Parents begin teaching children well before schooling starts. Obviously.
In fact, parents often teach children topics that we might consider “academic”: say, how to read, or, how to count.
Researchers might investigate this parental pre-school teaching with some reasonable hypotheses.
For instance:
Presumably, the way that parents teach reading influences the reading skills that their children develop.
Likewise, presumably, the way parents teach numbers and counting influences the math skills that their children develop.
Let’s ask a more counter-intuitive question:
Does the way that parents teach reading influence their children’s math skills?
In other words, does early teaching in one discipline influence understand in a different discipline?
That question might raise skeptical eyebrows, for a number of reasons. In particular, most research that asks this kind of transfer question comes back with a negative answer.
That is: learning in one discipline (say: playing piano) doesn’t usually make you better at another discipline (say: doing calculus).
Today’s Study
Researchers in England wanted to explore this surprising hypothesis. They had hundreds of parents fill out questionnaires. Some questions focused on parental approaches to reading:
How often does the child discuss the meaning of a story with an adult?
or
How often is the child encouraged to name letters or sound out words?
Other questions focused on parental approaches to numbers:
How often is the child encouraged to identify numbers in books or the environment?
They then tested the children on a variety of number and math skills.
Can you put two ducks in the pond?
Can you point to the number 5?
If two horses are on the path, and another joins them, how many horses are on the path?
So, what did they find? Did either of the reading approaches predict number and math skill? Did they predict those skills better than the parents’ direct focus on numbers and math?
The Results
Yes, and yes.
The parents’ approach to reading predicted math success better than the parents’ focus on numbers.
And, when comparing the two approaches to reading,
A focus on letters and sounds led to better math performance than did a focus on the meaning of the story.
In the dry language of research:
Only letter-sound interactions could predict statistically significant unique variance in counting, number transcoding and calculation.
What Should Parents Do?
This research pool is deep and complicated, and — as far as I can see — we’re not yet able to offer definitive parenting advice.
So, this study found that parental focus on letter-sound interactions improved later math skills.
But:
Self-reports aren’t always reliable (although they’re very common in this field), and
The differences weren’t all that great, and
We have many different goals when we teach children to read.
That is: if our only goal were to help students understand numbers, then this study would encourage parents to focus substantially on letter-sound relationships.
But, of course, we want our children to think about the meaning of stories too. That’s one way they learn important developmental lessons. That’s how they think about meaning in their own lives.
This study — especially if it’s confirmed by later research — encourages us to use several strategies to teach our children about words and reading.
And, it gives us reason to think that those multiple approaches will help them with books, and with numbers too.
As most parents, teachers, and education policy folks know well, early childhood education is expensive. Whether federally-funded, state-funded, or family-funded, preschool and structured early care generally operate on a pretty tight budget. They also generally operate on pretty high hopes: academic achievement, personal growth, reduced delinquency, and much more.
And they should! As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “there is no knowledge that is not power.” We certainly need to maintain high expectations for youth to get the most out of their academic careers. As well, we should expect the programs that we invest in to set children up for the success that they promise.
Show us the Results
So what happens when we don’t see those hopes result in program outcome data; in particular, at the state- and federally-funded program level?
Do we launch an investigation into what went wrong?
Do we take the money away?
Do we blame the teachers, or parents, or school districts?
The “what now?” of underwhelming achievement is a challenging road to venture down. For some context, check out my colleague Austin’s recent blog post regarding a newly published study looking at the infamous fadeout effects in Head Start preschools.
Unfortunately, questions of whom to blame have dominated much of the “what now?” conversation over the years. Yet some studies, like the one Austin discussed, are trending in a new, positive direction for developmental and educational research alike.
Let’s Re-think ‘Results’
This new genre of studies does two things. First, it looks at such factors as fidelity to a particular program’s plan. Let’s take Head Start as an example. Researchers will ask: how well and how often are Head Start’s specialized strategies actually being implemented in classrooms?
Second, and most important, these studies don’t stop there. Instead, they go on to broaden the idea of an outcome to include measures of mental health and social growth, and the image of a learning environment to include the home and child care centers.
Broadening what we think achievement is, and where we think learning happens, is an important movement. Of course, many developmental psychologists have been advocating for this broadening for years. Social psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, for example, began studying ways in which intra- and inter-person factors affect learning back in the 1970’s. But the merging of research questions that focus on individual context with research questions that focus on school program evaluation is an exciting new empirical endeavor.
Differential Susceptibility
An endeavor that we stand to gain a lot from. One way that these new context+program evaluation research questions are making an impact is in studies of early achievement and differential susceptibility (DS).
