the field of argumentation in the early years, the structural-discursive dimension of Schwarz and Baker’s (2017) model represents a continuum, stretching from more to less structural specificity along, primarily, the dialogic dimension.

With reference to our second research question, our review provides a systematic meta-synthesis of scientific evidence on a number of distinct features of young children’s argumentative discourse. First, it bears witness to a breadth of capacities and competencies that very young children may activate not only to resolve disagreement but also to arrive at solutions that are commonly shared and valid in their peer cultures. Building on the now long-established insights from within the sociology of childhood (James et al., 1998; James & Prout, 1997), this positions them as productive arguers and argumentative agents in their own right. In addition, our findings also point toward the importance of argumentation in socializing and initiating children into specific ways of thinking across home, kindergarten, and early school contexts. Building on and broadening Ehrlich & Blum-Kulka’s (2010) concept of peer talk as a double-opportunity space , we therefore propose to see children’s argumentation as a multi-opportunity space in which their linguistic, socio-emotional, and cognitive skills as well as their epistemic understanding can be productively nourished and fostered across different settings and participant structures.

Second, the review points consistently toward children’s utmost sensitivity to the interactional context of exchange. It underscores the role of both peer play and peer talk as a key platform for understanding argumentation in the youngest age groups but also the quintessential role of adults, such as teachers and parents, in fostering children’s capacities as arguers and critical thinkers. It also highlights differences between these conditions and underscores their variable significance for continued growth. However, children’s contextual sensitivity does not end with the interactional partner but extends to other contextual features such as the nature of the task they engage in and that may trigger argumentation, the employed methodological design features but also features of the broader contextual setting. While lending further support to a firmly established insight in early childhood scholarship on the key role of context in children’s learning and development (NAYEC, 2022), it also corroborates Arcidiacono and Perret-Clermont’s (2009) observation on the methodological limitations of earlier scholarship that, insufficiently attentive to this essential nature of very young children’s argumentation, may have led to the underestimation of their argumentative capacities. Additionally, it underscores the continued challenge of investigating preschoolers’ argumentation in scientifically valid ways, calling among other things for researcher vigilance and reflexivity throughout all stages of the research process.

Third, the review reveals clear developmental patterns in children’s argumentation in terms of its complexity, sophistication, variability, and frequency. However, once again, rather than inviting a view of children as argumentative becomings on the way to adult competence, we propose to see these findings as key to understanding the very origins and development of the human capacity to argue. Not only is this knowledge essential for a productive bridging between home, preschool, and school communities of practice, it propels to salience the continued need for locating attention and support in young children’s lived worlds (Dyson, 2013) and in line with developmentally appropriate pedagogical approaches (Barbarin & Wasik, 2011; NAYEC, 2022; Samuelsson & Carlsson, 2008).

While this review provides a systematic insight into the growing knowledge foundation on argumentation in the youngest age group, we see a distinct need for further research. One area of much promise is children’s multimodal argumentation, thematized in our sample through a handful of studies only. Given children’s deeply multimodal and situated way of being and participating in social life, it may open not only for important practical insights with implications for early childhood parenting and professional practice, but also new theoretical advances in the field of argumentation in general and multimodal argumentation in particular. Likewise, given the growing presence of digital tools in children’s everyday lives, studying how very young children potentially make use of digital artifacts as they initiate and advance arguments and negotiate standpoints while engaging in digital play-based and other activities seems to be as yet a largely unexplored territory.

By extension, we also call for a continued cross-fertilization between theoretical approaches as well as a scientifically rigorous interrogation of potential connections and overlaps between very young children’s argumentation and related concepts that were not specifically targeted in this review, such as sustained shared thinking (Siraj et al., 2015), inferential thinking (Collins, 2016), or the even broader concepts of exploratory talk (Mercer & Wegerif, 1998) and low-structured sensemaking, employed in Rapanta & Felton’s (2022) review to describe argumentation activity in early school grades. Rather than assuming the logico-rational conceptualization of argumentation as the only valid vantage point, rendering children’s argumentation a priori as mostly fallacious or deficient and hence not meriting the label in any positive sense, such pursuits may add a new layer to the ongoing conceptual debate within argumentation studies on what forms of argument qualify as such and why (see, e.g., Birdsell & Groarke, 1996; Bubikova-Moan, 2021; Tindale, 2017; Tseronis & Forceville, 2017). In our view, a continued exploration of these and other relevant issues through a sustained scientific effort will advance not only our understanding of the multifaceted nature of argumentation as a quintessential form of human communication but also how the early capacities to argue develop and can be nourished in developmentally sensitive ways so that children can grow to become rigorous arguers and critical thinkers of tomorrow.

