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Austin Matte About Austin Matte

It was during his time in Peace Corps Nicaragua when Austin had the striking realization that the first years of life are tremendously formative and far too overlooked. Upon returning stateside, his involvement in research and his studies in graduate school confirmed and further elucidated the notion that the earliest years of life lay an important groundwork for future learning; experiences had during this period have life-long effects on an individual. When not attempting to straddle the worlds of research and practice, Austin is probably outside, reading, or learning something.

Montessori: The New Science behind the Century-Old Methodology (part II)
Austin Matte
Austin Matte

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“Freedom in intellectual work is found to be the basis of internal discipline” (*Montessori, 1917/1965).

This quote highlights a notion which goes completely against our conventional wisdom. Internal discipline is to be instilled externally. Students develop discipline through following top-down instruction, no? They are told what to do and they do it.

Much of what Maria Montessori intuited about child development and education seems to fly in the face of the systems we have in place to educate our youngest citizens. There is no doubt that the insistence on obedience can create disciplined individuals; however, in regard to intellectual pursuits, if we desire individuals who are self-driven, allowing them a certain freedom in what they pursue enables them to develop this drive themselves.

Maria Montessori developed her approach to education, which contains eight principles, primarily through observation. In her book, Lillard (2005) outlines these eight principles and the scientific studies that have been carried out since which underscore that these principles are in fact in line with the way we learn and develop. These principles are:

  1. movement and cognition are intertwined
  2. students should have a sense of control
  3. interest improves learning
  4. extrinsic rewards hinder intrinsic motivation
  5. learning from and with peers
  6. learning should be contextualized
  7. optimal adult-child interactions
  8. order in the environment

In this post, we delve into principles five through eight, continuing from a previous post. While there are many examples of each of these principles in the Montessori classroom, I bring up one or two examples and just some of the science backing them up.

  1. Learning from and with peers

In a primary Montessori classroom (children ages 3 to 5), younger children may often work side by side, though not collaborating. As children get to be 4 and 5 years old, they begin to work together. At this age, and especially at the elementary level, collaboration is suggested and encouraged by the teacher.

Further, the mixed-age classrooms, which are an essential part of the Montessori classroom, provide opportunities for younger students to learn from older students. As importantly, it also creates the opportunity for older students to teach younger students — teaching becomes an opportunity for the older students to learn and grow.

Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who was 26 years younger than Maria Montessori and was involved in and presumably inspired by her work, also notes the importance of learning from peers. He believed that peer interaction, and the presentation of different ideas that comes along with it, creates states of cognitive disequilibrium where children must then “accommodate” these new concepts, advancing their understanding.

Lev Vygotsky, another developmental psychologist, believed that children learn in what he called the “Zone of Proximal Development.” This “zone” consists of tasks that one cannot accomplish, or conceptual understanding that one cannot attain, alone. Older peers allow their younger counterparts to accomplish tasks and reach higher levels of understanding.

Research has confirmed the benefits of social learning. Young children may benefit the most from observation, rather than interaction (*Azmitia, 1988). Yet, as children grow older, and especially in the elementary years, they are able to make gains through collaboration (*Tomasello, et al., 1993). Once children are able to engage in a dialogue that contains explanations, inferences, strategies, etc., collaboration has been found to improve their cognitive performance, compared to children who work alongside peers but are discouraged from talking, much like in traditional schools (*Teasley, 1995).

  1. Learning should be contextualized

As with the learning that takes place in traditional schools, “people are prepared for life by exclusion from it” (Montessori, 1967a). Investigation into some topic, void of the context of the topic, prevents the learner from engaging with it as deeply as she would be able to otherwise.

In the Primary Montessori Classroom, context is given via hands-on materials that are connected with the outside world. For example:

  • activities where children must button, tie, or zip fabric together, much the same way their clothes function
  • pouring (water, beads, etc.) from one container to another, just as they must pour water into their glass to drink
  • scooping items (small stones, beans, etc.) with a spoon from one container into another, just as they must spoon their own food into their mouths

In the elementary classroom and beyond, learning is also made contextual by physically going out to explore the place where the subject at hand is occurring. For a theme on entrepreneurship, for example, students may be encouraged to go out and speak with local business owners.

It is understood that learning is improved when new knowledge is connected with what we already know. Placing learning in a specific context is one way to facilitate that.

In a simple study, 10-year-old children were taught the basics of the LOGO graphics program language. One group was taught in an abstract context, where children had to move the cursor between five circles, touching each one. Other groups were taught in a meaningful context — they had to carry out the same task, though the circles were described as islands with treasure that must be collected at each one, for example.

Children who learned the language in a meaningful context, as opposed to an abstract one, better learned the programming language, and also reported to have better enjoyed the learning process. These children also showed a better mastery of following a series a steps towards the end of executing a plan — a skill set important to computer programming. Even further, and perhaps most importantly, two weeks later these children performed better on a geometry test of the underlying concepts and skills (*Papert, 1980; *Parker & Lepper 1992).

As highlighted in this study, placing learning in a specific context can allow an individual to enjoy learning the material, better learn the material, better retain the material learned, and better learn the meta-skills required to learn similar material. Is there anything else?

  1. Optimal adult-child interactions

Through observation, Montessori described optimal adult-child interactions before there was a body of research on the topic. In few words, she outlined that adults are to set clear limits but allow children to operate freely within those limits, and to respond sensitively to children’s needs while maintaining high expectations.

One study found that children of authoritative/democratic parents (i.e. parents who are warm, make suggestions rather than demands, and expect maturity) were more well-liked by their peers, and were judged as more prosocial by their teachers. On the other hand, children of  authoritarian/restrictive parents (i.e., parents who often prohibit, assert themselves, and provide directives) were viewed as less helpful by teachers and peers, and were often more disliked by their peers (*Dekovic & Jensen, 1992).

Another study also found that for two-year-olds, parents’ directiveness was positively associated with measures of cognition. As children grew older than two, however, parents’ directiveness was found to associate with lower levels of cognitive functioning (*Landry, et al., 2000). These findings suggest that adults must be sensitive to the degree to which children need direction and guidance. While it may be necessary, too much can hamper cognition.

  1. Order in the environment

When I first learned of the degree to which the Montessori classroom was ordered and structured, admittedly, it struck me as strange. Learning must be messy, I thought. Now, having spent plenty of time in a Montessori classroom, I see that the meticulous organization of the materials and shelves, and the purposefully structured progression of the materials, help children learn.

The research currently available agrees with this notion. Studies have found, for example, that items to be memorized are better retained when presented in an organized and structured way, rather than at random (*Bower, Clark, Lesgold, & Winzenz, 1969). As a (perhaps overly) simple example, it is much easier for us, as adults, to memorize “A B C D E F G H I J K” than it is to memorize “D F J C I A H E G K B,” even though the contents of both lists are the same.

In the same way, when new information is presented to children in an organized way, they are better able to make sense of it. The manner in which information and materials are presented matters.

Studies have also found that orderly home environments are associated with better cognitive functioning, while less organized homes are associated with lower levels of cognition, language use, more difficult temperaments, and lower motivation to solve problems or master tasks (*Wachs, 2000). Bear in mind that these are associations, not causations.

The Montessori Approach in Real Life

As I have seen through my own experience, and as Montessori set out to do with her method over a century ago, this approach to education has the potential to develop self-motivated, well-regulated, prosocial learners who take ownership of their own education.

Old two- and young three-year-olds have entered our classroom at the beginning of the year with little to no focus, just bouncing around the room, going from one thing to the next. One parent even described his young child to me as a “threenager.”

By the end of the year, this very same child is able to choose, out of a room full of activities, the one that she wants to do. She very carefully picks it up and, walking around other people and their work, she carries it to an open desk. She uses the work for as long as she desires, and with great focus. When she’s done, she cleans up her work, stands up, pushes in her chair, and carries the work back to shelf from where she got it; both the spot where she did her work and the work itself are both ready for the next person to use.

This work cycle enables the child to build focus, order, concentration, coordination, and independence. Beyond these higher-order cognitive functions, these activities also encourage the development of skills necessary for everyday living, like fine motor skills and hand strength.

By the time this child turns four, a tremendous foundation has been laid for learning. Not only are children ready for more challenging work, they ask for it. One of my four-year-olds, after working very hard on learning letter sounds and writing them out over this past year, recently began reading consonant-vowel-consonant words (cat, hop, etc.). She wrote a list of the first words that she read, and upon reading me this list, she danced around with excitement. This is a child who has ownership of and loves learning.

