Does Montessori preschool help children more than usual schools?
Children who won a lottery place in public Montessori preschools pulled ahead in academics, social understanding and willingness to tackle hard tasks, and the usual gap between richer and poorer children shrank.
Source
Montessori Preschool Elevates and Equalizes Child Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Natural experiment: children who won vs lost a random admission lottery to two public Montessori magnet preschools, each tested at four time points across three years
- N
- N=141 · 141 children in the final sample: 70 in Montessori and 71 in other (public and private) preschools; the full Methods section is missing from the available text, so exact measures and attrition details cannot be checked
- Population
- Children aged about 3-6 who applied to Montessori magnet preschools in a high-poverty US city (Hartford, Connecticut), from a broad range of household incomes
- Outcome
- Academic achievement, theory of mind, executive function, mastery orientation, social problem solving, creativity and school enjoyment
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Families applied through a random lottery to two public Montessori magnet preschools; the researchers followed 70 children who got in and 71 who did not and went to other public or private preschools. Children were tested 4 times over 3 years, from the start of preschool to the end of kindergarten, on academic achievement, theory of mind, executive function, mastery orientation, social problem solving, creativity and how much they liked school-type activities. Growth-curve models and comparisons at each time point tested whether the groups diverged, and subgroup analyses looked at household income and initial executive function.
What they found
The groups started out equal, but Montessori children grew faster in academic achievement and theory of mind, and by ages 4-5 more of them chose to retry a hard puzzle (65% vs 47%). They also liked school tasks relatively more, and scored higher on executive function only at age 4. There were no differences in social problem solving or creativity. The link between family income and achievement was about half as strong in Montessori (correlation 0.23 vs 0.46), and in Montessori classrooms children's initial executive function no longer predicted their academic growth.
The limits
What it doesn't show
A lottery is not a full randomised trial: not all lottery entrants could be found or agreed to take part, and families who enter school lotteries are not typical of all families. The schools were high-fidelity, AMI-recognised Montessori programmes, so results may not apply to lower-quality or differently affiliated Montessori schools. Teachers were not studied, so it is unclear whether the curriculum or simply better teachers produced the gains. The detailed Methods section is not included in the available text, so measures and attrition cannot be fully evaluated, and long-term effects beyond kindergarten were not tested.
Key terms
- Lottery-based design
- A study that compares applicants randomly admitted to a programme with those randomly turned away, approximating random assignment.
- Theory of mind
- The understanding that other people have beliefs, desires and knowledge that may differ from one's own.
- Executive function
- Self-regulatory skills such as inhibitory control, working memory and flexible attention.
- Mastery orientation
- A tendency to choose challenging tasks in order to learn, rather than easy ones that make you look competent.
- Income-achievement gap
- The typical finding that children from higher-income households score higher on academic measures.
- Growth curve model
- A statistical model that estimates each group's starting level and rate of change across repeated measurements.
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Quiz yourself
What made the Montessori and comparison groups comparable at the outset?
Common questions
Why is the lottery important?
Because admission was random among applicants, both groups came from families who wanted Montessori, which removes much of the self-selection that plagues school comparisons.
Did Montessori children do better on everything?
No. Social problem solving and creativity did not differ, and the executive-function advantage appeared only at one time point.
Could good teachers rather than the Montessori method explain the results?
Yes, the authors acknowledge this; teachers were not measured, and teacher effects remain an open alternative explanation.
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