Rigorous or Playful Preschools – New Study Suggests Value in More Rigor
Here’s an article worth reading that appeared in today’s NY Times. Click here to read the article (and comments) at the Times website. Should preschool be more about play or early academics? I believe a little of both serves children well.
Free Play or Flashcards? New Study Nods to More Rigorous Preschools
It looked like a basic geometry lesson one might find in any grade school, except for the audience: They were preschoolers, seated cross-legged on a comfy rug.
“What attributes would tell me this is a square?” asked the teacher, Ashley Rzonca.
A boy named Mohammed raised his hand, having remembered these concepts from a previous lesson. “A square has four angles and four equal sides,” he said.
As school reformers nationwide push to expand publicly funded prekindergarten and enact more stringent standards, more students are being exposed at ever younger ages to formal math and phonics lessons like this one. That has worried some education experts and frightened those parents who believe that children of that age should be playing with blocks, not sitting still as a teacher explains a shape’s geometric characteristics.
But now a new national study suggests that preschools that do not mix enough fiber into their curriculum may be doing their young charges a disservice.
The study found that by the end of kindergarten, children who had attended one year of “academic-oriented preschool” outperformed peers who had attended less academic-focused preschools by, on average, the equivalent of two and a half months of learning in literacy and math.
“Simply dressing up like a firefighter or building an exquisite Lego edifice may not be enough,” said Bruce Fuller, the lead author of the study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you can combine creative play with rich language, formal conversations and math concepts, that’s more likely to yield the cognitive gains we observed.”
The study comes amid rapid expansions of taxpayer-funded preschool in cities like Washington, San Antonio and New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last month that he would eventually expand the program, now open to all 4-year-olds, to 3-year-olds as well.
The new wave of preschools provide playtime, but their major goal is academic “kindergarten readiness,” and the study could provide ammunition for policy makers who want to keep on that course. It could also help officials like Mr. de Blasio make the case for even more public spending on prekindergarten programs.
Whether they will win over all parents is another question.
Many who are college-educated are wary of academic preschool, worrying it will quash the love of learning before their children make it past their holding-hands years. At one prekindergarten information session in the affluent Brooklyn Heights neighborhood last year, parents asked not about math or reading, but about how often their children would be exposed to art and music.
One mother worried that the curriculum would be “dictated by the Department of Education.” The school’s staff reassured her that they would not use flashcards.
Some child development experts question whether the goal of the new pre-K — putting all children on a path to read and do simple math problems by the end of kindergarten — is appropriate, and whether it might detract from the socialization value that preschools have been known for.
Many children “are not ready to do that without being put under a lot of stress and strain,” said Joan Almon, an expert on play-based education with the Alliance for Childhood, an advocacy group.
Aware of the concern, the Berkeley study, which is being published this week in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, assessed the children’s behavior, based on interviews with their parents. It found that students did not seem to be hurt socially or emotionally by attending the more academic programs.
Robert Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and an expert on effective teaching, said the new research, which followed 6,150 students nationwide and was controlled for income and home environment, confirmed smaller-scale studies from Tulsa and Boston showing that academic prekindergarten programs benefited both poor and middle-class children. “These effect sizes are substantial,” Mr. Pianta said of the Berkeley paper.
Nevertheless, the study had limitations. It followed children for a relatively short time, and it remained unclear if the benefits of academic prekindergarten would extend beyond the end of kindergarten. Previous research has demonstrated a disappointing “fade-out” effect, in which early academic gains are lost over time, making it harder to fulfill one of the main objectives of publicly funded preschool, closing the achievement gap between poor and middle-class students.
The study defined “academic-oriented” prekindergarten programs as those in which teachers reported spending time most days on activities like sounding out words, discussing new vocabulary, counting out loud and teaching children to measure and tell time.
That is not to say that these schools are all letters and numbers. The de Blasio program requires two hours per day of play, which is typically broken into several smaller chunks.
After Ms. Rzonca’s geometry lesson, she released her students for 30 minutes of free time. As they cradled dolls, drew and made collages, Ms. Rzonca moved around the classroom, pausing to kneel next to individual children. She prompted them to dictate simple narratives about their activities. “Baby sleeps,” said Mohammed, whose collage featured a photo of a crib. Ms. Rzonca wrote the sentence down on a sticky note and attached it to his work.
