In the October 2017, a preschool study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, six researchers looked at two Montessori schools in Hartford, Connecticut. Both were established by the state as public “magnet” schools, designed to be very high-quality Montessori programs that would attract wealthy families from the suburbs to low-income neighborhoods in Hartford. Some of the students who attended the public Montessori schools had family incomes as high as $200,000 a year. The students who “lost” the lottery all ended up at some other sort of preschool. Half of them attended a private school; others went to a federally funded Head Start program.

The researchers tested approximately 140 students at the start of the preschool and found that both the Montessori and non-Montessori kids began at age three with similar achievement scores. The 70 students who went to the Montessori schools advanced more rapidly on math and literacy tests over the next three years. At the end of kindergarten, when this study ended, the Montessori kids had significantly higher achievement.

Although the children in this study all really liked recreational activities like watching television and movies and playing, children in Montessori showed relatively more liking of academic tasks like reading and getting lessons from a teacher. One possible reason for this is that children have choices about how they spent their time in Montessori; such choice is increasingly rare in preschool programs generally (Bassok et al., 2016). People are generally happier when they have choices, which provide a sense of self-determination (Deci and Ryan, 2011). Other possible reasons for more school liking dovetail with those given for achievement and mastery orientation.