A Comparison of Full-Day and Half-Day English and French Immersion Kindergarten: Children's Outcomes and Experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this research was to examine kindergarten children’s outcomes and experiences in four program models: full-day French immersion, half-day French immersion, full-day English, and half-day English. This quasi-experimental study employed a mixed methods approach. Child participants (N=70) across the four programs were administered standardized measures of English receptive vocabulary and reading, as well as a print task, a number sense task, a drawing task, and an interview, at the beginning and end of kindergarten, as well as at the beginning of Grade 1. Additionally, children from French immersion (FI) programs were administered equivalent measures in French. Parents of child participants completed questionnaires at the beginning and the end of kindergarten, which served to provide demographic information and parents’ perspectives of their children’s experiences. Finally, in order to provide context for the study, educators (N=7) across the four programs participated in semi-structured interviews relating to program implementation and child experiences. Mixed ANOVAs were conducted in order to determine program differences at each time point. Results revealed significant differences in English word identification, with children from English full-day kindergarten (FDK) scoring significantly higher at the beginning of Grade 1 than children in either FI program, and English word decoding, with only children from half-day programs (FI and English) making significant gains over the kindergarten year. However, when analyzing French literacy skills, only children from FI FDK kindergarten made significant gains in word identification scores, and scored significantly higher in receptive vocabulary than children from half-day FI kindergarten. When examining drawing complexity, results revealed only children from FDK programs (both English and FI) made significant gains between time points. Children’s interview transcripts revealed that across all programs, play was discussed more frequently at the kindergarten level, but academics were discussed more often in Grade 1. This study makes important contributions to the literature on full-day kindergarten programming as well as second-language education. Findings suggest that FDK has a greater impact on reading in second-language contexts and that increased exposure to the second language, as well as learning through play, is beneficial for vocabulary development and word identification in the second language. In the context of education in Ontario, this study has particular relevance as school boards decide whether to offer FI at the kindergarten level with the emergence of the new play-based FDK program.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".