Raising the age of eligibility to enter kindergarten has not eliminated variations in children's readiness for school, and parents and teachers have used delayed entry and retention as strategies to accommodate these variations. Information from the 1993 and 1995 National Household Education Survey is used to describe the numbers and…

Over the past 10 years, kindergarten classes have escalated their academic demands in order to prepare children to begin first grade. In tandem with curricular changes, many parents have elected to "hold out" their children from first grade for an additional year, and increasingly, schools are using kindergarten retention in response to…

The purpose of this study was to obtain and analyze information on the characteristics of the child entering school for the first time in junior kindergarten, senior kindergarten and grade one. A sample of 209 children from different areas in Ontario, Canada, including rural, urban, inner city and metropolitan areas, was studied. Information was…