Other methods of early childhood education will most likely continue to thrive, counting on devoted legions of parents. One example are Waldorf schools, which at the preschool level eschew academics in favor of play and do not begin formal reading instruction until first grade.
In Montessori schools, which occupy more of a middle ground, children are allowed to spend long stretches of the day in freely chosen activities, like painting or sorting colorful beads. Teachers generally do not lecture, but they do impart academic concepts, like how to sound out words, by inviting children to participate in one-on-one or small group lessons.
At the Aster Montessori School in Cambridge, Mass., what looks like child-directed play is referred to as “work time” and lasts for three uninterrupted hours — an eternity in little-kid minutes.
One Monday this month, a 3-year-old named Magnus began his morning at an easel, swirling blue watercolor paint. Other children counted wooden pegs and cut patterns into construction paper, largely without assistance from the classroom’s two teachers.
Kanan Patel, the school’s co-founder and a lead teacher, sat at a table with a boy named Thomas. She had arrayed a set of — yes, flashcards — in front of them. “I was thinking about something that begins with buh-buh-buh,” Ms. Patel prompted. Thomas, grinning, picked up the card that depicted a bicycle.
Though Aster is a private school, costing $17,500 for the full-day program, some public preschools around the country have adopted the Montessori method. Aster’s leaders will begin accepting state-funded students next year, as many private preschools in New York City now do.
Mr. Fuller, the Berkeley researcher, said a carefully constructed Montessori classroom could certainly encompass the effective teaching practices his study identified.
“I see it as emulating good parenting,” he said. “We try to get them to use their words if there is a conflict. When we’re baking, we have fun with measuring a half cup of flour. We’re not heavily didactic and totally directive, but we are introducing new knowledge and rich language.”
Amelia Sorensen, Magnus’s mother, said that she and her husband, a transportation engineer, had chosen Aster Montessori because they wanted a stimulating but “gentle” pre-K for Magnus and their other son, Gustav, 5.
Ms. Sorensen, a stay-at-home parent, acknowledged that “there’s not a lot of worksheets or stuff where you can look and say, ‘This is what my child did today.’ ”
Still, she is thrilled with her sons’ growing independence, from tying their shoes and zipping their coats to drawing. Her older son, who attends Aster Montessori for kindergarten, has begun to read, and she said she would not worry if Magnus took longer to reach the same milestone. “Kids can start formal education later,” she said.
A ‘Goldilocks amount of screen time’ might be good for teenagers’ well being
Finally! Some guidance on how much screen time is okay for teenagers. This study, by British researchers Andrew Przybylski at the University of Oxford and Netta Weinstein at the University of Cardiff, indicates that parental fears about too much screen time hurting young people’s development may be exaggerated. I really like the way the researchers couched the results in giving kids a “Goldilocks amount of screen time.” As with everything in life, moderation rules – not too little, not too much, but just the right amount. The article below is from the University of Oxford and can be read on their website by CLICKING HERE.
A new study argues that while a lot has been said by scientists and paediatricians about the possible dangers of teenagers spending time on digital devices or computers, there is little robust evidence to back up their claims. The researchers say they are the first to systematically test for links between well-being and screen time measured continuously, separately for different digital activities and days of the week. They have proposed the Goldilocks theory: that there is a point between low and high use of technology that is ‘just right’ for teenagers when their sense of wellbeing is boosted by having ‘moderate’ amounts of screen time. The researchers suggest this may be because digital connectivity can enhance creativity, communication skills and development. Their findings also suggests that the relationship between screen time and well-being is weak at best, even when young people overuse their digital devices. The paper is published in the journal, Psychological Science.
Using a well-established self-report measure of mental well-being, researchers from Oxford and Cardiff universities analysed how 120,000 15 year olds in Britain felt after using digital technology and how much time they spent on different devices. Nearly all (99.9%) of the participating adolescents reported spending time using at least one type of digital technology on a daily basis. The teenagers were asked about time spent watching films and TV programmes, playing computer games, using the internet, or smartphones for social networking and chatting. The paper concludes that more than ‘moderate’ time can be linked with a negative effect on well-being, but they estimate this is a ‘small’ effect at 1% or less – equivalent to one third of the positive effect on well-being of a good night’s sleep or regularly eating breakfast.