DS is a theoretical model that aims to understand why some things affect some people differently. In developmental research, DS refers to children who are more behaviorally or biologically reactive to stimuli and, as a result, more affected by both positive and negative environments. [1]
Study 1
Let’s look at a longitudinal study conducted by researchers at Birkbeck University of London. [2] They investigated the effects of early rearing contexts on children of different temperaments. The following data was collected from 1,364 families:
predictive measures
parents reported the temperament of their child at 6 months (general mood, how often they engage in play behavior, how well they transition to a babysitter, etc.);
parenting quality (i.e. maternal sensitivity) was assessed at 6 and 54 months during laboratory and home observations;
quality of child care (e.g. daycare) was assessed at 6, 15, 24, 36, and 54 months via observation
outcome measures
academic achievement, behavior problems, teacher-child conflict, academic work habits, and socio-emotional functioning were assessed regularly between 54 months and 6th grade
Results showed that children who had a difficult temperament in infancy were more likely than children who didn’t to benefit from good parenting and high-quality childcare. They also suffered more from negative parenting and low-quality child care.
Most pronounced was the finding of differential effects for child care quality. Here, high quality care fostered fewer behavior problems, less teacher-child conflict, and better reading skills while low quality care fostered the opposite — but, only for those children who had a difficult temperament.
The takeaway: children that had a difficult temperament in infancy were differentially susceptible to quality of parenting and child care. For them, the good was extra good, and the bad was extra bad.
Study 2
Researchers at Stanford University engaged high- and low-income kindergartners in activities designed to elicit physiological reactivity (measured by the amount of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva). [3] In other words, the children completed activities that were difficult and kind of frustrating. They also completed a battery of executive function assessments.
It turns out that children who displayed higher reactivity (more cortisol) during the activities were more susceptible to their family’s income. That is, family income was significantly associated with children’s EF skills — but only for those children with high cortisol response. Highly reactive children had higher EF skills if their family had a higher income, but lower EF skills if their family was lower income.
The takeaway: children that were highly reactive when faced with challenging activities were differentially susceptible to their family’s resources. Their EF was particularly strong if their family had high income, yet particularly weak if their family had a lower income.
Evaluating Program Evaluation
How is being mindful of phenomena like differential susceptibility helpful when we receive the news that children made no special long-term gains after being enrolled in a publicly-funded program?
First, we should recognize that we may have set ourselves up for some disappointment at the outset if we assumed that all children would be equally susceptible to the positive effects of home or school interventions.
Of course, at school entry, we don’t necessarily know which students are arriving with difficult temperaments. Or whether their child care environment has exacerbated or buffered it. Which means that we’re also not going to be able (practically or ethically) to separate students by level of disadvantage in order to decide which program they should be enrolled in. So let’s just accept that we’re going to see some variation in individual outcomes.
Let’s also remind ourselves that variation is not necessarily reflective of an ineffective program. At Head Start, for example, it is probably safe to speculate that most families are juggling some amount of stress, financial instability, and social tension. And according to the DS model, students who are predisposed to be highly reactive will be hit hardest by these things. As a result, reactivity is probably going to interfere with their reaching what we define as success. But DS also tells us that they have the most to gain from a nurturing, consistent environment.
So let’s not take the money away. Let’s hold off on passing the blame around. And let’s not refer to these data as something going “wrong”. Let’s instead look at the students who continue to struggle and ask what contextual factors — such as a child’s weak self-regulation skills and their parent’s inability to address it in the way their teacher wants because they work two jobs — are at play.
I’m no gambler, but if we can figure those things out, and commit to doing something about them, then I say we double-down when it comes to funding.
References
Ellis, B. J., Boyce, W. T., Belsky, J., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2011). Differential susceptibility to the environment: An evolutionary–neurodevelopmental theory. Development and Psychopathology, 23, 7–28. doi:10.1017/S0954579410000611 [link]
Pluess, M., & Belsky, J. (2010). Differential susceptibility to parenting and quality child care. Developmental Psychology, 46, 379-390. [link]
Obradovic, J., Portilla, X. A., & Ballard, P. J. (2015). Biological sensitivity to family income: Differential effects on early executive functioning. Child Development, 87(2), 374-384. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12475 [link]
“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 secondpoint 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]
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Ever been in her brother’s shoes? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t, even in recent weeks. (Ok, it was yesterday.)
I love Lamott’s description of her brother’s immobility while facing the “hugeness” of a long put-off task; it’s a familiar experience across all ages. Avoiding daily routine and flailing under cognitive overload happens to us all: with school homework, work deadlines, exercise–even putting clothes in the hamper. In these moments of pileup, we might look back wishing we had more discipline in our daily lives.
Right now, if you look into early childhood and elementary classrooms as the new calendar year begins, you’ll likely see teachers re-creating a foundation of routine and general predictability – colorful calendars with days of the week clearly labeled, morning songs, schedules posted for the day with pockets of time for important free play.
There is more to routines than simply managing children. Research reveals the importance of patterned activity and consistent interaction in a child’s brain development.[1] It’s possible that helping young children to develop healthy habits, and to understand the value of routine, can promote their cognitive development and reduce their stress over a lifetime.