By the time many children finish their third year at the primary level in our classroom, they are reading books. As someone who didn’t begin reading until second grade, I can unabashedly say that I am jealous. Bear in mind that this did not come at some great expense either; the students aren’t burnt out– just the opposite is true.

While above I mostly mention the literacy curriculum, I’m also envious of my students’ ability to add, subtract, (and sometimes) multiply and divide. They also walk away with other pieces of explicit knowledge, like, for example, the names of the continents of the world, the names of plant and animal parts, and the names of many 2D and 3D shapes (do you know the difference between an ellipsoid and an ovoid?!).

Even further, these children have a strong set of social/emotional skills. They, for example, are encouraged to consider the needs of others, and also to express their own needs. Students are also made aware of our school community’s collective needs, and most are eager to contribute via preparing food, rearranging the room for different activities, organizing the materials on the shelves, cleaning up after a meal, etc.

Conclusion

Montessori’s methods highlight basic truths about human learning. Through observation, she realized that early childhood presents a time of unique cognitive malleability, and that this can be leveraged through interactions the child has with the environment. Scientific support for her methods continues to come to light even in present day, over a century later.

Through quality implementation of the Montessori method, children become engaged and excited about learning. They develop into independent learners who seek out challenges. Even further, this approach can develop students who are as engaged in their learning and as they are in their community, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Reference

Lillard, A. S. (2005). Montessori: The science behind the genius. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Montessori, M. (1967a). The absorbent mind. New York, NY: Henry Holt.

*References marked with an asterisk are cited in Lillard, 2005.

Montessori: The New Science behind a Century-Old Methodology (part I)
Austin Matte
Austin Matte

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Maria Montessori described observing children in a traditional classroom as being tantamount to an entomologist observing dead insects pinned to a board, “where the spontaneous expression of a child’s personality is so suppressed that he is almost like a corpse, and where he is so fixed to his place at a desk that he resembles a butterfly mounted to a pin” (Montessori, 1967b).

Despite her observations taking place around the turn of the 20th century, they sound eerily familiar. Even over a century ago, she acknowledged that in order to best learn, children need a certain freedom in order to explore their interests and take ownership over what they are doing.

Presumably motivated by the discrepancy between reality and practice, she developed an approach to education. Initially working with children with learning difficulties, and later with children between the ages of 3 and 6, Maria Montessori–who first studied medicine–developed her approach almost completely through careful observation of the way in which children interacted with their environment.

Montessori’s insights about the way children learn and develop were not confirmed by science until many years later. In a book, Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, Angeline Stoll Lillard (2005) outlines the eight principles incorporated into Montessori Education and provides the evidence base supporting each one. The principles are:

  1. movement and cognition are intertwined
  2. students should have a sense of control
  3. interest improves learning
  4. extrinsic rewards hinder intrinsic motivation
  5. learning from and with peers
  6. learning should be contextualized
  7. optimal adult-child interactions
  8. order in the environment

While there are many examples of each of these embedded in the Montessori classroom, and separately each one of these concepts now brings with it an immense amount of research, for each principle I cherry-pick just one or two examples from the classroom.

I also provide a brief mention of some supporting research to help give you a sense of the science that now reinforces the Montessori approach to education, developed over a century ago.

This blog post will address the first four principles listed above, part 2 will be posted at a later date and will address the latter four.

  1. Movement and Cognition are Intertwined

Montessori activities and materials purposefully incorporate movement into learning activities. Let’s take the Sandpaper Letters, for example, used to introduce preschool-aged children to letter sounds. (Children are not taught the names of the letters nor the order of the alphabet at this point). The Sandpaper Letters are lowercase letters, about five inches in height, made out of sandpaper and affixed to thin piece of painted wood.

When introduced, children are simultaneously shown how to trace the letter and produce the sound that the letter makes. The child is then free to use the Sandpaper letters to practice producing the letter sounds and tracing the letters.

Research has since underscored many instances of the interconnected nature of movement and cognition, including the improvement of memory when movement is involved at the moment when something is learned. For example, students who acted out actions described by sentences remembered the sentences better than students who did not act them out (*Cohen, 1989; *Engelkamp, Zimmer, Mohr & Sellen, 1994).

In the same way, when children simultaneously trace a letter and produce its sound, they are better able to remember it.

  1. Students should have a sense of control

In the Montessori classroom, this sense of control is brought about by giving children the choice of activities they wish to pursue, from among the options that have been laid out by the teacher; the Montessori m.o. is freedom within limits.

So if Thomas wants to pick up where he left off on a mathematics activity, he may do so. Or, if he wishes to take out the Knobbed Cylinder work from the Sensorial area (which, unbeknownst to him, will help him to develop his pincer grip necessary to later begin writing), he may do that as well. Thomas has a choice over what activity he wants to do, and how long he wants to do it for.

Researchers carried out a simple experiment which highlighted the importance of choice in activities. Children aged seven to nine years were presented with six categories of anagrams to work on. While all of the children in reality had the same choices, one group was told to choose from among the six categories, a second group was told that the experimenter chose the categories for them, and a third group was told that their mothers had made the choice of categories for them.

Children in the first group who “chose their own work” solved twice as many anagrams as the other two groups in the same amount of time. Additionally, during an optional free-play period after the time allotted to work on the anagrams, children in the first group elected to spend more time continuing to solve anagrams (*Iyengar & Lepper, 1999).

When children in a Montessori classroom have the freedom to choose, they have a sense of control, they take ownership over what they are doing, and their performance and their persistence improve. The freedom to choose also fosters independence in young children.

  1. Interest improves learning

In a previous post, I talk about the importance of emotion in learning. The Montessori method is yet another approach to learning which capitalizes on this notion.

Making the most of student interest can be seen from many different levels in the Montessori approach:

  • the design of materials in which young children tend to be naturally interested,
  • the introduction of language activities at a time when, developmentally, children take an interest in learning their language,
  • allowing children to pursue activities that they find interesting at a given moment.

It only makes sense that people will better learn something in which they are interested. All else held constant, if two people are given piano lessons, one who has pined for professional instruction for some time, and the other whose parents forced it on him, the former will most certainly learn how to play better more quickly. Interest matters.

There are numerous studies that confirm this common sense conclusion. (I won’t delve into them here, but they’re out there.) Let me instead present you with the psychological definition of the word: being in a state of interest involves, “focused attention, increased cognitive functioning, persistence, and affective [emotional] involvement” (*Hidi, 2000, p. 311).  In capitalizing on student interest, the Montessori approach encourages all of these things.

  1. Extrinsic rewards hinder intrinsic motivation

Depending on the circumstances, extrinsic rewards can get fast (though not necessarily long-lasting) results. Extrinsic rewards have their place, though when it comes to one’s learning, the Montessori approach views extrinsic rewards as a hinderance to concentration and intrinsic drive: the characteristics that Montessori herself sought to instill in individuals.

Instead of extrinsic motivators, Montessori education relies on children’s natural curiosity for motivation, and does all that it can to get out of the way of children and their learning. By giving children extended time to pursue the activities that interest them, Montessori teachers let students focus on an activity for as long as they wish, in order to complete it as many times as desired. This freedom allows children to obtain for themselves a strong sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

These feelings, not gold stars, provide the impetus and motivation for more challenging pursuits.

One study in particular (*Lepper, Greene & Nisbett, 1973) highlights particularly well the detrimental effect that extrinsic rewards can have on individuals–even with activities individuals otherwise would enjoy.

In this study, researchers put out markers available for use in classrooms of 3- to 5-year-old children. They noted which children were heavy marker users. One at a time, the heavy marker users were pulled aside and shown a “Good Player Award” (a card with a gold star and ribbon), and when asked, all the children said they would like to receive one. These children were told that all they had to do was draw with the markers.

In one condition, children were told they would receive a “Good Player Award” after drawing with the markers for six minutes. In another condition, the children were allowed to draw for six minutes and were unexpectedly given the award on the board. And in a third condition, the children drew for six minutes and no award was ever mentioned.

A panel of judges blind to each child’s condition rated the drawings of the children who expected the reward as being much lower in creative quality than those of the children in the two other conditions.

They researchers also found that a few weeks after the experiment, the children conditioned to expect a reward for using the markers used markers far less than the other children, and about half as much as the other children in the class.

In an activity that children otherwise enjoyed, the introduction of extrinsic rewards decreased children’s creativity, in addition to later decreasing their voluntary participation once the possibility of getting a reward was removed.

(For a recent LatB blog article about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, click here.)

