Scholars find differences based on social economic status
Children who convey more meanings with gestures at age 14 months have much larger vocabularies at 54 months than children who convey fewer meanings and are accordingly better prepared for school, according to research at the University of Chicago published in the journal Science on Friday, Feb. 13.
The research showed that the differences particularly favored children from higher-income families with well-educated parents and may help explain the disadvantages some children from low-income families face upon entering school, said Susan-Goldin Meadow, who co-authored the study with fellow psychologist Meredith Rowe.
"Vocabulary is a key predictor of school success and is a primary reason why children from low-income families enter school at a greater risk of failure than their peers from advantaged families," said Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University and a leading expert on gesture.
Although scholars have realized that families of higher income and education levels talk more with their children and speak to them in complex sentences, the new study is the first to connect gesture, vocabulary and school preparedness.
To study the differences in gesture among families, Goldin-Meadow and Rowe, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University, studied 50 Chicago-area families from diverse economic backgrounds. Their results are reported in the Science article, "Differences in Early Gesture Explain SES Disparities in Child Vocabulary Size at School Entry," for which Rowe is lead author.
They recorded video of children and primary caregivers for 90-minute sessions during ordinary activities at home. The researchers found that differences in gesture appeared early among children; moreover, differences in child gesture could be traced to differences in parent gesture.
"It is striking that, in the initial stages of language learning when SES (socioeconomic status) differences in children's spoken vocabulary are not yet evident, we see SES differences in child gesture use," Rowe said. "Children typically do not begin gesturing until around 10 months. Thus, SES differences are evident a mere four months, and possibly even sooner, after the onset of child gesture production."
Fourteen-month-old children from high-income, well-educated families used gesture to convey an average of 24 different meanings during the 90-minute session, while children from lower-income families conveyed only 13. Once in school, students from higher-income families had a comprehension vocabulary of 117 (as measured by a standardized test), compared to 93 for children from lower-income families.
Some of the robust differences in child vocabulary development at 54 months are likely to come from parents in higher-income groups using gesture to communicate more different meanings when their children were 14 months, the paper said.
The paper did not examine the specific nature of the relationship between early child gesture and later child vocabulary. "Child gesture could play an indirect role in word learning by eliciting timely speech from parents; for example, in response to her child's point at the doll, mother might say, 'yes, that's a doll,' thus providing a word for the object that is the focus of the child's attention," the authors write.
The connection also may be more direct, since gestures allow children to use their hands to express meanings when they have difficulty forming words for them.
Whatever the mechanism, the scholars contend that encouraging gesture among parents and children learning to speak and could boost vocabulary and better prepare children for school.
All work and no play makes for troubling trend in early education
Parents and educators who favor traditional classroom-style learning over free, unstructured playtime in preschool and kindergarten may actually be stunting a child’s development instead of enhancing it, according to a University of Illinois professor who studies childhood learning and literacy development.
Anne Haas Dyson, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the U. of I. College of Education, says playtime for children is a “fundamental avenue” for learning, and attempts by parents and educators to create gifted children by bombarding them with information is well-intentioned but ultimately counterproductive.
“That approach doesn’t appreciate the role of play and imagination in a child’s intellectual development,” Dyson said. “Play is where children discover ideas, experiences and concepts and think about them and their consequences. This is where literacy and learning really begins.”
What Dyson calls the “banning of the imagination” in schools may be influenced by what some critics have called the “Baby Genius Edutainment Complex,” a cottage industry of mind-enrichment products developed specifically for infants and toddlers and marketed to anxious parents eager to give their children’s cognitive abilities an early boost.
“I see this ‘Einstein in the crib’ trend as a societal reduction of children to the means for fulfilling parents’ desires for intellectual distinction,” Dyson said.
“Children learn the way we all learn: through engagement, and through construction. They have to make sense of the world, and that’s what play or any other symbolic activity does for children.”
While Dyson does see some value in teaching the ABCs to children in pre-kindergarten, she thinks that trying to accelerate learning actually works against a child’s development. Kindergarten and preschool, she said, should be a place for children to experience play as intellectual inquiry, before they get taken over by the tyranny of high-stakes testing.
“I’m certainly not opposed to literacy in the early grades,” Dyson said, “but the idea that we can eliminate play from the curriculum doesn’t make sense. Kids don’t respond well to sitting still in their desks and listening at that age. They need stimulation.”