We would like to thank our colleagues in the international Kin­der im Gespräch research network for their inspiring comments and suggestions during an earlier stage of the study production process. We would also like to thank our two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our work and their constructive and inspiring suggestions on how to improve the original manuscript.

Given that this study is a meta-synthesis of relevant empirical studies, no ethics approval on research subject participation was required.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

The first author has led and contributed to all stages of the study design and production, including all database searches, manuscript screening, and full-text review, as well as the analytical and manuscript production process. The second author has contributed in conceptual and methodological discussions, the full-text review, the analytical validation, and final manuscript production process.

The empirical studies included in this review can be accessed online or as hard-copy manuscripts in the relevant journals.

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Early Childhood Education Essay

If you are writing an early childhood education essay, examples can be very useful to aid you in your research. How did this concept develop? What are the current principles of schooling for children? And what is the importance of early childhood education? The essay on this page aims to answer these questions.

• Historical development of Early Childhood Education

Current Principles of Early Childhood Education

Professional organizations, technology in early childhood development, improvements, controversial issues.

The following importance of early childhood education essay will tell you about the significance of learning institutions, organizations, and programs. Also, we’ll look at the key aspects that form the foundation of a child’s development. This sample will make it easier for you to cope with writing your own paper. So, you’ll write a “Why Is Early Childhood Education Important Essay” successfully.

Early Childhood Education is the field of practice, research, and study that deals with children’s experiences during their early stages of life. During childhood education, young children receive formal education and are under the care of professionals who may not be family members. Children receive this kind of education outside their homes. The term early childhood is used to refer to children below the age of regular schooling, which, according to many nations, is five years. However, this is not always true. For instance, in the U.S., it includes children below the age of eight years.

The educator should be aware of the physical, social, and cognitive development stages of preschoolers, toddlers, and babies. He/she must also cooperate with their parents to bring the child up in a good way.

According to Blenkin and Kelly (1996), the study of early childhood is important because it is the time during which the body and brain of a child are undergoing rapid development. During this stage, children develop skills and abilities like motor skills, language, psychosocial cognition, and learning.

Exogenous factors like the environment to which children are exposed from birth to eight years are said to affect the psychosocial, cognitive, and learning of the child (Cascio, 2021). Early childhood education builds a strong foundation for academic success in children. Its studies prepare the child for primary school education, contributing to the academic excellence of the child later in life.

Studies have shown that the readiness that children get from early childhood education has positive social and economic impacts during their adult life. Such children have limited chances of engaging in criminal behaviors and attaining good results in schools, which secures them good places in employment, resulting in higher earnings. Based on the significant role that childhood education plays, the content of this paper will emphasize the topic.

Historical Development of Early Childhood Education

The philosophy of early childhood education can be traced from the works of scholars like John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and John Amos Comenius. Sociologists like Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, and Sigmund Freud concentrated much on the developmental stages of children (Su & Yang, 2022). The scholars approached the discipline in different ways, but they all held the belief that early childhood education played a major role in developing the interests and abilities of children as they grow up.

The first and largest early childhood program was Kindergarten, which was developed in the United States between 1782 and 1852 by Friedrich Froebel. The program was later adopted in Europe and other countries (Cascio, 2021). The movement was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution and the absorption of women in large numbers to work in factories. Between 1870 and 1952, another early childhood program developed by Maria Montessori was also adopted in many countries (Cascio, 2021). However, the role of early education as the first step in the system of education came to the knowledge of many nations after the Second World War.

Blenkin and Kelly argue that Kindergarten was the first training institution to offer training skills for teachers of young children. The first training school was begun in Boston by German kindergarteners Matilda Kriege and her daughter in 1868. The term “kindergartener” was used to refer to children attending school and their teachers.