Conclusion

Developing curricula around these four principles would be powerful. I wish that my own education had better leveraged these four insights, I’m sure I’d be all the better for it.

What I continue to find intriguing is that these were developed simply through the meticulous observation of young children over time, carried out by one person. No scientific experiments necessary.

More recent studies have revealed that these principles are in line with the way we learn. Designing her approach with the way children learn and develop better enables them to engage with and take ownership of their learning. This, I believe, is a major oversight with the way children are currently educated.

Look out for part two where I will delve into the other four principles, and discuss what this can look like in the classroom.

Reference

Lillard, A. S. (2005). Montessori: The science behind the genius. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Montessori, M. (1967b). The discovery of the child. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

*References marked with an asterisk are cited in Lillard, 2005.

 

Emotion: Cognition’s Rudder
Austin Matte
Austin Matte

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We are not rational beings.

In fact, many aspects of our cognition are inherently emotional. When one’s emotional well-being suffers, so does her cognition. Because of the inseparable nature of emotion and cognition, the way we feel has a profound effect on our learning.

And yet, the emotional processing inherent in cognition is not always considered in pedagogical practices. What is measured is what is emphasized, and when it comes to traditional schooling, the thing getting emphasized is content knowledge. We place so much weight on the assessment of the content knowledge that we gloss over how it may be best received by students.

If instructors were also encouraged to tailor the delivery of the course material, they could enlist students’ emotional processing to ultimately better enable students to engage with, learn, and understand that same content.

What Gets Measured Is What Gets Emphasized

Traditional pedagogy largely takes on a vacuum-sealed, content-centric approach to learning. Content is passively transmitted to the students to then be assessed, most often via a written test. Derived largely from these tests are letter grades, GPA, class rank, overall school performance, etc. What gets measured is what gets emphasized, and the thing that’s measured is content knowledge.

While it may seem counterintuitive, focusing so narrowly on the content knowledge that we want students to learn prevents them from best learning it. One study, for example, revealed that students of teachers who are told to ensure that their students perform well on a given exam tend to fare more poorly than students of teachers who are told to facilitate student learning (Flink, Boggiano, & Barrett, 1990; Flink et al., 1992, as cited in Diamond, 2010).

Let’s take a step back and look at what the science says about the way we are wired. We are emotional beings. By disregarding our emotional processing, we fundamentally disregard the way in which we store and access information.

Emotions and School Performance

Studies relating the social and emotional well-being of students to their academic performance underscore the interrelationship of the two.

If students’ emotional well-being is not sound, their cognitively capabilities–and thus academic performance–are necessarily hindered. For this reason, ensuring student social and emotional well-being can improve academic outcomes.

Students’ motivation and interest in school, for example, can be predicted by the positive support they receive from peers, teachers, and parents (Wentzel, 1998). Relatedly, teachers’ expectations of student achievement, which has an emotional component, affect student motivation, academic self-perceptions, and academic performance (Jussim & Harber, 2005).

This enhanced engagement may be due, at least in part, to the fact that when teachers create a positive social environment, students feel safe to explore and take risks in their learning, without the fear of failure (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). At the same time, stress can greatly hamper our thinking and cognition (Diamond, 2010).

Let us not lose the view of the forest from among the trees. We want students to perform well on assessments, so we focus on the content. However, students perform better when their social and emotional processing are engaged throughout the learning process. This improvement has even been found to be true for performance on standardized tests (Weissberg, et al., 2008), on which many high-level decisions are based.

Emotion and Executive Function

What may help to explain this improved school performance is the role emotion plays in cognition–in particular, our executive function (EF).

EF includes fundamental capacities like working memory, inhibitory control, and attentional control, which are building blocks for other skills and capacities, like cognitive flexibility, creative problem-solving, critical thinking, etc. (Diamond, 2010). All of these, I think we can agree, are important underlying skills to possess for academic (and professional) success.

(For a broader review of EF, see this post by my fellow blogger, Lindsay Clements.)

In a simple, though somewhat mean-spirited study, Baumeister, Twenge, and Nuss (2002) compared cognitive assessments of two groups of people: one group was told by the researchers that they would have close relationships throughout their lives, the other group was told that they would likely end up alone in life.

The groups showed no difference on assessments of simple memorization tasks. They did, however, show differences on complex cognitive tasks that require use of EF; unsurprisingly, the group told that they were likely to end up alone fared worse. This group also performed more poorly on assessments of IQ and on a widely used measure of academic achievement: the GRE.

(Don’t worry; the researchers let the participants in on the secret at the end of the study, and reassured them they wouldn’t die alone…)

A neuroscience study also confirmed the notion of hindered cognition due to social exclusion. In this study, people who experienced feelings of social exclusion showed less brain activity in certain regions when required to do difficult math problems (Campbell, et al., 2006). The researchers suggest specifically that social exclusion interferes with an individual’s ability to focus their attention, which then affects other aspects of cognition.

You’re Being So Emotional

Despite what any economist may try to tell you, we are not rational beings. Emotional processing is necessarily and inextricably woven throughout many aspects of cognition.

Conventional wisdom may say that human decision-making void of emotion is rational. This is probably due to the fact that we can easily find examples of emotions driving us to irrationality, e.g., some individuals fear flying over driving, despite flying being statistically safer.

It also turns out that human decision-making void of emotion can also become quite irrational. When posed with two alternative dates for an appointment, an individual with an injured ventromedial prefrontal cortex–a region of the brain associated with emotions and decision-making–took close to 30 minutes to weigh out the pros and cons of each date, considering anything one could reasonably think about that might impede his ability to make the appointment on either day (Damasio, 2006).

According to Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007), cognition, especially the aspects of cognition that we ask of students in school, “namely learning, attention, memory, decision making, and social functioning, are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within the processes of emotion.”

Emotional processing is necessary for students to be able to transfer that which is learned in the classroom to the outside world; simply having the knowledge does not necessarily mean that students will take advantage of it in different contexts. They suggest that emotional processing provides a “rudder to guide judgement and action” (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007).

Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007) end their piece with the following lines:

When we educators fail to appreciate the importance of students’ emotions, we fail to appreciate a critical force in students’ learning. One could argue, in fact, that we fail to appreciate the very reason that students learn at all.

 

The Delivery of the Content Matters

Learning is an inherently emotional process. Our emotional well-being affects our ability to learn; when we are not stressed, nor feeling anxious, we are best able to engage with material. Though what’s more, our emotions can be leveraged in the learning process; when we are excited about something, we will be able to push ourselves to learn it better.

To create this kind of beneficial emotional environment, schools might need to rethink policies. They might also adopt new pedagogies that emphasize emotional involvement–for example, inquiry-based learning.

A constructivist approach, inquiry-based learning motivates and engages students by encouraging them to grapple with concepts, often with hands-on activities (Minner, Levy & Century, 2010).  Unlike traditional, passive pedagogies, it makes learning active and emotionally salient.

Of the many findings from their meta-analysis of inquiry-based science learning, Minner, Levy and Century (2010) suggest that teaching techniques where students are actively engaged in their learning process through investigations are more likely to increase conceptual understanding than are students in passive learning environments.

The researchers also cite a study which found that students in active learning environments better retained their conceptual understanding over a longer period of time.

While I give inquiry-based learning only a cursory mention, I do so to emphasize that pedagogies can create engaging, real-world activities that encourage students to grapple with concepts, and make them emotionally engaging for students.

Conclusion

Teachers who are most concerned with student performance tend to neglect student emotion, which, ironically, leads to lower levels of student achievement. The same could be said at the systemic level: we have tried to quantify and assess what we believe to be student learning, and in doing so, we have overlooked the fact that learning is a complex, personal process and is necessarily consumed by our emotional processing.

Armed with this information, we can begin to design learning experiences to meet the social and emotional needs of students. It just so happens that there are pedagogies which lend themselves to do just that. In any classroom setting, creating an environment that incorporates students’ social and emotional learning, and which has students emotionally engrossed, will better enable them to engage with, grapple with, and ultimately better understand the content material which we hold so near and dear to our hearts.

Continue Reading

Here is a link to a Learning and the Brain blog post reviewing Immordino-Yang’s book: Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience.

For more on social-emotional learning, visit the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) website here.

References

Baumeister, R. F., Twenge, J. M., & Nuss, C. K. (2002). Effects of social exclusion on cognitive processes: anticipated aloneness reduces intelligent thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), 817. [link]

Campbell, W. K., Krusemark, E. A., Dyckman, K. A., Brunell, A. B., McDowell, J. E., Twenge, J. M., & Clementz, B. A. (2006). A magnetoencephalography investigation of neural correlates for social exclusion and self-control. Social Neuroscience, 1(2), 124-134. [link]

Damasio, A. R. (2006). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York, New York: Avon Books.

Diamond, A. (2010). The evidence base for improving school outcomes by addressing the whole child and by addressing skills and attitudes, not just content. Early Education and Development, 21(5), 780-793. [link]

Immordino‐Yang, M. H., & Damasio, A. (2007). We feel, therefore we learn: The relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 1(1), 3-10. [link]

Jennings, P. A., & Greenberg, M. T. (2009). The prosocial classroom: Teacher social and emotional competence in relation to student and classroom outcomes. Review of Educational Research, 79(1), 491-525. [link]

Jussim, L., & Harber, K. D. (2005). Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies: Knowns and unknowns, resolved and unresolved controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9(2), 131-155. [link]

Minner, D. D., Levy, A. J., & Century, J. (2010). Inquiry‐based science instruction—what is it and does it matter? Results from a research synthesis years 1984 to 2002. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47(4), 474-496. [link]

Weissberg, R. P., Durlak, J. A., Taylor, R. D., Dynmicki, A. B., & O’Brien, M. U. (2008). Promoting social and emotional learning enhances school success: Implications of a meta-analysis. Unpublished manuscript.

Wentzel, K. R. (1998). Social relationships and motivation in middle school: The role of parents, teachers, and peers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90(2), 202. [link]

Head Start: Right on Time
Austin Matte
Austin Matte

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“Children who grow up in poverty often exhibit delays in academic and social-emotional school readiness that undermine their school progress at kindergarten entry and initiate a lifelong trajectory of underachievement and underemployment.”

 

What a powerful concept — a lifelong trajectory of underachievement that is initiated by the time a child reaches kindergarten. Kindergarten! Most people are just aging out of childhood amnesia by this point, and already, a potentially lifelong trajectory has been established.

In a research article published last month, Karen Bierman and colleagues (2017) open with the line quoted above. They go on to mention that, in addition to the differences in academic and professional outcomes, there are also disparities in physical and mental health experienced by children growing up in poverty.

One focus of the study is a well-known problem regarding early childhood interventions: fadeout. Fadeout occurs when children show immediate gains in response to a given education program only for these gains to dissipate over time, leaving the children ostensibly no better off than those who did not participate in the program.

Such fadeout was found to be the case with the federally-funded Head Start program, which is also the focus of the Bierman study. Those who founded the Head Start program recognized the formative potential of the earliest years of life, though studies have found that the program does not live up to its potential. A 2012 federal impact study noted that Head Start “improved children’s preschool outcomes across developmental domains, but had few impacts on children in kindergarten through 3rd grade“ (Puma, et al., 2012).

Another study assessing federal- and state-funded preschools found the instructional quality of such institutions to be “especially problematic” (Early, et al., 2005). Policy-makers have cited such research to back their argument that the Head Start program is not worth the billions of dollars it receives.

I understand not wanting to invest in a program which was found to have no lasting results (of what was measured). Though let us not forget that the issue isn’t whether or not to invest in young children — investing in young children may be the most efficacious way to spend education dollars. This issue then is how we are investing in young children. We ought to be making sustained investments to figure out what program elements produce the best results, and for whom.

Bierman and her colleagues suggest that, in part, the nature of the intervention is to blame for the fading of positive, initial gains. They say that the transient results may be due to the quality of the program.

I agree that improvements made to a given program can make for more lasting results, however, there’s an additional point to be made: people misunderstand the implications of fadeout. Fadeout has been framed to mean that a given program did not achieve what was intended, despite the fact that just the opposite may be true.

I will go into further detail about this when I talk about fadeout below, but first, I’ll review the Bierman study.

The Current Study

Bierman and her colleagues understand that high-quality early childhood education yields positive results. In this study, they go a step further and attempt to elucidate which may be the active ingredients that enable programs to produce positive, long-term outcomes.

Toward that end, the researchers designed a study with one control group and two experimental groups to receive different interventions in preschool. Then, they assessed the students years later when they neared the end of second grade. Below is a simplified summary of the groups and assessments.

Group 1 – The Control Group

Students in this group attended their Head Start center, just as they would have otherwise.

Group 2 – Added Classroom Program

Students in this group also attended their Head Start center, though their classrooms benefitted from an added curriculum that promoted the development of children’s social-emotional, language, and literacy skills.

Group 3 – Added Classroom Program and Home Visits

In addition to the added curriculum that the students in group 2 received, the parents of students in group 3 also received home visits. During these home visits parents were shown how to encourage their children’s literacy growth and develop their children’s learning and self-control.

The Assessments

Three years later, when the students were finishing second grade, the researchers assessed the students’ mental health and academic outcomes via teacher reports, student self-reports, and assessments of reading and math skills.

Results

Group 1 Vs. Group 2

Relative to children in the control group, those in a Head Start classroom with the added curriculum showed improved mental health on four out of five teacher-rated measures: classroom participation, social competence, student–teacher relationships, and reduced peer problems. These students also showed near-significant improvements on the fifth measure: learning behaviors. These students also saw improvements in their perceptions of their own social competence.

These students did not appear to benefit academically from the added curriculum.

Group 2 Vs. Group 3

Adding home visits did not further improve any of the mental health measures as rated by the teachers, above and beyond the gains that the children experienced due to the added curriculum alone. Though these children experienced enhanced perceptions of their own social competence, in addition to reduced perceptions of peer problems.

Interestingly, students who received the added curriculum and whose parents received home visits showed improved results on three of the five academic measures (sight words, reading skills, and math skills), with near significant improvements in a fourth measure (letter-word identification).

In brief: the additional class prompted mental health benefits, whereas the home visits yielded additional mental health and academic benefits.

What Have We Learned

Parents matter

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: work through the parents. The current study produced the best results when parents were purposefully encouraged and enabled to bolster their children’s learning.

I feel we have yet to truly harness the influential power of the parents. Studies testing this notion continue to show promising results, and I am convinced that the purposeful design and application of programs meant to build the capacity of caretakers will yield impactful results. These positive effects will be compounded when combined with high-quality, targeted curricula and tailored experiences for young children.

Fadeout

I’d like to make two points about fadeout.

My first point is that the fading out of initial gains brought about from a preschool intervention is not the rule. Because the academic gains achieved by Head Start do not last does not mean that an early intervention’s academic gains cannot last. As we see with the present study, the intervention made improvements to the program and was thus able to bring about sustained change.

Whether or not positive results are attained at all, and whether or not these results last, is completely contingent on each individual’s experience with the given program. Different programs will yield different results with different individuals, the effects of which will last varying durations with each participant. Programs will fare better when they meet children’s individual needs.

The second point I’d like to make regarding fadeout is the following: in order for there to be fadeout, gains must have been made initially. And if gains were made initially, the program worked! Is it the fault of the intervention for not creating gains that are present years later, or is it the fault of the subsequent years of schooling for not maintaining those gains?

Allow me to draw a parallel. You, a novice runner, decide you’re going to run a marathon. You hire a trainer. This trainer assesses your abilities, designs a day-by-day training program for you, and shows up every day to motivate you to do that day’s activities. Within a few months, you’re on pace to run the entire marathon in sub-eight-minute miles. All you need to do is stick with the program.

But, a couple months before the marathon your trainer has to move away and can no longer work with you. So, you hire another trainer. This new trainer shows up everyday with a different progression of activities for you to do, to which you completely commit. However, over the subsequent weeks, you notice your mile time is slipping. Your time is not substantially improving, even though you do all the activities this new trainer has prescribed. Finally, on marathon day, you run the entire race but your average mile time is just over nine minutes.

Would you say it is the fault of the first trainer that your initial gains did not last? Saying that an early childhood program does not make an impact because students’ grades are no better off three years after the fact, in a sense, is saying just that. Providing high-quality early experiences (your first trainer), followed by suboptimal grade school experiences (your second trainer), might not yield stellar long-term results. Surprise!

Learning happens on a continuum. Experiences build on experiences. High-quality early childhood experiences will set an individual up to make the most out of the following experiences (and studies have shown that these experiences alone leave individuals better off across the lifespan). However, high-quality experiences must also follow in order to make the most of the foundation that has already been laid. Early childhood education is powerfully formative, though it is only the beginning.

Conclusion

When he announced the creation of the Head Start program in 1965, President Johnson said, “We set out to make certain that poverty’s children would not be forevermore poverty’s captives.” President Johnson’s intention of improving people’s lives by investing in them when they’re young was insightful, even though the program may have been lacking. Bierman and her colleagues also note that reducing discrepancies across the population through early intervention would be “highly strategic for public health.”

According to the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University, 47% of children age 5 years or younger are living in low-income households (link). While early childhood education is not poverty’s panacea, research has shown that quality programs can make a substantial, lifelong impact. Further, improving caretakers’ capacities will only compound the benefits reaped from providing high-quality early childhood education, making for sustained gains in academics and in life. Lastly, if we are to capitalize on high-quality early experiences, they must be followed by more high-quality experiences. Neglecting all of this is choosing to pass up on potential.

References

Bierman, K. L., Heinrichs, B. S., Welsh, J. A., Nix, R. L., & Gest, S. D. (2017). Enriching preschool classrooms and home visits with evidence‐based programming: sustained benefits for low‐income children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 58(2), 129–137. [link]

Early, D., Barbarin, O., Bryant, D., Burchinal, M., Chang, F., Clifford, R., … & Kraft-Sayre, M. (2005). Pre-kindergarten in eleven states: NCEDL’s multi-state study of pre-kindergarten and study of state-wide early education programs (SWEEP). Preliminary Descriptive Report. NCEDL Working Paper. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. [link]

Puma, M., Bell, S., Cook, R., Heid, C., Broene, P., Jenkins, F., … & Downer, J. (2012). Third grade follow-up to the Head Start Impact Study final report, OPRE Report # 2012-45, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. [link

Early Brain Science and What We Do About It: Starting Off on the Wrong Foot
Austin Matte
Austin Matte

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The brain is an incredible machine with immense potential. When we are born, our brains are wired to learn from, and adapt to, our environment. Given what we know about the brain’s unique malleability in the first years of life, young people’s need for purposeful support and education seems obvious during this period.

However, upon looking at the current state of early childhood education and care, there is a clear mismatch between what is and what should be. In this article, I will touch on how remarkably powerful early education can be, and that through current practices, we are missing a huge opportunity to prepare ourselves for the future.

Brain Science of the Early Years

Within a handful of weeks of conception, even before some mothers know they are pregnant, children’s brains begin forming. By the time a child is born, she has most all of the neurons she will ever have: about 100 billion of them (Perry, 2002). Also occurring before birth is the formation of the first synapses, which are the connections between the neurons. These neural connections allow the brain to learn and function.

Because of this prenatal formation of synapses, incredibly, newborns are able to show a preference towards their mothers’ voices (Querleu, et al., 1984). These prenatal synapses also enable neonates to cry with a cadence that matches that of their mothers’ native language (Mampe, et al., 2009). Even before we are born, we are learning.

Over the first few years of life, the brain continues making connections between the neurons, to the tune of about 700 to 1,000 synapses every second (Center on the Developing Child). The rate of synapse formation peaks between 1 and 2 years of age (Kostović, et al., 1995), and by 2 or 3 years of age, the brain has about twice as many synapses as it will have as an adult (Corel, 1975). Starting at some point in childhood and lasting through adolescence, the brain gradually and systematically prunes away the surplus synapses that are not sufficiently reinforced through experience and behavior (Huttenlocher, 2002).

Here’s the key point: The purpose of the proliferation of synapses, only for them to be pruned away, is to capture and incorporate early experiences. This is, presumably, evolution’s way of allowing us to adapt to our environment. The brain then prunes away the unused synapses, allowing it to function efficiently.

In the same way, a fisherman ensures he makes a catch by casting a wide net. He then reels it in, taking with him only what he needs.

Because this pruning process starts early on, early experiences that are reinforced throughout the pruning process become deeply embedded in the brain’s architecture. This neural architecture then becomes the foundation that supports future learning.

Just as a house is built on a strong foundation, future learning depends on the foundation that is laid in the first years of life. A weak initial foundation does not doom an individual, though attempting to change behavior later on cannot be done as easily.

Investment in Young Children Is Good for Everyone

This quick review of research makes it clear that we must invest in education for young children.  Many studies have highlighted that individuals with access to quality early childhood education enjoy both short-term benefits (see Outcome Evaluation of Washington State’s Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program which found positive academic gains for students in third, fourth, and fifth grade), and, more importantly, many long-term benefits as well.

There are two often-cited projects that help to make my point: the Abecedarian Project and the Highscope Perry Preschool study.

At 21 years of age, individuals who were enrolled in the Abecedarian program as preschoolers earned higher scores on intellectual and academic measures, attained more years of total education, were more likely to attend a 4-year college, and had lower rates of teenage pregnancy (Campbell, et al., 2002).

At 40 years of age, individuals who passed through the Perry Preschool program, on average, had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job for a longer period of time, had been convicted of fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not go to preschool (Schweinhart, et al., 2005).

Economic studies of investment in early childhood education have also found societal returns on various programs that range from about $7 to $10 per dollar invested (e.g. Reynolds, et al., 2011; Heckman, et al., 2010). The primary sources of societal benefits came through avenues such as increased tax revenues, averted criminal justice system and victim costs, and savings on child welfare, special education, and grade retention.

The benefits both to the individual and to society created by quality early childhood investment are undeniable. No longer does a case need to be made for if we are to invest in young children, but rather, how to invest in young children.

The State of Early Childhood Education

Excellent. We have the science. We have a good understanding of the general trajectory of brain development. We have confirmed that individuals tend to be much better off across the lifespan with quality experiences over the first few years of life. In fact, we have shown again and again that society benefits from early investment in people.

It only makes sense that in the most powerful nation to have ever existed, a country with access to immense resources, we would invest in ourselves at a time when we can make the strongest impact, in order to ensure a strong future.

Well, actually, that may not be the case. In fact, it’s not looking too good. Let’s take a brief look at what is actually happening, and you can decide for yourself.

Early Enrollment

How many of our nation’s young people attend preschool? The quick answer is about half. From 2012 to 2014, only 47% of 3- and 4-year-olds in the US (3,890,000 in total) were enrolled in any preschool (The Anne E. Casey Foundation, 2016). There is a swing of about 8% for families earning at or above 200% of the poverty line (55% of these 3- and 4-year-olds are enrolled) and those earning below 200% of the poverty line (39% enrolled). The enrollment rates of children younger than 3 are, presumably, even lower across the board.

Tragically, children of families earning less are enrolled at lower rates; Studies say that these children stand to gain the most from high-quality intervention (e.g., Karoly, et al., 1998, as cited in Reynolds, et al., 2011).

Though maybe it’s better that only half of young children are enrolled in preschool. The students would not stand to benefit if these preschools were of low-quality. Whether or not this is the case (though especially if it were), we have a phenomenal opportunity to improve the future standing of our nation by creating access to high-quality preschool for more than just half of our young people.

Teacher Pay

To think that so many of the nation’s three- and four-year-olds might not be getting the experiences needed to help them lay the groundwork for their future, for academics, career, and life, leaves me flustered. This feeling is only exacerbated when I learn about the preparation and benefits for those charged with setting these young citizens up for success. First things first: teacher pay.

In June of last year, the Department of Education released a report entitled, “High-Quality Early Learning Settings Depend on a High-Quality Workforce: Low Compensation Undermines Quality.” The name says it all, doesn’t it?

According to this report, the median salary for a preschool teacher in the U.S. is $28,570. That figure jumps up above $50,000 at the kindergarten and elementary levels. This disparity alone creates a disincentive for teachers to pursue a career teaching preschool — or to pursue teaching at all, for that matter.

Even the two states that come the closest to attaining pay parity fall short; teachers in Louisiana and Oklahoma still only earn 84% and 83% of what kindergarten teachers take home, respectively. And in 13 states, preschool teachers earned less than half of the annual wages earned by kindergarten teachers.

What is really spirit-crushing is that in six states (you know who you are), the annual wages for preschool teachers were less than the 2015 poverty threshold for a family of four. Yes, you read that correctly: some preschool teachers qualify as being in poverty.

While improving teacher pay alone won’t evaporate all of our early childhood education woes, it certainly will help to attract and keep talent.

Teacher Preparation

The level of teacher preparation for the preschool centers also leaves much to be desired. As of the June 2016 report, only 24 states have at least one preschool initiative that requires lead teachers to hold a Bachelor’s degree with a specialized concentration in early childhood. Also, across the country, only 45% of all preschool teachers working with children ages three to five have Bachelor’s degrees.

