Two-thirds of babies born at only 23 or 24 weeks were ready for kindergarten on time, researchers found.
Unexpectedly, nearly two percent of them even achieved gifted status in school. While these extremely premature babies often score low on standardized tests, preterm infants born 25 weeks or later performed only slightly lower than full-term infants. In fact, as the length of pregnancy increased after 28 weeks, the differences in test scores were negligible.
“Most infants born at 23 to 24 weeks still demonstrate a high degree of cognitive functioning at the start of kindergarten and throughout school.”
“What excites me about this study is that it changes the focus for the clinician and families at the bedside from just focusing on the medical outcomes of the child to what the future educational outcomes might be for a child born early,” says Craig Garfield, associate professor of pediatrics and of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Garfield is first author of the paper in JAMA Pediatrics.
The longitudinal study analyzed more than 1.3 million babies born in Florida from 1992 to 2002 with gestational ages of 23 to 41 weeks who later entered Florida public schools between 1995 and 2012. The scientists matched the babies’ vital statistic records with their Florida public school records to examine the association between being born early and educational performance.
“Many studies look at premature babies but very few of them look at their educational outcomes into middle school in such a large population,” says Garfield.
“While some people might be troubled that very premature infants tend to score well below their full-term peers on standardized tests, I believe that the glass is more than half-full,” says senior author David Figlio, director of the Institute for Policy Research. “Most infants born at 23 to 24 weeks still demonstrate a high degree of cognitive functioning at the start of kindergarten and throughout school.”
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Conventional wisdom is that “extreme prematurity is very deleterious to educational accomplishment,” says Jeffrey Roth, research professor emeritus in the University of Florida department of pediatrics’ division of neonatology.
“That said, the fact that two thirds of these kids showed up ready to start school is very reassuring. When physicians talk with parents about the prospects for their newborn infant, they can say that some very premature babies do brilliantly. That’s comforting to both parents and physicians.”
While the study’s data is strong, it doesn’t account for some of these infants’ medical issues related to preterm birth or provide information about why these children performed well in school, such as their biological make-up or if they received extra support from family or schools, Garfield says.
Nevertheless, most babies born prematurely ended up performing reasonably well on standardized tests through middle school.
“Our future work in this area will focus on what parents and service providers can do to help future premature children to achieve their full potential.”
The National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, through the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, funded the work.
Source: Northwestern University