Habit in, and on, the Brain
A habit is an automatic behavior or thought that may have developed with ease or with perseverance. We might reflect and notice healthy habits in our lives, such as eating a nutritious daily breakfast ; we might feel “off” if we don’t practice our writing, dance, or other craft regularly.
We also might notice habits we’d like to change, such as waking early if usually sleeping in late, or limiting screen time if we find ourselves constantly reaching for our phone.
In research, habit learning is defined as “the acquisition of associations between stimuli and responses.”[2] In other words, behaviors that receive some kind of reward tend to be repeated, and behaviors which are not reinforced tend to be extinguished (a pattern known as operant conditioning). Habits are developed when procedures and even thoughts become more and more fixed after days, weeks, months, even years of repetition.
Experience Expectable Environments
How can we help children learn to self-manage their time and tasks–not only in childhood, but throughout adulthood? We can guide children in developing their own routines when possible.
A report by the Center of the Developing Child (CDC) at Harvard explains the importance of starting early:
“Once a particular circuitry pattern becomes established, it is difficult [but still possible] for the effects of new and different experiences to alter that architecture. This means that early experience has a unique advantage in shaping the architecture of developing brain circuits before they are fully mature and stabilized.”[3]
Research by Paro and Gloeckler (2016) emphasizes the perils that can result from inadequate structure. In their review, infants and toddlers in orphanages who lacked a predictable environment and caregiver interaction often showed deficits in speech and vocabulary, and even lower-than-average IQ scores.[1]
For this reason, they suggest that early childhood is a crucial time develop “autonomy with connectedness” by way of “experience expectable environments.” Such “experience expectable environments” may reinforce children’s anticipation and enjoyment of a sequence of events: such as arrival times, reading time, lunchtime, and playtime. Within this supportive context, children may begin making age-appropriate decisions with teacher or caregiver help about what they’d like to do with their time during free choice periods.
Freedom AND Structure
Additional research supports Paro and Gloeckler’s argument. In one study, 125 early learning settings were categorized either as “Structured-Balanced Classrooms” or “High Free-Choice Classrooms.” Children in Structured-Balanced classrooms had more chances to take part in literacy and math activities with teacher involvement, whereas children in High Free-Choice classrooms spent over ¾ of time in student-led activity and fantasy play. [4]
To ensure the validity of their research, researchers included intentionally diverse learning environments: public preschool programs, private preschools or community childcare, and licensed home-based family childcare programs.
Results showed that young children in both Structured-Balanced classrooms and Free Choice classrooms had similar results in socio-emotional learning and math reasoning scores.
However, children in Structured-Balanced classrooms involving more teacher-guided interactions also showed higher language scores. Given the importance of early vocabulary and language as predictors of lifelong learning, [5] this study is a springboard for investigating the value of Structured-Balanced classrooms, with appropriate amounts of time for free choice.
As an elementary school teacher, I often grappled with this delicate balance. How much structure is too much structure? How much free choice is too much free choice, given that I am responsible for my children’s learning and advancement to the next grade?
I found that rather than question “how much” structure or free choice, the more precise question is “when?” In the teaching world, we recognize the importance of mastery-based learning (e.g.., mastering cardinal numbers by repeated counting on a number grid) as well as unstructured exploration (e.g., freely discovering patterns on a number grid [5] click to try! I bet you’ll be surprised at what you see).
By asking ourselves when we should offer structure and free choice, we acknowledge different learning goals for our students:
(a) to unlock conceptual understanding and encourage innovation,
(b) to solidify important skill sets, or
(c) some combination of these intentions.
Free reading time can allow students to identify their own interests and make connections; teaching the skill of identifying metaphors in a story may require a more structured “I Do – We Do – You Do” lesson format.
A simple step I can take right now: ask students to recognize differing purposes in both structure and freedom during our school day, eventually supporting them in creating space for both in their personal and academic lives.
Let’s give our children the foundation to not only follow routines, but to explore and build their own. With exposure to the benefit of habit from a young age – its lower level of stress and reduction of cognitive overload – children can learn how to prioritize and enjoy meeting their own goals by living ‘bird by bird.’
1 La Paro, K., & Gloeckler, M. (2016). The Context of Child Care for Toddlers: The “Experience Expectable Environment”. Early Childhood Education Journal, 44(2), 147-153. [Paper]
2 Gasbarri, Pompili, Packard, & Tomaz. (2014). Habit learning and memory in mammals: Behavioral and neural characteristics. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 114, 198-208. [Paper]
3 National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2007). The timing and quality of early experiences combine to shape brain architecture: Working paper No. 5. Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu. [Link]
4 Fuligni, Howes, Huang, Hong, & Lara-Cinisomo. (2012). Activity settings and daily routines in preschool classrooms: Diverse experiences in early learning settings for low-income children. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27(2), 198-209. [Paper]
5 Number Grid. Retrieved on January 1, 2017 from Eduplace.com. [Link]