It is hard to make a case for increased pay when teachers are underprepared. Yet, teachers may not become masters of their craft unless there exists some extrinsic incentive to do so, be it increased salary, benefits, prestige, etc. Attempting to improve the field of early childhood education brings with it many problems. While teacher preparation and benefits are only two of the issues, I do not foresee the field progressing without redressing both of them.

Hope…?

Things looked promising back in 2013. President Obama released a plan to provide early education for all Americans. Sounds great, right? The plan incentivized states to expand access to high-quality public preschool for four-year-olds living at or below 200% of the poverty line, done through a cost-sharing program. The plan laid out benchmarks that states needed to meet in order to access funding, including state-level standards for early learning, qualified teachers, and data and assessment systems. The plan would have supported families of young children through other means as well.

However, funding for the “Preschool for All” initiative relied solely on passing a 94% increase on the federal tobacco tax, which may be why the program has not been enacted. However, after first appearing in the 2015 budget proposal, “Preschool for All” has also appeared in the proposed budgets for 2016 and 2017. Take this into consideration with the fact that the word “preschool” appeared in the proposed 2013 budget a grand total of zero times, for now, I find some comfort in knowing it has at least stayed on the national political agenda.

It’s also good to know that investment in early childhood ostensibly has bipartisan support. According to a 2016 report from the Education Commission for the States, for example, in the 2015-16 school year, Republican governors in 22 states and Democratic governors in 10 states (and also the policy makers for D.C.) increased funding for preschool programs.

Despite the five states (with governors of both parties) that decided to decrease preschool funding, the recognition of the importance of preschool overall seems to be steadily growing — albeit slowly. From the previous year to the current one, state funding on preschool programs across the country increased by 12%.

Things seem to be moving in the right direction, overall. In the 2013 Preschool for All proposal, the federal government acknowledges that it would “invest critical resources where we know the return on our dollar is the highest: in our youngest children.” Yet, despite knowing these monies have the chance to be the most efficacious, the initiative relies solely on a huge tax increase on tobacco products, of all things. These priorities don’t match up.

If you truly believe that “the return on our dollar is the highest” with a given investment, shouldn’t there be a greater push to make it happen? With funding contingent on nearly doubling the tax of some unrelated product, this plan does not convey the sense of urgency needed to move the needle on early childhood investment.

This isn’t the first time the federal government shot down a proposal to provide broader access to early childhood care, either. The Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, which would have established a national day care system for working families, was approved overwhelmingly by the Senate. It was, however, vetoed by president Nixon in 1972. (Here is a story from NPR.) In this case, the political climate seemed to be the primary driver in deciding the bill’s fate.

Even though they may not have had the science underscoring the importance of experiences during early childhood, the notion was understood. Nixon had been previously quoted as saying, “What happens to the child from a nutritional standpoint, from an educational standpoint, from an environmental standpoint in the years between one and five may affect that child for the balance of his life regardless of what may happen after that time.” And yet, he signed the veto.

Well, now we have the science confirming what we’ve thought all along. So what are we going to do about it?

Constructive Dissatisfaction

Who’s to say that increasing the federal budget for universal preschool would be the best way to go? I am not promoting any one solution to providing early childhood education and care. Though I am championing the idea that these are extremely formative years. During this time, a groundwork is laid that stays with an individual across the lifespan. Ensuring that young people have quality experiences during this time stands to benefit everyone.

We don’t have all of the answers yet, but we do know that our notion of daycare as it has historically been, simply ensuring the physical and perhaps mental well-being of young children, neglects to capitalize on what the science has revealed about this period.

As cognition comes online in the first years of life, it is at its most malleable. Learning is a gradual process; future learning depends on past learning, new experiences build on previous ones. Science has made clear that experiences during this time can have lifelong consequences. We know that educational investments are most efficacious during this period, and without these critical investments, potential is lost.

Though don’t get me wrong, I am trying to not use alarmist hyperbole in an attempt to garner support for the cause. Life will go on regardless of what happens in this arena, just as it has. Children born to families with access will continue to enjoy quality early experiences; not much would change for them either way. And individuals whose first years of life lack these quality experiences will continue to enter kindergarten and first grade already at a disadvantage, just as they have been doing all along.

Jack Shonkoff, director at the Center on the Developing Child, often uses the phrase “constructive dissatisfaction” to describe what he hopes people would feel when presented with the reality of the system currently in place to educate and care for our youngest citizens. He hopes that the discontentment created by the recognition of the discrepancy between what we know ought to be taking place and what is actually taking place would provide the impetus for action.

I hope that you, like me, are constructively dissatisfied. Change won’t be easy. Nor do we know exactly what it will take to ameliorate the preschool problem. Though we do know that it needs to happen. The science is clear: investing in young people is a no-brainer.

References

The Anne E. Casey Foundation. (2016). Young children not in school. Retrieved from: http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/9010-young-children-not-in-school?loc=1&loct=1#detailed/1/any/false/1443,1218,1049,995,932/any/17975,17976

Campbell, F. A., Ramey, C. T., Pungello, E., Sparling, J., & Miller-Johnson, S. (2002). Early childhood education: Young adult outcomes from the Abecedarian Project. Applied Developmental Science, 6(1), 42-57.

Center on the Developing Child. Brain Architecture. Retrieved from: http://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/brain-architecture/

Corel, J. L. (1975). The postnatal development of the human cerebral cortex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Department of Education. (2016). High-quality early learning settings depend on a high-quality workforce: low compensation undermines quality. Retrieved from: https://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/earlylearning/files/ece-low-compensation-undermines-quality-report-2016.pdf

Heckman, J. J., Moon, S. H., Pinto, R., Savelyev, P. A., & Yavitz, A. (2010). The rate of return to the HighScope Perry Preschool Program. Journal of Public Economics, 94(1), 114-128.

Huttenlocher, P. R. (2002). Neural plasticity. Harvard University Press.

Karoly, L. A., Greenwood, P. W., Everingham, S. M. S., Hoube, J., Kilburn, M. R., Rydell, C. P., et al. (1998). Investing in our children: What we know and don’t know about the costs and benefits of early childhood interventions. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.

Kostović, I., Judaš, M., Petanjek, Z., & Šimić, G. (1995). Ontogenesis of goal-directed behavior: Anatomo-functional considerations. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 19(2), 85-102.

Ludden, J. (2016, October 13). How Politics Killed Universal Child Care In The 1970s. Retreived from: http://www.npr.org/2016/10/13/497850292/how-politics-killed-universal-childcare-in-the-1970s.

Mampe, B., Friederici, A. D., Christophe, A., & Wermke, K. (2009). Newborns’ cry melody is shaped by their native language. Current Biology,19(23), 1994-1997.

Parker, E., Atchison, B., & Workman, E. (2016). State pre-k funding for 2015-16 fiscal year: National trends in state preschool funding. 50-state review. Education Commission of the States.

Perry, B. D. (2002). Childhood experience and the expression of genetic potential: What childhood neglect tells us about nature and nurture. Brain and Mind, 3(1), 79-100.

Querleu, D., Lefebvre, C., Titran, M., Renard, X., Morillion, M., & Crepin, G. (1984). Discrimination of the mother‘s voice by the neonate immediately after birth. European Journal of Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Reproductive Biology,13(2), 125-134.

Reynolds, A. J., Temple, J. A., White, B. A., Ou, S. R., & Robertson, D. L. (2011). Age 26 cost–benefit analysis of the child‐parent center early education program. Child Development, 82(1), 379-404.

Schweinhart, L. J., Montie, J., Xiang, Z., Barnett, W. S., Belfield, C. R., & Nores, M. (2005). Lifetime effects: the High/Scope Perry Preschool study through age 40. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press.

Washington State Institute for Public Policy. (2014). Outcome evaluation of Washington state’s early childhood education and assistance program. Retrieved from: http://www.wsipp.wa.gov/ReportFile/1576/Wsipp_Outcome-Evaluation-of-Washington-States-Early-Childhood-Education-and-Assistance-Program_Report.pdf

The White House Office of the Press Secretary. (2013, February 13). Fact sheet: President Obama’s plan for early education for all Americans. Retrieved from: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/13/fact-sheet-president-obama-s-plan-early-education-all-americans

Parenting Matters, and Earlier than You Think
Austin Matte
Austin Matte

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Studies of neglect and maltreatment of young children have revealed a lot about early brain development (e.g., Cicchetti, 2002; Nelson, 2000). These studies have highlighted that experiences in the first years of life can have profound implications across the lifespan.

In a seminal study, Nelson and others (2007) found that children reared in abject circumstances showed severe cognitive delays. Children that were adopted out of these environments and into more supportive homes experienced some cognitive recovery, with children faring better the earlier they were adopted.

Studies of neglect on the developing brain show the consequences of early detrimental environmental factors. Though at the same time, how might we be able to optimize early experiences?

We know that these years present a period when the brain is uniquely malleable. How can we leverage this malleability to set children up to achieve their full potential? What might the optimal circumstances look like for a developing child?

In the first years of life especially, the differences between the environments in which children grow and learn are driven by caregivers. They are the ones responsible for most all of the external factors that affect the child’s development. As I mentioned in my last post, research continues to elucidate specific examples of environmental factors that contribute to early development, and in particular, the role that caregivers play within that environment.

We all presume that parents play an important role in a child’s upbringing, and in fact, studies have revealed that even a normal variation in parenting can have a great influence on brain development (e.g., Francis & Meaney, 1999).

The whole gist of this preamble is to say that we know early experiences matter, and we know that caregivers are largely responsible for those experiences. While we have a good idea of what constitutes a healthy environment for development, we have yet to pin down an optimal set of experiences in the first years of life, if such a thing exists. Further, we just don’t know to what degree subtle changes in the environment affect later outcomes.

In the present post, I present an article published this past summer from the growing body of work on the effects of parent-child interactions. This particular study explores the correlation between a mother’s behavior and her child’s brain development.

The Current Study

Researchers in the present study (Bernier, Calkins, & Bell, 2016) wanted to investigate whether the quality of a mother’s parenting behavior influences the development of the infant’s frontal cortex.

Previous research has shown that the prefrontal cortex, the forward-most region of the frontal cortex, plays a large role in an individual’s executive function (EF): the suite of skills that enables an individual to control her own behavior and emotions. EF has been found to correlate with life-long outcomes. (Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child has created a video that succinctly explains the topic.)

In testing the correlation between parenting and frontal lobe development, researchers carried out two types of assessments: mothers’ parenting behavior, and children’s frontal resting electroencephalogram (EEG) power at 5, 10, and 24 months of age. (More on “EEG power” in a minute…)

Researchers assessed mothers’ parenting behavior in the first of three visits. They gave mothers two simple infant toys, keys and a rattle, and instructed them to interact with their infants as they normally would at home, for a total of two minutes. Researchers studied four areas of maternal behavior:

  1. Sensitivity – the extent to which the mother’s interactions related with the infant’s behavior. Does she acknowledge the infant’s feelings? Soothe the child? Pick up on the infant’s interests?
  2. Intrusiveness – the extent to which the mother displayed over-controlling behavior or was focused on her own agenda. Does she ignore the infant’s cues? Force toys on the infant? Demonstrate intrusive physical interactions?
  3. Positive Affect – the extent to which the mother expressed positive emotions through her tone of voice and facial expressions.
  4. Physical Stimulation – the extent to which the mother directly stimulated her infant’s body for the purpose of heightening the infant’s level of arousal. Does she tickle her infant? Exercise her infant’s limbs?

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and yes, two minutes is not a long period of time to assess the quality of a mother’s interactions with her child–especially when the researchers want to relate those two minutes to the child’s brain development. While these assessments were not meant to be robust, they are considered to be indicative of the interactions that the child has with the parent in general.

Next, children’s resting EEG power of the frontal lobe was assessed during each of the three visits, timed when the children were 5, 10, and 24 months of age.

Two points to clarify.

First, the researchers were most interested in parenting habits that may contribute to the development of a child’s executive function, which depends on processing in the prefrontal cortex. The current study focuses on this region of the brain because of this known association between EF and the frontal lobe.

Also, what is “resting EEG power”? EEG measures electrical activity in the cortex, or the outermost layer in the brain. EEG power essentially grows in a linear fashion across infancy, and is thus thought to be an indicator of brain development (Bell & Fox, 1992; Cuevas & Bell, 2011).

Just know that higher EEG power in infancy, even at rest, is thought to indicate further brain development. (Of course, there is a lot of variation in the growth of EEG power from person to person (e.g., Cuevas et al., 2012).)

Findings

While many of this study’s findings are very nuanced, I highlight here what I believe to be the most important takeaways.

(I’ll emphasize below that the findings are strictly correlational. They might be due to causation, but given the nature of the study, we cannot say this for certain.)

To begin with, a mother’s display of positive emotions, as seen when interacting with her infant, was essentially unrelated to frontal lobe EEG power when the children were 5 months old. This finding may be due to a number of reasons: perhaps, by 5 months of age, a mother’s expression of positive emotions has not yet had time to influence the child’s brain development. Again, merely speculation.

The other interesting finding from the study I’d like to point out is in regard to children of mothers who expressed positive emotions AND heightened their children’s emotional arousal LESS through physical contact, like through moving their limbs. These mothers did not barrage their children with physical stimulation, and instead engaged them with their voice and facial expressions.

This group of children displayed higher EEG power at both 10 months and 24 months. Further, the resting frontal EEG power of these children increased at the quickest rate between 5 to 10 months of age, and then again from 10 to 24 months of age.

One possible interpretation of the results might suggest that by expressing positive emotions and refraining from heightening the level of arousal through physical contact, a mother can increase the resting EEG power of her child’s frontal lobe, thought to be a sign of cognitive development.

Possible Reasons for the Correlations – Be a Good Skeptic

I cannot convey strongly enough the skepticism with which you should consider these, and all correlational findings. In this case, the magnitude of the correlations was small, and there are a number of things that could account for these changes.

One possible, and plausible, explanation for these results may be that a mother’s behavior and her child’s brain development both encourage one another; change in one spurs change in the other.

As mentioned above, the mother’s behavior while interacting with her child was studied for only two minutes–hardly a robust assessment. The study does not take into consideration any other environmental factor which could play a role, for example:

  • paternal behavior when interacting with the child,
  • the quality and availability of toys at the children’s home,
  • child care settings,
  • siblings & grandparents, or
  • the multitude of other environmental factors that play a role in shaping how a child’s brain develops.

Or maybe an assessment of genetics would explain these correlations. Or maybe not. We just don’t know.

The Big Takeaway

I hope you–like me–find this study fascinating, and while at the very least it provides possible direction for future lines of inquiry, it is possible that this simple variation in a mother’s behavior had some effect on her child’s brain development. In fact, when taken into consideration with findings from other studies, the authors believe it to be likely that these variations in motherly interactions do in fact affect a child’s brain development. In any case, this study’s results continue to shed light on what an optimal environment may be for early brain development, underscoring specific parenting characteristics that show promise.

Further, however, there is a bigger takeaway which bolsters what we already know: early experiences matter, and they matter very early on. By 10 months of age, there are measurable differences in the frontal brain function of normally-developing infants associated with variations in maternal input. There is so much that we do not know about the developing brain, however, we do know that experiences in the first years of life have a measurable impact. We should not wait until we can define precisely what an optimal infancy looks like before we start getting serious about how we prepare the next generation.
References

Bell, M. A., & Fox, N. A. (1992). The relations between frontal brain electrical activity and cognitive development during infancy. Child Development, 63(5), 1142-1163.

Bernier, A., Calkins, S. D., & Bell, M. A. (2016). Longitudinal associations between the quality of mother–infant interactions and brain development across infancy. Child development.

Cicchetti, D. (2002). The impact of social experience on neurobiological systems: Illustration from a constructivist view of child maltreatment. Cognitive Development, 17, 1407–1428. doi:10.1016/S0885-2014(02)00121-1

Cuevas, K., & Bell, M. A. (2011). EEG and ECG from 5 to 10 months of age: Developmental changes in baseline activation and cognitive processing during a working memory task. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 80(2), 119-128.

Francis, D. D., & Meaney, M. J. (1999). Maternal care and the development of stress responses. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 9(1), 128-134.

Harvard Center on the Developing Child’s video on Executive Function http://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/inbrief-executive-function-skills-for-life-and-learning/

Nelson, C. A. (Ed.) (2000). The effects of early adversity on neurobehavioral development. The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, 31, (Vol. 31). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers.

Nelson, C. A., Zeanah, C. H., Fox, N. A., Marshall, P. J., Smyke, A. T., & Guthrie, D. (2007). Cognitive recovery in socially deprived young children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project. Science, 318 (5858), 1937-1940.