The kindergartens were started by German immigrants who were running away from the Russian Revolution in which Germany was defeated, and that’s why they were initially German-speaking. Today, the role of early childhood education is recognized worldwide. Public institutions have been established to offer training to these teachers because children at this stage are sensitive, and teachers should know how to deal with them.

To enhance early childhood education, the program is based on various principles aimed at making the system effective for improving the level of education. The program necessitates trained personnel, with teachers acquiring adequate training in early childhood education centers to be equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to interact and train young children successfully.

Early childhood education serves not only to assist working parents but also to help children acquire physical, cognitive, social, and emotional experiences away from their homes (Jalongo, 2021). During this period, children learn skills such as counting, playing, interacting, and socializing with others. Parents should understand that the purpose of sending their children to school is to gain the required knowledge and skills. According to Beneke and Helm (2003), the program is based on the principle that all childhood education programs should be licensed, and the teaching methodologies used should align with the interests and developmental needs of children.

Licensing ensures security and addresses the health needs of children. Teachers should ensure that the environment in which children live is secure and healthy, as children learn best when they feel free and secure (Macrides et al., 2021). Therefore, it is important for teachers to ensure that children are comfortable with enhancing their learning. Resources and programs needed in education centers should be coordinated by the government to prepare children for elementary and secondary education. The government should fund these institutions so that they can purchase materials and cover all expenses necessary for the successful learning of children.

Institutions should be provided with reading and writing materials, as well as good feeding programs for children (Redondo et al., 2019). Recreational facilities are also crucial, as playing is vital for young children. Coordination between parents, teachers, and the government is important.

Finally, the system is based on the principle that all children have the opportunity to access early childhood education, and parents are encouraged to enroll their children in the program as it creates a strong academic foundation.

Intensive research has been conducted concerning early childhood education because of its importance. It is argued that if interference in the fundamental development of skills and abilities of a child occurs during the early stages, this is likely to affect their learning potentiality in the future, and the damage may be long-lasting.

Various organizations have been established worldwide advocating the role played by early childhood education. Professional organizations support early childhood professionals by providing them with guidance and resources needed to better educate young children.

Examples of such organizations include The New York City Association for the Education of Young Children (NYCAEYC), the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, and the National Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI), among others (Jalongo, 2021). World Organization for Early Childhood Education is a worldwide non-profit and non-governmental organization operating in more than 60 countries. The organization includes parents, teachers, health officers, activists, researchers, social workers, and students. The goal of the organization is to ensure that children between the ages of zero and eight years access their rights to education in all the member countries.

The NYCAEYC advocates for and promotes the quality of education offered to children below the age of eight years and their larger families, as well as enhancing their well-being by supporting professional development. The ACEI is a global organization whose aim is to support and promote optimal education and children’s development from birth till puberty. In addition, the organization encourages people to train and become professionals who would then bring change to society by passing acquired knowledge to children. The organization sees to it that all children access quality education.

In the modern world, some of the best practices employed by teachers in childhood education centers include play, songs, and dances that form the basic form of entertainment (Macrides et al., 2021). Play is crucial for young children because their brains are not fully developed, so they cannot retain large volumes of information. It is, therefore, essential for the teacher to allocate enough time for children to relax their minds.

Since they cannot concentrate for a long period of time, the teacher should have several breaks in between the classes during which children should go to the field and play. The teacher should accompany them and be in charge. The teacher directs the children during the activity (Su & Yang, 2022). In addition to plays, children can also engage in dances and songs, mainly aimed at refreshing the mind.

Children should be taught how to conduct the songs themselves. Finally, other forms of entertainment, like watching television, can be of great help. The teacher should ensure that the programs enhance the academic work of the children.

In the modern world, people are always striving to find solutions to their problems. Technology is a major problem-solving tool in education, increasing academic skills, reducing the number of school dropouts, and discouraging racial discrimination in schools. Improvements in technology have made it easier for teachers to execute their duties.

Studies have shown that children in the modern world know much more than children of their age some time ago. Current generations are more advanced than the previous ones (Su & Yang, 2022). For instance, children can easily access books of all kinds whenever they need them in libraries, helping in the rapid and easy expansion of knowledge.

