Why Would Rural and Big City Kids Be Similarly Underprepared for Kindergarten?

Common sense tells us that small children in rural areas have a different set of learned information at their disposal than urban ones. A 6-year-old living in Brooklyn has little need to discern a bull from an ox, just as one living on a Kentucky farm probably can't tell the local train from the express. When it comes to early academic skills, however, children who are just about to begin school in the big city and the back country may not be all that far apart.

A new analysis of long-term data has found that kids in rural and big urban areas are entering kindergarten with less advanced reading and math skills than their counterparts in the suburbs or smaller cities. Psychologists Portia Miller and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal of the University of Pittsburgh present their findings in an upcoming issue of the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly: