ABSTRACT

The focus on improving children’s readiness for kindergarten has intensified globally. While most studies examine this issue prior to children entering kindergarten, little is known about how education stakeholders make sense of readiness once children enter kindergarten. This article addresses this gap by examining how a range of stakeholders made sense of kindergarten readying children for elementary school. Our findings suggest that while context played a significant role in their conceptions of readiness, their understandings of this construct differed from previous work in that stakeholders no longer worried about children’s readiness to learn. Rather, they wanted to ensure children learned enough to be successful in school and beyond. Moreover, they shifted the responsibility for such readiness from the child to the entire system. Still, these stakeholders focused on children’s future learning. Such attention to the future not only ignores the present but also framed children at risk for success in and out of school. Such findings suggest education stakeholders should conceptualize school readiness as a multifaceted process that occurs in the present. This may allow for new policies that expand both the conceptions of the ready kindergartner as well as the practices that align with these stakeholders’ conceptions of readiness.

摘要

全球越来越重视提高儿童的入学准备率。尽管大多数研究都是在孩子上幼儿园之前就研究了这个问题，但对于孩子们上幼儿园后教育利益相关者如何做好准备的了解却鲜为人知。本文通过研究各种利益相关者如何理解幼儿园为孩子们上小学做好准备，来解决这一差距。我们的发现表明，尽管背景在他们的准备状态概念中起着重要作用，但他们对这种结构的理解与之前的工作有所不同，因为利益相关者不再担心孩子的学习准备程度。相反，他们想确保孩子学到足够的知识，以便在学校及以后取得成功。此外，他们将这种准备工作的责任从儿童转移到整个系统。仍然，这些利益相关者专注于儿童的未来学习。对未来的这种关注不仅忽视了现在，而且使陷害儿童有可能在学校内外取得成功的危险。这些发现表明，教育利益相关者应将入学准备工作概念化为当前发生的多方面过程。这可能允许新的政策扩展既有幼儿园的概念，也扩大与这些利益相关者的准备状态相一致的做法。