Dyson said that having an early-childhood curriculum reduced to isolated test scores or other measurable pieces of information doesn’t take into account a child’s interests or an ability to imagine, problem solve or negotiate with other children, all of which are important social and intellectual qualities.
“All tests tell us is how many letters and how many sounds children know,” she said. “I think there should be this grand societal conversation about what’s intellectually motivating and exciting for our children.”
Dyson doesn’t believe there should be any sort of compromise in the amount of learning by rote and play that children experience, especially in preschool and kindergarten.
“We have to intellectually engage kids,” she said. “We have to give them a sense of their own agency, their own capacity, and an ability to ask questions and solve problems. So we have to give them more open-ended activities that allow them the space they need to make sense of things.”
So what can parents and educators do to stimulate children?
“I think parents ought to engage with their children,” Dyson said.
“Follow the child’s interests in people, objects, places, and activities, and talk with them. It’s social interaction that creates a link between the child and an ongoing activity. Help them learn how to articulate themselves and participate in the world.”
One thing that parents may worry too much about is the television shows their children watch. She said that parents should be attentive to what their children watch and make judgments about the appropriateness of the material, but more important, they need to talk with their children about what they see.
“I think we want children to grow up media-literate,” Dyson said, “but we don’t want to dismiss the sources of their pleasure only because it doesn’t appeal to our adult sensibilities. Contemporary childhoods are mediated in large part by the media, and it can be very informative for kids.”
Dyson said that the media inform children’s play and even their early writing efforts. For example, a 5-year-old Dyson knows who is just learning about written language and the alphabet can already spell “Hannah,” thanks to Hannah Montana, the popular Disney show character.
“Knowledge of media gets kids a lot of social cachet because their peers watch it, too,” Dyson said. “And a lot of social bonding between children who normally wouldn’t have much in common occurs when they watch the same shows.”
Dyson is a co-author of the forthcoming book “Children, Language, and Literacy: Diverse Children in Diverse Times,” which discusses the nature of contemporary early-childhood programs and children’s language learning.
Rote memorization of historical facts adds to collective cluelessness
As fans of talk-show host Jay Leno’s man-on-the-street interviews know, Americans suffer from a national epidemic of historical and civic ignorance. But just because most Americans know more about “American Idol” than they do about American government doesn’t necessarily mean it’s entirely their fault.
Americans’ historical apathy is also an indictment of the way history is taught in grades K-12, according to a University of Illinois professor who studies and teaches historical instruction.
Brenda M. Trofanenko, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education, says that teaching history by rote – that is, by having students memorize historical dates and then testing them on how well they can regurgitate that data on a test – is a pedagogical method guaranteed to get students to tune out and add to our collective civic and historical cluelessness.
“Everybody thinks of history as being really boring – and it is, if it’s solely the recitation and recalling of facts,” Trofanenko said. “The concern is always, ‘Our kids don’t know history!’ But if we’re just talking about the recall of facts and dates, that’s not solely what you want to know about history.”
While Trofanenko does believe there should be a baseline body of historical knowledge taught in school, the memorization and recall methods of inundating students with red-letter historical dates neglects contextualizing those events within the broad sweep of history.
“I agree that there should be a base knowledge that students need to know about their country and their community affiliations,” she said. “But its relevance lies not just in knowing historical fact but being able to see what can be gleaned from historical inquiry, including cause and effect, progress and decline, and historical significance. You still have to know what happened, but you also have to be able to put it into a larger context of what was happening at the time, why it was happening, and what relevance it has to the current day.”
Facts and important historical dates, Trofanenko said, are easily measured and quantifiable through tests, which is why they remain so popular in elementary and secondary education. The emphasis on memorizing facts and dates has its roots in standardized testing and has only been given further pedagogical credence by the accountability measures of the No Child Left Behind law.
“In elementary- and middle-school grades, history is one of many subjects of social studies, which is not a testable subject or focus of current NCLB laws,” she said. “And if it’s not testable, it’s often not taught. Asking a student to write an essay explaining the moral dilemmas of the American Revolution can’t be put into a bubble answer.”
Since the federal government uses only math and reading scores to measure a school’s progress, there’s little incentive for schools to teach students non-tested subjects such as history. But history, according to Trofanenko, “is just as important as everything else. Everything is set in time, and experiences typically change in significance over time.”
“If you were looking at the evolution of scientific knowledge,” she said, “you would want to understand just how significant the Scopes trial was, and not just the result and the year it was decided. And, to further historicize, how that decision is still relevant to a science curriculum in modern-day Kansas.
