Research and Resouces

A growing body of research supports the effectiveness of Montessori education over a range of outcomes, including school readiness, academic achievement, executive function skills, and more.

Featured Research

Montessori—The Science Behind the Genius by Dr. Angeline Lillard

Oxford University Press, 2017

Lillard’s 2017 book is a comprehensive summary of the developmental psychology underpinning the Montessori method.

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Public Montessori Raises Achievement, Closes Gaps

Frontiers in Psychology, 2017

This three-year study of four public Montessori schools in New Haven reduced achievement gaps across income levels and rated Montessori children higher in academic achievement, social cognition, mastery orientation, and school enjoyment. This work is the basis for an ongoing federally funded national study.

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Montessori Shows Strengths Across Race and Income

Riley Institute at Furman, 2018

This study of 45 public Montessori schools in South Carolina found that Montessori students met more standards and showed more growth (especially in low-income and Black sub-groups), showed more creativity, and had fewer absences, discipline events and suspensions.

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Research Summaries

Links to Published Studies »

Research Resources

What the research shows

Dozens of studies show how Montessori supports a wide range of developmental outcomes.

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Executive Functions

Montessori supports executive function skills, including self-regulation, working memory, planning, and inhibitory control. Executive functions predict positive life-long outcomes such as academic achievement, income potential, and marital satisfaction.

Academic Achievement

Montessori supports self-regulation and intrinsic motivation, which correlate with academic achievement. In language arts, children in Montessori classrooms have shown strengths in decoding, letter-word identification, reading assessments, sentence structure, and writing creativity. In mathematics, children have shown higher scores in applied problem solving, understanding of math concepts, and standardized test scores.

Social Development

Montessori supports social problem solving ability, a sense of community and social justice, positive perceptions of classmates, and construcive social problem-solving.

School Readiness

While the Montessori approach recognizes that learning begins at birth, well before conventional schooling starts, children in Montessori preschool and kindergarten classrooms have shown strengths in traditional “school readiness” measures.

Resources

Making the Case for Public Montessori

White Papers

NCMPS produces a series of White Papers to provide support for Montessori implementation and program development for use with administrators, policy makers, legislators, and wherever else they can be helpful.

These papers are free to download and use with attribution to the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector.