The coalition Government has made clear that it wants children to be 'school ready' by the time they enter reception class. What this means and how it is to be achieved is causing dismay within the early years sector.
Many practitioners fear a move towards curriculum-centred approaches to early years teaching in schools. Such a step, we argued in Part 1 of this series, would be misguided. Curriculum-centred teaching fails to take account of the ways in which young children learn, leaving little room for their individual differences, or links to specific social contexts. It also suggests that any mismatch between children's needs and the experiences provided by schools is the fault of the child.
Much more productive, we would argue, is to begin by studying how young children learn and to use this understanding to help us design better schools. So, here, we examine the evidence relating to how young children learn and some of the varied environments they experience, which shape their early development.
Such an understanding is fundamental in helping us to develop teaching approaches that support young children's development and learning - in other words, making schools ready for children.
NEUROSCIENCE EVIDENCE
Children are born with an intrinsic and active drive to make sense of the world and with a set of sophisticated brain functions which enable them to do so. Recent evidence reveals, for example, that many structures for thinking and understanding are present in the brain in a basic form at birth, enabling infants to learn rapidly about certain social stimuli like faces (Farroni et al 2002) and language (Dehaene-Lambertz et al 2006).
However, the growth of a child's capacities to think and understand is not predetermined by a sort of central 'powerhouse' in the brain which decides what is to be 'known' and what is not, thereby setting the child off in one particular direction or another of learning.
While there is no doubt that there are genetic and physiological differences between brains, evidence suggests that each child's development and learning are highly dependent upon the type of environment they experience. What this means is that each child, each 'thinking being' that emerges from infancy over time, is individual and different from the next, since we all have different experiences. Indeed, the human brain is uniquely prepared to learn from early experience.
While the brains of even our closest animal relatives are very largely formed at birth (for example, the chimpanzee's brain is four-fifths of its full size at birth), the human brain grows in size by a factor of around four times in the first five to six years of life. During this period there is massive growth in connections between neurons in the cerebral cortex, and these connections arise from and are selectively adapted by the child's early experiences.
INHERENT LEARNING SYSTEMS
Inductive learning, which seems to be there from birth, is the process by which we identify patterns and regularities in the stream of experience. It accounts for the ways in which the human visual system learns, how young children learn language with such speed and ease, how they form concepts and detect categories from their experience, and how they seem so ready and able to understand cause-and-effect relationships between events.
Researchers have shown that, for example, babies as young as two months old can learn complex sequence patterns in a series of shapes they are shown (Kirkham et al 2002). The infant brain is equally sophisticated in being able to differentiate between sounds; Kuhl (2004) has shown that infants use auditory perceptual information to construct patterns of sounds and eventually learn language.
Direct social interaction is necessary for this 'perceptual' learning to occur. It's interesting that babies do not learn language from watching videoed images or television.
Analogy is an active process of learning which is evident early in childhood. A pattern identified and learned in one context is used to make sense of a new experience or new information related to a separate context. This ability, sometimes referred to as the 'transfer' of learning, or 'generalisation', explains how people adapt to new situations, and how we can solve previously unencountered problems (for example, Chen et al 2004).
Imitation is another form of learning. In an attempt to understand how infants become aware of other people's minds and intentions, researchers have investigated how they imitate facial and manual gestures.
It seems that through imitating others, babies come to understand that others not only share behavioural states, but are 'like me' in deeper ways in terms of intentions as well, which forms the basis of their understanding of other minds (Meltzoff & Decety 2003).
BRAIN FUNCTIONS
Key brain functions start to develop early in childhood, which enable the child to think and control their actions - including, for example, capacities to play mentally with ideas, to give measured rather than impulsive responses, and to stay focused upon a task. Working memory as well as more complex functions such as problem-solving, reasoning and planning also develop early.
Successful development of such brain functions depends upon a wide range of experiences (primarily sensory-motor) and opportunities for repeated practice and progressive challenge. Clearly, the type and range of experiences that a child has early in life, during the building period of brain functionality, will affect their capacities for thinking and acting.
What emerges strongly from the psychological evidence is that two key aspects of early development underpin a child's skills as a learner and their emotional well-being, thereby effecting long-term positive life experiences. These aspects relate to the early growth of language abilities and to what is termed 'self-regulation' - the child's growing awareness of, and ability to control, their cognitive and emotional processing.
SELF-REGULATION
Self-regulation, based upon developing self-awareness, leads to increasing control of mental processing and performance and is relevant and fundamental across the whole range of children's development. So, as the child increases their capacities for self-regulation, they become aware of their emotional experiences and their social abilities, as well as the mental processes underlying the abilities which support their learning, thinking, reasoning and remembering (Bronson, 2000).
As the emergence in young children of self-regulatory abilities has become increasingly acknowledged, a number of research studies have focused specifically on the implications for early years education.
Several studies have found that early problems of self-regulation are predictive of future problems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, children with low self-regulation not only spend less time 'on task' in classrooms, which may lead to academic difficulties, but also their behaviours lead to negative reactions from peers and teachers, further reducing their development of appropriate social skills and engagement with others (for example, Ladd, Herald, & Kochel, 2006).
On the positive side, Blair & Razza's (2007) study of three- to five-year-olds from low-income American families showed that aspects of self-regulation - particularly abilities to inhibit and control immediate, inaccurate or inappropriate responses - predicted progress in early maths and reading abilities approximately a year later.
LANGUAGE AS A 'TOOL OF THOUGHT'
Language plays a crucial role in development, as children progress through being supported by others (that is, learning how to do something initially guided by an adult) to learning how to do things independently. Since learning emerges from such social interactions, the ways in which the child is supported by the adult are influential.
Research in recent years has investigated the processes by which adults support children's learning and highlighted the importance of language as a tool for the processes of learning, regarded as a process of internalisation over time. As adults encourage, instruct, ask questions, simplify the task, remind children of the goal, make suggestions, model to emphasise the key points, give feedback and so on, they obviously employ language as the key medium with which to convey their ideas and actions.
As the child begins to understand the steps modelled and articulated by a sensitive adult, they become able to talk themselves through the task using self-commentary or 'private speech'. This represents a crucial bridging mechanism between external 'social speech', produced in the context of social interaction with another person, and fully-formed 'inner speech', which we all use as adults to help us to structure and keep track of our thoughts. It appears predominantly in young children up to the age of seven or eight years and then gradually fades, as the capability for 'inner speech' is established (Winsler & Naglieri 2003). Children thus become progressively able to fully self-regulate using internal speech or, in other words, abstract thought.
It is widely recognised that sharing a relevant vocabulary and encouraging children to articulate their ideas in discussion are key to helping them develop capacities to think and construct their own understandings about the world. What also seems to be crucial are opportunities for children's active engagement in processes of interpretation and transformation of new experiences.
New tasks and ideas are most valuable to a child when linked to contexts with which they are familiar and which carry meaning for them. However, while studies of early adult-child interactions have shown that humans have a general disposition to support children's early communicative developments, there are considerable variations between adults in the sensitivity and style of communication.
These variations influence how individual children learn, and in particular, how they learn language. A number of studies have highlighted the differences in the amount of time that one- and two-year-olds spend in joint-attention activities with their parents or carers, including playing, talking and reading books together. This variation is directly related to the rate of language learning by the child. Further, within joint-attention activities, wide differences exist in the sensitivity, or responsiveness, of the adults to the children, which also affects language development (see Schaffer, 2004).
EARLY EXPERIENCES
The make-up of our society in England is extremely complex. In reality, there is no such entity as a 'typical' child, who experiences a 'typical' range of early childhood experiences. Numerous indicators highlight the substantial differences in early childhood experiences, differences that affect children's initial development and which persist as they grow older, influencing dispositions towards learning as well as the range of skills that they will be ready to employ upon arrival in school.
Healthy child development may be supported by a variety of factors during the early years. Or, conversely, the desired outcomes for a child may be compromised, either temporarily or on a more long-lasting basis. Such factors include, for example, the nature of early relationships with parents and other caregivers, the extent of cognitive stimulation, and access to adequate nutrition, healthcare, and other resources, such as a safe home and neighbourhood environment.
Poverty affects a sizable share of young children in the UK. The proportion of children living in low-income households in the UK was falling until 2004-05 but has risen since then and reached 3.9 million in 2008-09 (DWP, 2010). Living in certain areas does not support healthy development for many where high percentages of the population have income below the poverty line. Such neighbourhoods offer limited opportunities in terms of resources, including health facilities, parks and playgrounds, for example.
It may be that preventative healthcare does not reach all parents and young children. This disadvantages those children, who miss out on opportunities for healthcare providers to conduct developmental screenings and to encourage parental behaviours that promote healthy child development.
Research shows there is a relationship between socio-economic status and educational achievement - poverty is linked significantly to poor educational outcomes (Dearing, Berry & Zaslow 2006). Extensive research evidence has linked economic disadvantage to parental stress, low responsiveness in parent-child interactions and a range of poor cognitive and social-emotional outcomes in young children. These outcomes affect adequate language acquisition, self-regulation, and confidence to interact or express their needs (Meyers, Rosenbaum, Ruhm & Waldfogel 2004).
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HOME ENVIRONMENT
However, recent evidence from the UK and internationally has shown that it is not poverty or indicators such as low parental educational level in themselves that adversely affect children's early development.
Analyses from the EPPE project (Sylva et al 2004), for example, confirm that parental involvement in activities such as reading to children, visits to the library, drawing and painting together, singing songs and rhymes together, playing with letters and numbers and so on, will influence children's social and behavioural achievements over the pre-school period. Such activities are significant in accounting for differences in their social and behavioural development at the start of primary school.
The resulting picture is an optimistic one, in that it is not who you are as a parent (wealthy, poor, educated), but what you do with your child that has the greatest influence upon their early learning. These findings have been endorsed by other studies, such as that by Smith and Markman (2005) in the United States. Their study concludes that the key advantage bestowed by higher income within a home is a stimulating learning environment. The number of books in the home and the access of children to learning experiences routinely explain about a third of the 'poverty effect'.
Such findings must underpin policy decisions not only in relation to working with parents in disadvantaged communities, but also in the provision of meaningful curricula in pre-schools.
CONCLUSION
We have seen that the innate and active desire in young children to understand their environment, to be in control of their own experiences and to make relationships with others leads to an accumulation of knowledge about the causes and effects of what is perceived around them, and forms the basis of their 'cognition'.
Interaction and movement within their environment are the core ways in which children build up knowledge. Understandings achieved through sensory-motor experiences are extended by knowledge gained through language, play and teaching interactions with people in the environment.
Capacities of language and self-regulation underpin this early cognitive, social and emotional learning - and where this development can be set in an appropriately stimulating and challenging environment, supported by caring and sensitive adults, the child's progress seems limitless.
The final article in this series will look at the influence of schools on children and suggest ways forward for developing supportive pedagogy and curricula, in line with the evidence about the ways in which children learn.
David Whitebread is a senior lecturer in Psychology and Early Years Education and Sue Bingham is a former early years practitioner and a PhD student of the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
REFERENCES
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This series of articles is based on a report commissioned by TACTYC (The Association for the Professional Development of Early Years Educators) entitled School Readiness: a critical review of perspectives and evidence, written by David Whitebread and Sue Bingham of the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. The report was launched at the TACTYC Research into Practice conference in York, 11-12 November, and is available from TACTYC (free to members). TACTYC can be found online at www.tactyc.org.uk
