The Effects of Preschool Experiences on Mexican Children’s Spanish Test Scores

Abstract

Preschool was announced by the Mexican government to be part of compulsory education in 2002. Under such a policy background, our group studies the impact of preschool on Mexican children’s academic performance by looking at their test scores in Spanish. We use a value-added linear regression model to check how student’s test scores are affected by the attendance of preschool and to estimate the magnitude of preschool’s impact on Spanish scores. We also conduct a pair of controlled experiments to test the effect of preschool education on children from different family income levels. This paper concludes that preschool attendance has a positive effect on student’s Spanish scores and middle-income families are most affected by this policy.