Academic pathways from preschool through elementary school

In the first edition of the Handbook of Educational Psychology Paris and Cunningham ( 1996 ) summarized young children’s enculturation into education according to the theme of children becoming students. The experiences involved in “becoming” capture the myriad developmental changes of childhood and emphasize the emerging identities of children as students (Roeser, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2000 ). The theme also confirms the close connections between developmental and educational psychology for understanding children’s emerging lives as students in academic worlds. The child-centered theme of becoming is still relevant for understanding how children progress from home to preschool to formal school, especially between the ages of 3 and 10 years that is the focus in this chapter, but we have added a theme of “pathways” to illustrate how children follow different routes through educational experiences. Children’s opportunities for learning vary widely in American homes, schools, and communities, and they contribute to large ranges of skill levels at every grade level. These diverse and developing skill trajectories, especially for literacy and numeracy, help to establish different pathways, as well as different identities, for children into and through formal schooling.