“So it’s not just knowing facts but being able to place everything in a period of time so you understand how the past continues to inform current issues.”
While it’s important to know facts and dates, Trofanenko believes history teachers should challenge students, especially high school students, to think like historians.
“We need to start thinking differently about our students’ abilities,” she said. “They can think critically and engage in historical inquiry if they’re actually given the opportunity. Instead, we make them learn facts and test them on their ability to regurgitate them at the end of the week. I think that’s really insulting to them.”
Trofanenko believes that students today are a lot more critical than they were in years past.
“With the amount of information that’s out on the Internet, I don’t think you can fool kids anymore,” Trofanenko said. “They’re much more savvy now about looking things up than they were even a few years ago. They’re certainly critical about other things in their lives, so why can’t they be critical of history as well?”
Thinking like a historian, according to Trofanenko, entails studying primary source documents, thinking about the historical context, weighing the evidence and then making an argument – “something all high school students are capable of doing,” she said. “That helps students develop a historical consciousness, which is the ability to ask why a particular historical narrative or a historical concept is advanced or not.”
Teaching students to look at history with a critical eye also helps students see past the jingoism than sometimes passes for history in classrooms.
“History is used as a way to instill nationalism and patriotism and commitment to a country, and it particularly becomes strong when there’s a threat against the nation, like in the United States after Sept. 11. But that often blinds everyone to unsavory historical events that have happened in the past. That’s why it’s important to foster a healthy bit of critical skepticism in students instead of training a generation of expert test-takers.”
Georgia Grading Alignment Study
Georgia’s Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (GOSA) t commissioned Dr. Chris Clark, an Economics professor at Georgia College and State University, to examine the relationship between Georgia students’ 2007 End of Course Test (EOCT) performance levels and the grades they earned in related courses.
“This relationship is important because Dr. Clark’s findings suggest that disparities between the two may impact students’ college success, HOPE Scholarship retention rates, and need for remedial support in college,” said Executive Director Kathleen Mathers. “Both EOCTs and course grades are based on the same state standards, so we should expect general alignment between the two achievement indicators. As a general rule, if students earn an “A” in a course, it should be reasonable to expect them to also perform well on the corresponding EOCT.”
Currently, Georgia’s federal No Child Left Behind plan requires high school students to pass the Georgia High School Graduation Test before graduating with a high school diploma. Some states, including Georgia, are moving toward greater use of EOCTs as high school exit exams instead. In fact, state law (O.C.G.A. § 20-2-281) calls for Georgia’s current High School Graduation Test to be replaced by EOCTs, and the state is already moving in that direction.
In the meantime, EOCTs count as 15% of a student’s final course grade. Even with that requirement, there are some considerable differences between Georgia students’ 2007 EOCT achievement and their corresponding course grades:
(State Averages) Algebra I 9th Grade English Lit. Geometry Biology Physical Science 11th Grade English Lit. U.S. History Economics
% of students who passed EOCT 60.75% 67.54% 61.01% 58.38% 62.23% 80.82% 71.30% 64.15%
% of students who passed their course 79.98% 84.42% 86.34% 83.23% 81.82% 89% 90.84% 94.13%
% of students who failed EOCT 39.25% 32.46% 38.99% 41.62% 37.77% 19.18% 28.70% 35.85%
% of students who failed their course 20.02% 15.58% 13.66% 16.77% 18.18% 11.00% 9.16% 5.87%
Dr. Clark found that "there are considerable grading disparities across Georgia's High School Algebra, English Literature, Biology, Physical Science, History, Geometry, and Economics classes. Comparing student's course grades to their End of Course Test (EOCT) scores indicates that some school systems appear to be inflating course grades relative to the EOCT scores considerably while others appear to hold their students to higher standards.
These disparities are disconcerting because they may impact college success, HOPE scholarship retention rates for HOPE scholars, and the need for learning support (remedial classes) in college. Students from schools and school systems that appear to consistently inflate grades may be less likely to succeed in college courses, less likely to retain the HOPE scholarship, and more likely to need to take remedial classes after enrolling in college than students from schools and school systems that hold their students to higher standards.__Future research should be undertaken to analyze the impact of grading disparities on later academic success. An examination of the impact that rigor in grading standards (or a lack of rigor) may have on a student's academic future should be performed once data on HOPE eligibility, HOPE retention rates, and performance in college courses become available for the students whose data were used in this study."__
For the full research report, please visit http://www.gaosa.org/research.aspx.
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