The use of computers, tablets, laptops, and smartphones has increased rapidly in childhood education programs. Through technology, the qualities of educational programs have been modified in interesting ways. Computers are used by teachers to teach children and keep records of class performance. Children between the ages of three and eight effectively use computers today. Now that children know how to make use of the above electronics, they have a lot of information at their fingertips. For instance, they only need to “Google” on the computer and search for answers to their questions.

For children whose parents own computers at home, they have a greater advantage because they can access computer services at home. Some mobile phones can also be networked and provide similar services. The media has improved early childhood education. Modern television channels offer more quality programs than traditional ones (Timmons et al., 2021). There are many educational programs displayed on different channels for children to watch. There are so many that children can never watch them all. The radio offers educational programs for children in which children are allowed to answer questions.

For instance, the questions are asked by the radio presenter, and children answer through a phone call. The presenter then says whether the child is right, and if not, he provides the correct answer (Macrides et al., 2021). The knowledge is passed to all children who happen to be listening, making this a way of enhancing education. Other technological advancements that have eased early childhood education include the use of printers, scanners, digital cameras, and video recorders.

Blake and Taylor argue that the application of technology in early childhood education will increase even in the future. However, less fortunate children from poor families will be disadvantaged (Macrides et al., 2021). These electronics are very expensive, and accessing and using them will be difficult for children from poor families. Improvement in technology is likely to increase immorality rates among school children.

The more children know how to operate computers, the more they will get in touch with sites not fit for their stage. Research has shown that many children visit pornographic sites on computers. As much as technology is going to affect early childhood education positively, it will also have its side effects.

There are many challenges that children encounter during their studies, which should be well-known to their teachers and other educational employees who interact with them directly. These individuals are the right people to determine the areas that require improvements. In order for children to learn well, their physical, social, emotional, and learning needs should be met. Failure to satisfy one of these needs makes it hard for the child to study effectively. The performance of children improves when they are encouraged and supported by adults. Teachers should ensure that they make the necessary improvements to help children succeed in their studies whenever they identify points of weakness among students.

Among the challenges facing early childhood education is the lack of enough funds. Early childhood education is mainly offered in the private sector at very high costs. Lack of finance makes it hard for some parents to enroll their children in schools. Accessibility of such institutions may be a challenge. People may have to travel for long distances before getting to the learning institution.

Other challenges include lateness at school, a lot of homework given to children that cannot be completed overnight, competition in class, lack of enough playing grounds, competition with neighboring schools, and lack of enough sleep for children.

The list of controversial issues in early childhood education is long. Some of the debatable issues include whether young children should use computers, whether viewing television leads to violent behavior among children, whether homework improves the performance of children, and finally, the correct age at which young children should join kindergarten, among other issues.

The study of developmental stages of young children is a vital topic. I personally chose the topic because I like interacting with young children and helping them whenever it’s necessary.

My desire is to see children live comfortably and succeed in their studies, and that’s why I have chosen to pursue a course in early childhood education, which will help me understand the concept better. My goal is to see that I help children pursue and succeed in their studies once I become a professional in the field.

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Advantages And Disadvantages Of Preschool

Cambridge montessori, 34 comments.

• Preschool Learning

In this article, You will learn about the advantages and disadvantages of preschool. A preschool, also known as nursery school, pre-primary school, playschool or kindergarten, is an educational establishment or learning space offering early childhood education to children before they begin compulsory education at primary school. It may be publicly or privately operated and may be subsidized from public funds. Preschool generally runs between the hours of 9:00 am and 3:00 pm similar to school hours although this may vary by state and by service so check with the provider.

Through Cognitive, Psychosocial and Physical developments-based learning a child in preschool will learn about their environment and how to verbally communicate with others. Children who attend Preschool learn how the world works around them through play and communication. During this school year children will learn how to properly express themselves, share, communicate with their classroom, follow classroom rules, proper hygiene and how to sleep during naptime.

They’ll learn simple English like how to identify all the letters in the alphabet, write their full name, the beginnings of phonics and how to trace all the letters in the alphabet. In Math class, they’ll learn how to identify basic shapes, recognize size difference, count to 100, how to trace numbers 1-10 and simple adding & subtracting.

