Stephen H. Stearn, Ph.D. and Susan Sirigatti, October 25, 2020
Review
“Too many schools place a double burden on young children. First, they heighten their stress by demanding that they master material beyond their developmental level. Then they deprive children of their chief means of dealing with that stress—creative play.” This appeared in “Crisis in the Kindergarten,” written in 2009. (Miller, Edward, and Joan Almon. Alliance for Childhood, 2009, p. 49, files.eric.ed.gov).
Today, more than fifteen years later, a large number of preschool programs focus on getting children “kindergarten ready.” What this means is that despite what was written in “Crisis in the Kindergarten,” many preschools serving children 3 to 5 years of age have introduced more rigid curricula and routines, more teacher dominated activities, and even less play time. This report suggests that more has been lost than gained by introducing rigorous and controlled elementary school procedures at earlier ages and at least some balancing of things needs to happen. For certain children, particularly where their families are struggling with job losses and poverty, more than this is needed.
While there is reason to be concerned about what is happening in the preschools for 3 to five- year old’s, particular attention should be focused on children’s first years from 0 to 3 where they are being served by parents in the home and in childcare facilities. In this case, ignoring the findings of the early learning research can lead to more serious long-term consequences. This report shows that we now know that children can and do learn more at an even earlier age than was thought and that a positive early learning environment from 0 to 2 years is vital to children’s health and development.
This paper begins by reviewing the research done by psychologists and neuroscientists on the human brain and on early childhood learning and development over the past thirty years. It then goes on to discuss the important implications of the research for parenting, for early childhood learning, and for children’s healthy development as well as actions and practices that support children and their parents. We include such topics as the role in learning of children’s innate curiosity and intrinsic motivation, nature’s pattern for learning, how approach and avoidance influence learning, children’s need to explore and discover, the importance of encouraging children to question and be creative, the role of praise and rewards, play, guided play and play-based learning, the role of the parent/teacher, the importance of adult-child bonding, play learning tools, early childhood settings and preschools, and parents’ concerns about an uncertain future.
With the right supportive programs and with early interventions, it is now possible to help children from all socioeconomic groups look forward to living fulfilling lives and making positive contributions to our society.
The Problems
Preschools and Kindergartens:
The important research in early childhood education and development is not being widely implemented. While this important research is not totally ignored and can be found in public media, it has unfortunately had little effect on current practices.
Many preschools serving children from 3 to 5 years, in an effort to prepare children for these “academic” kindergartens, have become more “academic” as well, and in so doing, have also reduced play time and independent child activities. These changes work against children’s innate motivation to learn and against their creativity and their opportunity to explore and discover. This, in turn, impacts negatively on children’s independence, thinking abilities, joy in learning, outlets for stress, and healthy development.
Parents:
Problems of implementation of the latest research on early childhood learning are compounded by:
1. The deleterious effects of joblessness and poverty;
2. The concern on the part of many parents of young children regarding the Kindergarten Entry Assessments (KEA) that accompany entry into the new “academic” kindergartens. Anxiety about these assessments has them looking to the preschools to help prepare their children academically and behaviorally for kindergarten.
3. Many parents with a misguided faith that technology will make their children smarter, turn towards electronic products in a wide array of formats including electronic educational toys, apps, videos, games, and TV programs which make strong educational claims but many of which work against what is now known to be good practices in early childhood development and learning.
Since there is a lot to say on the subject of positive and effective early childhood learning, we’ve decided to deliver this report section by section as can be seen in the Contents directly below:
Contents
I. Revolution and Revelation in Early Childhood Learning
II. Organic Growth in Early Learning: The Forces of Human Nature
III. The Learning Environment
IV. How Children Learn
V. Play-Based Learning
VI. Should Parents Be Worried?
(I) Revolution and Revelation in Early Childhood Education
We used to believe that babies were egocentric, irrational little beings who didn’t know very much. Over the last three or four decades, however, there’s been a major revolution in our understanding of the learning that takes place in babies and in very young children. Based on evidence from neuroscience and experimental psychology, striking revelations have been at the root of this revolution. These revelations focus on evidence that children learn more than we once thought, that they learn more complex materials, that they learn them more deeply, and that they learn at an earlier age, in fact from the very beginning. Although some of these revelations were explained by educators working in the 1960’s and 1970’s, they were not widely accepted. Now they are. In fact, there are numerous studies in books, articles, and podcasts available for anyone wishing to learn more about them.
