Does One More Year Matter? Dosage Effect of the One-Village-One-Preschool Intervention in Rural China

The One-Village-One-Preschool (OVOP) initiative aims to guarantee early childhood education (ECE) to all children in high-poverty villages in China. A challenge to policymakers is to balance expanding the scale with lengthening service duration. Following 23,775 children from preschool (4-year-old) to fourth-grade (10-year-old) in a poverty-stricken county, we found: 3-year and 2-year-OVOP groups started off the first-grade with a similar level of performance in Chinese, English, and math, lagging behind the well-resourced township-public-ECE group by 0.14 SDs. However, by the third or fourth-grade, the 3-year-OVOP group had emulated the township-public-ECE group, whereas the 2-year-OVOP group lagged by about 0.2 SDs. Our finding suggested that 1 more year in ECE for children in high-poverty-villages can counteract the long-term fade-out effect.