In Science class, they do simple things learning the names of different types of weather, the names of the season and animals name, environmental habits & sounds. In Social Studies they’ll learn about places we see/visit in everyday life, how things work in certain public places and what are the names & jobs of the people who work in our communities. During recesses-playtime-lunchtime, children will interact with their peers playing dress-up, interacting on the playground, eating lunch/snack together and how to play certain games with others.

Advantages –

1. Since preschool provides children with space where they can learn appropriate classroom behavior at a young age, it can help your child develop a sense of self and independence. Your child will not have to waste time trying to get adjusted to other children, the classroom environment and the lessons he is supposed to learn after he has joined the school.

2. Another advantage of a preschool is that most include a structured learning day with a lot of varied activity—with a significant portion of it focused on learning. Daycares usually provide activities (including recess, naptime, and lunch). Preschools will include more educational opportunities to foster early reading abilities, art, and even some math and science concepts.

3. Good programs feature a wide variety of fun activities – including singing, dancing, arts and crafts, storytelling, free play, and both indoor and outdoor games and projects – designed to teach children different skills. Children may also learn some academic basics such as counting and the alphabet.

4. Preschool will help your toddler develop important skills, such as taking turns, listening to others, helping one another, etc. Interacting with other children of the same age can teach your child to communicate better.

5. Preschools and daycares offer trained staff that is often required to take courses and become certified in childcare, or they are required to have a degree in education or child studies. This allows you the confidence in having your child under the care of these professionals who are knowledgeable about your child’s needs and development at any age.

Disadvantages –

1. lack of one-on-one time :.

Some argue it’s best to keep young children at home for most of the years before formal schooling begins (at least until the age of three). Although preschools tend to have low teacher-to-student ratios, it isn’t one-to-one. This means a teacher’s attention is often divided and there is less individualized attention than at home. And the importance of one-on-one time for some kids cannot be disputed. That said, most agree that at a certain age, usually four or five (at the oldest), kids need lots of interaction with their age-peers. This helps them develop socially, emotionally, and cognitively.

2. Specific Hours/Days :

While the schedule of the daycare can be an advantage, it can also be a disadvantage. Many preschools are not in session during holidays or the summer, often for extended periods of time. This might not coordinate well with your own work schedule, leaving you to figure out an alternative for those periods of time, which can also cost you more money.

3. Learning too Early :

Some preschools, it’s claimed, force kids to learn too early. This is a special concern with academic programs. Learning subjects such as reading, writing, and math before one’s ready can lead to frustration and interfere with a love of learning. That said, many alternative preschools, such as Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia, normally delay introducing certain subjects until kids are interested and ready.

4. Limitations on Creativity and Free Exploration :

Critics of kids attending preschool argue that introducing them to the idea of a teacher being the sole source of information can limit their range of learning and ability to think creatively. When 4-year-olds attend preschool, they unconsciously narrow their thinking and only consider the information their teacher provides. In contrast, kids who don’t attend preschool tend to search for wider ranges of information and consider more options.

5. Learning too Early :

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Preschool Science Education: A Vision for the Future

• Published: 10 February 2020
• Volume 48 , pages 703–714, ( 2020 )

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• Rachel A. Larimore   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8597-5605 1  

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Reforms in K-12 science education and their implications for PreK teaching, make this a critical time for developing a unified vision for early childhood science education. The goal of this essay is to provide a vision of what it might look like to leverage the best of both early childhood and K-12 science education reform efforts for meaningful science learning opportunities for young children. The essay suggests to best support young children, PreK science education must implement the holistic approach of early childhood education (i.e., physical, social-emotional, and cognitive development) while at the same time taking up the richer scientific disciplinary practices put forth in recent science reform efforts. Bringing together the strengths of both early childhood and science education will support young children in making sense of natural phenomena in the world around them while valuing them as capable science learners with prior experiences.

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Larimore, R.A. Preschool Science Education: A Vision for the Future. Early Childhood Educ J 48 , 703–714 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-020-01033-9

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• Persuasive Essay- Why We Need Preschool

The essay isn’t quite finished yet, I plan to write a little bit more about why the Head Start program is ineffective even for those who do qualify and I want to end the essay with my detailed proposal of what needs to be seen in preschool is this country- it needs to be available, free, and optional, and preschools must have qualified teachers, adequate materials, and government controlled curriculums. Emphasis needs to be placed on government regulation so that preschools in underprivileged districts still get the same benefits as wealthier districts. Please offer any honest feedback! Thanks.

(Citations aren’t in yet but I have endnotes marking their place just for my own use. You can ignore them, but if you would like to know where I got any of my information I can post a completed copy next week)

My first day of preschool was one of the most exiting days of my life. My aunt signed me in as I ran to the classroom already filled with kids getting to know each other. “What’s your name?” a volunteer parent asked me gently, marker in hand waiting to fill out my nametag. Hmm… my aunt was already gone and preschool was my chance to be anyone I wanted to be.  “Katie!” I lied enthusiastically. I never actually expected the lie to work, but it did. My first day of preschool my nametag read “Katie” right up until the end of the day when my very confused aunt came to pick up “Lizzy.” With new friends, a new atmosphere, new knowledge, (and a new name) preschool really was the world of new possibilities that I had dreamt it to be. Unfortunately, far too many American children never get to have this kind of experience.  Private preschool is expensive and in most places in America, only the poorest families qualify for state-funded education before Kindergarten. This country needs publically available and free preschool education to give every child the opportunities that he or she deserves. We need to ensure that the possibilities of the world remain open to every student and this process begins with nationalized, public early childhood education.

Children learn more in their first five years of life than in any other five-year period [i] . Melzoff describes children as “just like little sponged during the first 2000 days of life.” [ii] During this stage, brain growth occurs rapidly. At age five, the human brain is the densest that it will ever be [iii] . In early childhood development, a special emphasis is placed on education at ages 3-5, which is why preschool specifically is so important. As children “engage in avid an rapid learning,” [iv] progress is made in cognitive and motor development. Access to education can foster positive improvement in these areas, not only because the children can learn from properly trained teachers but also because of the many social interactions available in the classroom environment. Additionally, by observing children’s progress, many developmental disabilities can be diagnosed in the first few years of life. Early intervention beginning at age three has the incredible ability to reduce the severity of many disabilities, including hearing or sight impairments, speech problems, or generalized learning delays [v] .  If children lack access to trained professionals such as teachers, many of these disabilities may go unnoticed until Kindergarten, when intervention is much less likely to have a profound effect. Nationalized preschool would give children the opportunity to take advantage of the critical stages of young brain activity, enhancing development and helping to recognize and improve the severity of various developmental disorders.  Without proper access to good education, valuable time and opportunities can be lost, forcing children to start Kindergarten already behind with little chance to catch up.

Social development is another major attribute of preschool. The ability to play and interact with other students offers countless benefits. Communication skills are enhanced in a classroom setting because child-to-child interaction is increased and children must learn to effectively communicate needs to a teacher [vi] . Self-help skills, like eating, washing hands, and putting on shoes, are also acquired more quickly in a group setting. If students gain these important skills in preschool, then the disparities between children is greatly reduced upon entering kindergarten.

Social acceptance is highly variable among students between the ages of three and five, but nationalize preschool and well-educated teachers can promote social equality at this young age. Research suggests that sexist behaviors are developed from birth on, but are greatly increased by our public education system; for example, in preschool, teachers are more likely to keep teaching boys certain skills, like cutting out a shape, consequently enhancing male learning, but teachers are more likely to do the skill for girls, like cutting the shape our for them, thereby preventing female learning [vii] . Teachers, often female themselves, do not recognize the impact of these actions because it occurs from a subconscious tendency to sympathize more with girl students. Similar problems often arise with differences in race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Nationalized, government-controlled preschools would allow for better and more uniform teacher education and training. With proper training, teachers can better understand subconscious tendencies and avoid these behaviors, thus promoting equality and diminishing public education’s role in perpetuating academic deficiencies in women, minorities, and poor students.

