Latino kindergarteners: strong social skills

...and ready to learn.

Mr. Fuller and Claudia Galindo, an assistant professor in language, literacy, and culture at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, drew on a database of 19,590 kindergartners, called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, to compare the social skills of children from different ethnic and racial groups at the start of kindergarten. The researchers also looked at how having those social skills, which were rated by teachers, translated into kindergartners’ acquisition of mathematics knowledge.

The researchers found a strong correlation between their social competency when entering kindergarten and the gains they made in math skills during kindergarten. They looked at several social areas: self-control, interpersonal skills, approaches to learning, and internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors.

I was most pleased, 'though, that this article avoided the "Latino population is one group" trap:

...they are the first to draw on it to report differences among subgroups of Latino kindergartners, Mr. Fuller said. For example, the study found that children of Mexican heritage start kindergarten with social skills and task engagement very comparable to those of white children. But that’s not the case with Puerto Rican children, who, on average, enter school with significantly less social competence than white children.

You can find the full study here; it will be in the May issue of Development Psychology.