Children who applied for the school were selected through a lottery system.
Angeline Lillard, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has attempted to overcome these issues by looking at a particular Montessori School in Milwaukee, the US. Children who applied for the school were selected through a lottery system. This random selection should eliminate those other confounding factors – allowing Lillard to be more confident that any differences were down to the Montessori method itself. Analysing their progress at age five, Lillard found that the children who went to the Montessori school tended to have better literacy, numeracy, executive function and social skills, compared to those who had attended the other schools. And at age 12, they showed better story-telling abilities.