The many benefit of a preschool education remain with students throughout their lives, creating a better society overall. In President Obama’s State of the Union Address, he emphasized the need for an early education system by stating the proven outcomes: “In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job and form more stable families of their own.” [viii] University of Chicago researcher, James Heckman also suggests that preschool education reduces crime rates and increases income levels [ix] . Tax-payer funded preschool would require an expensive start up, but the proven benefits can ultimately decrease government spending by reducing the number of people in prison or on welfare. It can also reduce the money spent on special education programs, aiding students with learning disabilities early enough to keep them at grade level instead of waiting until these students are already too far behind to catch up. The most current research suggests that every $1 invested in early childhood educations can save up to $7 in the future. [x]    If preschool was nationalized and better regulated, these benefits could be further increased by getting more children educated by more highly trained teachers. Society as a whole would advance, benefiting all citizens regardless of whether they have children.

Clearly, preschool has huge benefits in this country, but there is already an extensive public and private preschool system, why aren’t we seeing these returns? Unfortunately, even though preschool is available in some places of the country, many individuals still lack affordable access. Private preschool can be very extremely expensive if it is of good quality.  In rural areas, good quality education might not be available even for families that can afford it. Today, only one in five families has a stay-at-home parent [xi] ; these families must spend a significant part of their income on childcare.  When money is tight or good preschools are too far away, parents must sacrifice the quality of their children’s education. Untrained baby sitters and poor quality childcare can be detrimental to children. In these situations, children are not properly educated and fail to learn many of the beneficial skill that can be gained from qualified teachers and specialized attention. Well-run preschools have toys and curriculum designed specifically to enhance young cognitive and motor development, to promote literacy and reading, and to handle children with special needs. Denied these tools, the value of learning is diminished and children can no longer gain the potential benefits only possible at the critical ages of three to five.

The United States government does offer public preschool, know as the Head Start program, to poor families, but many of the families that need it still don’t qualify for the necessary help. Currently, Head Start is only available to families that make 130% of the income that defines the national poverty line. Many families that do not fall below this line still cannot afford quality childcare. It is the children just above the cutoff for the Head Start program that suffer the most, because most often they end up without significant education and then must enter school distracts far behind wealthier children and the children that qualified for Head Start.

3 Responses to Persuasive Essay- Why We Need Preschool

I like this topic. It is also interesting to me that I wrote about making college education free. You make a lot of good points and have a really strong sense of logos. I also liked the story at the beginning. One thing you might want to fix is that your second paragraph starts off with just a bunch of facts stringed together. You might want to add some narrative in between. It might also be helpful to quote any psyhological studies that you may be talking about and not just paraphrase.

I completely agree with this. I love the personal example you gave at the beginning, I think that really added to the statement you are making. I also like all of the facts that you use to back up your arguments. Great job so far, this is a great first draft!

I like the story that you included about your own preschool experience. I think it really adds a personal touch to the paper. I think that so far your essay is really well-written and each of your points flow together nicely! I think that you argue your opinion very clearly.

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• How to write an argumentative essay | Examples & tips

How to Write an Argumentative Essay | Examples & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An argumentative essay expresses an extended argument for a particular thesis statement . The author takes a clearly defined stance on their subject and builds up an evidence-based case for it.

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Table of contents

When do you write an argumentative essay, approaches to argumentative essays, introducing your argument, the body: developing your argument, concluding your argument, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about argumentative essays.

You might be assigned an argumentative essay as a writing exercise in high school or in a composition class. The prompt will often ask you to argue for one of two positions, and may include terms like “argue” or “argument.” It will frequently take the form of a question.

The prompt may also be more open-ended in terms of the possible arguments you could make.

Argumentative writing at college level

At university, the vast majority of essays or papers you write will involve some form of argumentation. For example, both rhetorical analysis and literary analysis essays involve making arguments about texts.

In this context, you won’t necessarily be told to write an argumentative essay—but making an evidence-based argument is an essential goal of most academic writing, and this should be your default approach unless you’re told otherwise.

Examples of argumentative essay prompts

At a university level, all the prompts below imply an argumentative essay as the appropriate response.

Your research should lead you to develop a specific position on the topic. The essay then argues for that position and aims to convince the reader by presenting your evidence, evaluation and analysis.