Babies and Young Children are Active Learners. What follows is a very brief review of some of the experimental research about how and what young children learn:
· The evidence as a whole indicates that infants’ memory processing is remarkably similar to that of older children and adults: Babies acquire information quickly, retain it over time, and apply it flexibly – doing so more effectively with age. 1,2
· By 6 months of age, babies can categorize on the basis of two correlated features – for example, the shape and color of an alphabet letter.3 This ability to categorize using clusters of features prepares babies for acquiring many complex, everyday categories.
· Findings reveal that in the second half of the first year, as long as they have sufficient familiarity with category members, infants group objects into an impressive array of categories – food items, furniture, birds, land animals, air animals, sea animals, plants, vehicles, kitchen utensils, and spatial location (“above” and “below,” “on” and “in”).4,5,6,7
· Besides organizing the physical world, infants of this age categorize their emotional and social worlds. Their looking responses reveal that they sort people and their voices by gender and age and have begun to distinguish emotional expressions.8
· The ability to recall modeled behaviors in the order in which the actions occurred—evident as early as 6 months—strengthens over the second year.9
· “Even the youngest children know, experience, and learn far more than scientists ever thought possible,” and “Children learn about the world in much the same way that scientists do—by conducting experiments, analyzing statistics, and forming intuitive theories of the physical, biological and psychological realms.” 10
· There are parallels between babies and scientists: both formulate theories, make and test predictions, seek explanations, do experiments, and revise what they know based on new evidence. 11
· “From birth on, there appears to be a central tendency to form and test hypotheses about what is occurring in the world. Infants are constantly ‘evaluating’ in the sense of asking, ‘is this different from or the same as that?’” 12
References
1 Bauer, Patricia J. and Angela F. Lukowski. “The Memory Is in the Details: Relations Between Memory for the Specific Features of Events and Long-Term Recall in Infancy.” J Exp Child Psychol, 20 May 2010, doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2010.04.004.
2 Rovee-Collier, Carolyn and Kimberly Cuevas. “Multiple Memory Systems Are Unnecessary to Account for Infant Memory Development: An Ecological Model.” Dev Psychol, 45(1), Jan 2009, pp. 160-74, doi:10.1037/a0014538.
3 Bhatt, Ramesh S. et al. “Perceptual Organization Based on Common Region in Infancy.” Infancy, 3 Feb 2010, pp. 147-168, doi.org/10.111/j.1532-7078.2007.tb00238.x.
4 Bornstein, Marc H. et al. “Infant Object Categorization Transcends Diverse Object-Context Relations.” Infant Behav Dev., 33(1), Feb 2010, pp. 7-15.
5 Casasola, Marianella et al. “Six-Month-Old Infants’ Categorization of Containment Spatial Relations.” Child Dev, 16 May 2003, doi:org/10.1111/1467-8624.00562.
6 Mandler, Jean M., and Laraine McDonough. “On Developing a Knowledge Base in Infancy.” Dev Psychol, 34(6), Nov 1998, pp. 1274-1288, doi.org/10.1037//0012-1649.34.6.1274.
7 Oakes, Lisa M. et al. “By Land or By Sea: The Role of Perceptual Similarity in Infants’ Categorization of Animals.” Dev Psychol, 33(3), May 1997, pp. 396-407, doi.org:10.1037//0012-1649.33.3.396.
8 Spelke, Elizabeth S. et al. “Infants Knowledge of Object Motion and Human Action.” In Sperber, D., Premack, D., and Premack, A.J. (Eds.) Symposia of the Fyssen Foundation. Causal cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 44-78.
9 Rovee-Collier and Kimberly Cuevas, “Multiple Memory Systems are Unnecessary to Account for Infant Memory Development: An Ecological Model.” Dev Psychol. 2009 Jan;45(1):160–174. doi: 10.1037/a0014538.
10 Gopnik, Alison. “How Babies Think.” Scientific American, July 2010, pp. 76-81, ScientificAmerican.com.
11 Gopnik, Alison, et al. The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind. William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999.
12 Stern, Daniel. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. Basic Books, 1985.