EDGE Study: Understanding Victorian children's kindergarten attendance

Our team is currently undertaking a large-scale evaluation of the roll out of funded 3-year-old kindergarten in Victoria, through the Educational and Developmental Gains in Early Childhood (EDGE) study.

Our research questions include:

• Does attendance at 3-year-old kindergarten improve childrenʼs language, cognition, and social-emotional outcomes?
• What variables (including the quantity and quality of kindergarten) are associated with better language, cognition, and social-emotional outcomes?
• Is inequity in children's outcomes at school entry reduced by participation in 3-year-old kindergarten?

In Australia, nearly all early childhood education evaluations measure the quantity of kindergarten accessed by the number of days or hours a child is enrolled. However, kindergarten enrolment and actual attendance are not the same. Absences from kindergarten can be due to social, economic, cultural, or health factors.

We have conducted a scoping process and identified five key apps or programs that are used in the 150 services in our study. We are confident that we can work with kindergarten staff to securely export this data for the 2500+ children who have consented into this study.

The format of attendance data varies between apps. In many cases, we have time-stamped data for each day over the three years of the study. We will work with MDAP to navigate analysing and integrating this data into a manageable and meaningful format that can then be integrated with our other datasets.

This project aims to:

• Develop and implement of a protocol to extract relevant data from multiple formats of attendance data records.
• Synthesise the extracted data into a meaningful metric that reflects the amount (or 'dosage') that children receive of early childhood education.

Broadly, we are looking to prove that the intricacies of the Australian early childhood sector can be navigated, and a meaningful dataset can be created and used.