• Don’t just list all the effects you can think of.
• Do develop a focused argument about the overall effect and why it matters, backed up by evidence from sources.
• Don’t just provide a selection of data on the measures’ effectiveness.
• Do build up your own argument about which kinds of measures have been most or least effective, and why.
• Don’t just analyze a random selection of doppelgänger characters.
• Do form an argument about specific texts, comparing and contrasting how they express their thematic concerns through doppelgänger characters.

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An argumentative essay should be objective in its approach; your arguments should rely on logic and evidence, not on exaggeration or appeals to emotion.

There are many possible approaches to argumentative essays, but there are two common models that can help you start outlining your arguments: The Toulmin model and the Rogerian model.

Toulmin arguments

The Toulmin model consists of four steps, which may be repeated as many times as necessary for the argument:

• Make a claim
• Provide the grounds (evidence) for the claim
• Explain the warrant (how the grounds support the claim)
• Discuss possible rebuttals to the claim, identifying the limits of the argument and showing that you have considered alternative perspectives

The Toulmin model is a common approach in academic essays. You don’t have to use these specific terms (grounds, warrants, rebuttals), but establishing a clear connection between your claims and the evidence supporting them is crucial in an argumentative essay.

Say you’re making an argument about the effectiveness of workplace anti-discrimination measures. You might:

• Claim that unconscious bias training does not have the desired results, and resources would be better spent on other approaches
• Cite data to support your claim
• Explain how the data indicates that the method is ineffective
• Anticipate objections to your claim based on other data, indicating whether these objections are valid, and if not, why not.

Rogerian arguments

The Rogerian model also consists of four steps you might repeat throughout your essay:

• Discuss what the opposing position gets right and why people might hold this position
• Highlight the problems with this position
• Present your own position , showing how it addresses these problems
• Suggest a possible compromise —what elements of your position would proponents of the opposing position benefit from adopting?

This model builds up a clear picture of both sides of an argument and seeks a compromise. It is particularly useful when people tend to disagree strongly on the issue discussed, allowing you to approach opposing arguments in good faith.

Say you want to argue that the internet has had a positive impact on education. You might:

• Acknowledge that students rely too much on websites like Wikipedia
• Argue that teachers view Wikipedia as more unreliable than it really is
• Suggest that Wikipedia’s system of citations can actually teach students about referencing
• Suggest critical engagement with Wikipedia as a possible assignment for teachers who are skeptical of its usefulness.

You don’t necessarily have to pick one of these models—you may even use elements of both in different parts of your essay—but it’s worth considering them if you struggle to structure your arguments.

Regardless of which approach you take, your essay should always be structured using an introduction , a body , and a conclusion .

Like other academic essays, an argumentative essay begins with an introduction . The introduction serves to capture the reader’s interest, provide background information, present your thesis statement , and (in longer essays) to summarize the structure of the body.

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how a typical introduction works.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

The body of an argumentative essay is where you develop your arguments in detail. Here you’ll present evidence, analysis, and reasoning to convince the reader that your thesis statement is true.

In the standard five-paragraph format for short essays, the body takes up three of your five paragraphs. In longer essays, it will be more paragraphs, and might be divided into sections with headings.

Each paragraph covers its own topic, introduced with a topic sentence . Each of these topics must contribute to your overall argument; don’t include irrelevant information.

This example paragraph takes a Rogerian approach: It first acknowledges the merits of the opposing position and then highlights problems with that position.

Hover over different parts of the example to see how a body paragraph is constructed.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

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An argumentative essay ends with a conclusion that summarizes and reflects on the arguments made in the body.

No new arguments or evidence appear here, but in longer essays you may discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your argument and suggest topics for future research. In all conclusions, you should stress the relevance and importance of your argument.

Hover over the following example to see the typical elements of a conclusion.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

The majority of the essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Unless otherwise specified, you can assume that the goal of any essay you’re asked to write is argumentative: To convince the reader of your position using evidence and reasoning.

In composition classes you might be given assignments that specifically test your ability to write an argumentative essay. Look out for prompts including instructions like “argue,” “assess,” or “discuss” to see if this is the goal.

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Caulfield, J. (2023, July 23). How to Write an Argumentative Essay | Examples & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved April 6, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/argumentative-essay/

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