When people think about the roots of a child’s struggles in math class, they may picture a tough teacher, a missed unit or a sudden loss of confidence around fractions. Our new study suggests we should be looking much earlier, at kindergarten, or even before.

Using linked provincial data from more than 25,000 Ontario children, we tracked students from kindergarten through Grade 9 to see how each child’s “school readiness” — their cognitive, language, social, emotional and physical skills at school entry — related to their math performance nearly a decade later.

The results, published in the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, show that the children who started behind in kindergarten were, on average, still behind in Grade 9. The gap didn’t necessarily widen, but neither did it close.

This matters because math achievement is closely linked to later educational opportunities, participation in STEM fields and labour market success.

At a time when provinces across Canada are trying to address post-pandemic learning loss and reduce educational inequities, our findings suggest that efforts to improve educational outcomes must begin in the early years. Our study is among the first in Canada to provide this kind of large-scale longitudinal evidence from Ontario.

What we measured, and how

In Ontario, approximately every three years,........

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