Parent-Child Interactions: Forming Beliefs About Intelligence
Austin Matte
Austin Matte

AdobeStock_104015726_Credit

It is common knowledge that parents play a vital role in their children’s development. However, we are slowly coming to understand just how vital this role is.

Teachers understand this connection better than anyone; we interact with our students’ parents, and we also see how parents interact with their children. We teachers in turn are able to make anecdotal connections between parenting styles and how children carry themselves in and out of school.

Research is catching up to what teachers have known since the earliest days of the profession. Scientists have begun to tease out certain traits that help children do well in school and in life, and are going one step further to investigate how these traits are developed, including the role that caretakers might play.

One recent example of this growing body of research examines the development of a child’s intelligence mindset–the belief about whether intelligence is fixed or malleable–which has been found to influence motivation and learning. When faced with obstacles or difficulties, those with a growth mindset, who believe that their intelligence can be improved through effort, tend to persevere [1,2]. They do not view obstacles as discouraging, but rather, as informative and motivating [3].

Those with a fixed mindset, on the other hand, do not belief that intelligence can be improved with effort. Thus, those with a fixed mindset tend to be discouraged–not informed and motivated–by obstacles.

How, though, might parents instill a growth mindset in their children? In a paper published this spring, Kyla Haimovitz and Carol Dweck seek to investigate just that [4]. They hypothesize that it is in fact not the parents’ intelligence mindset that influences that of the child; an adult’s intelligence mindset is all but invisible and thus not readily adopted by the child. Rather, it is a parent’s failure mindset–their view of failure as being either enhancing or debilitating–that becomes visible to a child through interactions, and which thus plays a larger role in shaping children’s belief about their intelligence.

Parents’ Intelligence Mindset Isn’t Visible

The series of studies presented in the paper show some important correlations. To begin with, the researchers found no significant correlation between parents’ reports of their own intelligence mindsets and the children’s perception of their parent’s intelligence mindsets; children could not accurately perceive whether or not their parents viewed intelligence as something that is fixed or as something that can be improved. Just as the authors had previously guessed, parents’ intelligence mindsets are invisible to their children.

Additional findings from these studies provide some insight into why parents’ intelligence mindsets might not be seen by their children. When presented with the hypothetical situation of their children bringing home a failing grade, parents were given options to respond in two primary ways: to show concern over their children’s poor performance, or instead, to show concern over how their children could use the failing grade as a learning opportunity (the latter of which would be more in-line with a growth mindset). These studies found that parents’ view of intelligence did not predict how they would respond.

Even if parents believe that intelligence can be improved through effort, they still may respond to the performance of their children in ways that are not representative of this outlook. This is a fundamental concept for this paper; children do not see and are thus not influenced by their parents’ beliefs, only by their actions.

Parents’ Failure Mindset Is Visible

If not their intelligence mindset, how might parents influence their children’s view on intelligence? The authors suggest it is the parents’ failure mindset–their view of failure as being either debilitating or enhancing–which is visible to their children, and which thus plays a larger role in forming children’s beliefs about intelligence. Unlike parents’ intelligence mindsets, children were in fact able to predict what their parents thought about failure.

Parents’ Failure Mindset Predicts Their Response

Presumably, parents make their failure mindset visible to their children through their reactions and responses in various situations. More precisely, the studies found that parents’ failure mindset predicts how they respond to their children in situations where their children have done poorly. The more that parents believe that failure is debilitating, the more likely they are to react with concerns of their child’s performance or ability, perhaps by pitying their children, doubting their ability, and/or comforting them. On the other hand, parents with a failure-is-enhancing perspective are more likely to respond to their children’s failure with support for improvement, discussing with them what they could have learned from the experience and how they can get better.

Parents’ Responses Predict Child’s Intelligence Mindset

Consider the message that these reactions send to a child. Might these reactions play a role in shaping what children think about their own abilities? Haimovitz and Dweck’s findings support this hypothesis. Of the variables measured, the strongest predictor of children’s intelligence mindset was parents’ response to their failure: either focusing on the children’s performance or on how their children could improve.

While a parent’s failure mindset is also a strong predictor of a child’s intelligence mindset, parents’ failure mindset is an even stronger predictor of how they tend to react in these scenarios, which then goes on to most strongly predict the child’s intelligence mindset.

Parent’s Failure Mindset

Parent’s Response to Child’s Failure

Child’s Intelligence Mindset

Why is it that a parent’s response is such a strong predictor of the child’s intelligence mindset?

The studies reveal that when parents place such a strong emphasis on their children’s performance, children tend to believe that this is how their parents want them to prove their abilities: through their performance. The researchers suggest it is this perception of their parents’ beliefs that leads children to believe that intelligence is fixed. Parents’ strong emphasis on their children’s performance leads the children to believe that it is the performance that is most important, and not their learning.

Takeaway 1 – Take On a Learning-Orientation (While Maintaining Expectations)

Parents’ responses to their children’s performances are powerful predictors of the children’s belief about the malleability of intelligence. If we are to interpret these correlations favorably, we ought to use occasions of poor performance as learning opportunities for our children. We should let them know that these scenarios present opportunities to get better.

It is also worth mentioning that, in addition to the importance of maintaining a focus on learning and improvement, studies have found that, academically, parents’ expectations for their children’s performances predict the children’s performances [5].

There is a fine line that parents and teachers need to walk: they must maintain expectations while also conveying the notion that poor performances are not indicators of ability, but rather, opportunities to learn how to improve.

Takeaway 2 – Work through the Parents

While the findings in this paper highlight a specific and important correlation, Haimovitz and Dweck also reference the large body of work that underscores the importance of the role that parents play in their children’s development [6,7,8]. Schools may be able to reinforce what they are doing by more deeply involving parents, encouraging them to strengthen at home various aspects of what the teachers are working on at school.

I envisage a (perhaps utopian) future wherein schools, especially those focusing on early childhood, view building the capacity of caregivers as vital to their work in enabling their students to realize their full potential. Many practitioners might understand why this would be desirable, and I believe that research will continue to highlight the strong influence that caretakers have on children’s developmental trajectories.

Takeaway 3 – The Earliest Years Matter

After having a few perspective-altering “Aha!” moments on how formative the earliest years of life are, I tend to view most everything through this lens. This is especially the case here. The average age of the children from the studies in this paper was about ten years old. By that age, children have already developed a belief about whether or not their intelligence is fixed or malleable, and this mindset in turn has already had an effect on their learning.

It is doubtful that children develop this belief overnight. In fact, I would argue that they begin to formulate their beliefs as early as they can understand, which occurs well before they can speak, and is then shaped through the daily interactions they have with others. It has been shown that the first years lay a crucial foundation for development across the lifespan, and it is during this time that we must also be deliberate about what we convey to our children about many things–including how to handle failure.

Conclusion

Future research will continue to underscore what many practitioners already know: in order to best enable children to reach their full potential, parents must be made a part of the equation. The paper presented in this article sheds some light on one aspect of parenting, however small, yet greatly formative. If these findings are at all indicative of the potential that lies in the interactions that caretakers have with their children, supporting parents in supporting their children from day one shows immense promise in improving children’s outcomes.

References

  1.    Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78, 246–263.
  2.    Robins, R. W., & Pals, J. L. (2002). Implicit self-theories in the academic domain: Implications for goal orientation, attributions, affect, and self-esteem change. Self and Identity, 1, 313–336.
  3.    Dweck, C. S., & Leggett, E. L. (1988). A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality. Psychological Review, 95, 256–273.
  4.    Haimovitz, K., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). What predicts children’s fixed and growth intelligence mindsets? Not their parents’ views of intelligence but their parents’ views of failure. Psychological science, p.1-11. doi:10.1177/0956797616639727
  5.    Lane, K. L., Wehby, J. H., & Cooley, C. (2006). Teacher expectations of students’ classroom behavior across the grade span: Which social skills are necessary for success?. Exceptional Children, 72(2), 153-167.
  6.    Duncan, A. (2010). Looking in the mirror: Final remarks of Secretary Arne Duncan to the Mom Congress. Retrieved from  http://www2.ed.gov/news/speeches/2010/05/05032010.html
  7.    Hill, N. E., & Taylor, L. C. (2004). Parental school involvement and children’s academic achievement: Pragmatics and issues. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 161–164. 
  8. Pomerantz, E. M., Grolnick, W. S., & Price, C. E. (2005). The role of parents in how children approach achievement: A dynamic process perspective. In A. J. Elliot & C. S. Dweck (Eds.), Handbook of competence and motivation (pp. 259– 278). New York, NY: Guilford Press.