Readiness is a term that I came across when looking at kindergarten in contemporary
times. It is a term that was used by the people I interviewed and in the documents I
read for the document review. However, the definition of readiness was not unified
throughout the documents and interviews. It was often described as a set of criteria that
children needed to possess before they entered kindergarten without including information
about how families and schools can specifically support the children. This idea
about having a set of criteria for children for entering kindergarten has been discussed as
problematic due to the fact that this goal is based on the belief that children will have the
same sets of skills when they start kindergarten (Downer, LoCasale-Crouch, Mashburn,
& Pianta, 2007). The participants interviewed as well as the documents that were reviewed
spoke about readiness as including academic and social-emotional traits. In the
literature on this topic, school readiness includes social emotional as well as academic
skills, along with the approach to learning tasks (Cheung, Green Wright, Hahs-Vaughn,