The researchers tested their digital Goldilocks hypothesis against the data, finding that teenagers’ well-being increased as their screen time increased, up to a certain point. After that point, increased screen time was associated with decreased well-being. The study also highlights that the point at which screen times flipped between moderate and potentially harmful screen time were notably at higher amounts and less variable for days at the weekend. The research finds that moderate digital activity does not generally displace other activities essential for mental well-being; however, smartphones at the weekend could be harmful if a virtual social life disrupted other more rewarding social activities that could have taken place in a teenager’s free time.
Thresholds defining the point at which ‘moderate’ use becomes overuse and affects wellbeing negatively varied according to the digital device and whether teenagers played during the week or at weekends, says the study. It suggests time should be limited to I hour 40 minutes for weekday video-game play and 1 hour 57 minutes for weekday smartphone use. Watching videos and using computers for recreational purposes appears to be less disruptive so limits during the weekdays were 3 hours 41 minutes and 4 hours 17 minutes respectively. For weekends, the limit was 3 hours 35 minutes for playing video games to 4 hours 50 minutes for watching videos. The authors speculate that ‘moderate’ levels of digital screen use are lower on weekdays because the weekdays are relatively richer in opportunities for socialising and learning compared to weekends.
Lead author Dr Andrew Przybylski, of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, said: ‘Previous research has oversimplified the relationship between digital screen time and the mental well-being of teenagers. Overall we found that modern use of digital technology is not intrinsically harmful and may have advantages in a connected world unless digital devices are overused or interfere with schoolwork or afterschool activities. Our research suggests that some connectivity is probably better than none and there are moderate levels that as in the story of Goldilocks are “just right” for young people.’
Co-author Dr Netta Weinstein of Cardiff University commented: ‘To the extent that digital activities either enrich teenagers’ lives or displace more rewarding activities, they should have either positive or negative effects on their mental well-being. There have been theories that digital use is disrupting more satisfying pursuits. However, the role of digital technology has a central role in everyday life and online gaming is now a shared way of playing for teenage boys. There is good reason to think digital technology used in moderation is not disruptive and may even support development.’
For more information, contact the University of Oxford News office on +44 (0) 1865 280534 or email news.office@admin.ox.ac.uk
Notes for Editors:
The paper, ‘A large scale test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis: Quantifying the relations between digital screen use and the mental well-being of adolescents’, will be published in the journal, Psychological Science.
The researchers analysed data on teenagers’ screen use from the United Kingdom’s Department for Education National Pupil Database.
Couldn’t Get Into Yale? 10 New York City High Schools Are More Selective, by Elizabeth Harris
As if parents and students don’t have enough to worry about! This article appeared in the NY Times today. Click here to read it at the NY Times website.
And you thought it was hard to get into Yale.
Try a competitive New York City public high school.
Each year, about 80,000 eighth graders participate in the stressful and elaborate dance that is the New York City high school application process. Students can apply to up to a dozen schools anywhere in the city, and then an algorithm matches them with one. This week, students received their results.
Using the number of seats available for the 2016-17 school year and the number of applicants for the 2017-18 school year, The New York Times calculated the admissions rate for some of the most popular high schools in the city (Year over year, the number of seats on offer tend to be quite similar. Schools that admit students based on where they live were excluded).
The school with the lowest admissions rate was Manhattan/Hunter Science High School, which admitted just 1.7 percent of all applicants. Last year, Stanford admitted 4.8 percent of undergraduate applicants.
Popular New York City High Schools
Note: Number of seats is based on the 2016-17 school year. Number of applicants is based on the 2017-18 school year.
All ten of the schools, among the most sought after in the city, are more competitive to get into than Yale College, which admitted 6.3 percent of applicants last year for the class of 2020.
Some of them are even more exclusive than these raw percentages suggest. Baruch College Campus High School gives priority to students who live or go to school in Manhattan’s District 2. Last year 99 percent of its offers went to those students.
Some of the city’s best-known schools, like Stuyvesant High School, are not on this list because students apply to what are known as the specialized schools through a separate process, in which admission is based on a single standardized test.
“The problem is there are more good kids than there are good schools,” said Clara Hemphill, editor of InsideSchools at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, which originally reported the city’s 20 most popular schools. “And the perception that you can’t get a good education outside of the very tippy top schools fuels this insane number of applicants.”
How to Raise an Exceptionally Smart Child
Check out this article from Nature News where a long-running study of exceptional children reveals what it takes to produce scientists of the future!
How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children
A long-running investigation of exceptional children reveals what it takes to produce the scientists who will lead the twenty-first century.
by Tom Clynes
On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Even that wasn’t enough. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students.
Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics — the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy’s talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States.
Bates’s score was well above the threshold for admission to Johns Hopkins, and prompted Stanley to search for a local high school that would let the child take advanced mathematics and science classes. When that plan failed, Stanley convinced a dean at Johns Hopkins to let Bates, then 13, enrol as an undergraduate.
Stanley would affectionately refer to Bates as “student zero” of his Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which would transform how gifted children are identified and supported by the US education system. As the longest-running current longitudinal survey of intellectually talented children, SMPY has for 45 years tracked the careers and accomplishments of some 5,000 individuals, many of whom have gone on to become high-achieving scientists. The study’s ever-growing data set has generated more than 400 papers and several books, and provided key insights into how to spot and develop talent in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and beyond.
“What Julian wanted to know was, how do you find the kids with the highest potential for excellence in what we now call STEM, and how do you boost the chance that they’ll reach that potential,” says Camilla Benbow, a protégé of Stanley’s who is now dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But Stanley wasn’t interested in just studying bright children; he wanted to nurture their intellect and enhance the odds that they would change the world. His motto, he told his graduate students, was “no more dry bones methodology”.
With the first SMPY recruits now at the peak of their careers1, what has become clear is how much the precociously gifted outweigh the rest of society in their influence. Many of the innovators who are advancing science, technology and culture are those whose unique cognitive abilities were identified and supported in their early years through enrichment programmes such as Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth— which Stanley began in the 1980s as an adjunct to SMPY. At the start, both the study and the centre were open to young adolescents who scored in the top 1% on university entrance exams. Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as were Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins centre.
“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program in Durham, North Carolina, which collaborates with the Hopkins centre. Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies2, including SMPY, to demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires,” he says.
Source: K. Ferriman Robertson et al. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 19, 346–351 (2010).
Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice — that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. SMPY, by contrast, suggests that early cognitive ability has more effect on achievement than either deliberate practice or environmental factors such as socio-economic status. The research emphasizes the importance of nurturing precocious children, at a time when the prevailing focus in the United States and other countries is on improving the performance of struggling students (see ‘Nurturing a talented child’). At the same time, the work to identify and support academically talented students has raised troubling questions about the risks of labelling children, and the shortfalls of talent searches and standardized tests as a means of identifying high-potential students, especially in poor and rural districts.
“With so much emphasis on predicting who will rise to the top, we run the risk of selling short the many kids who are missed by these tests,” says Dona Matthews, a developmental psychologist in Toronto, Canada, who co-founded the Center for Gifted Studies and Education at Hunter College in New York City. “For those children who are tested, it does them no favours to call them ‘gifted’ or ‘ungifted’. Either way, it can really undermine a child’s motivation to learn.”
Start of a study
On a muggy August day, Benbow and her husband, psychologist David Lubinski, describe the origins of SMPY as they walk across the quadrangle at Vanderbilt University. Benbow was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins when she met Stanley in a class he taught in 1976. Benbow and Lubinski, who have co-directed the study since Stanley’s retirement, brought it to Vanderbilt in 1998.
“In a sense, that brought Julian’s research full circle, since this is where he started his career as a professor,” Benbow says as she nears the university’s psychology laboratory, the first US building dedicated to the study of the field. Built in 1915, it houses a small collection of antique calculators — the tools of quantitative psychology in the early 1950s, when Stanley began his academic work in psychometrics and statistics.
His interest in developing scientific talent had been piqued by one of the most famous longitudinal studies in psychology, Lewis Terman’s Genetic Studies of Genius3, 4. Beginning in 1921, Terman selected teenage subjects on the basis of high IQ scores, then tracked and encouraged their careers. But to Terman’s chagrin, his cohort produced only a few esteemed scientists. Among those rejected because their IQ of 129 was too low to make the cut was William Shockley, the Nobel-prizewinning co-inventor of the transistor. Physicist Luis Alvarez, another Nobel winner, was also rejected.
Stanley suspected that Terman wouldn’t have missed Shockley and Alvarez if he’d had a reliable way to test them specifically on quantitative reasoning ability. So Stanley decided to try the Scholastic Aptitude Test (now simply the SAT). Although the test is intended for older students, Stanley hypothesized that it would be well suited to measuring the analytical reasoning abilities of elite younger students.
Nurturing a talented child
“Setting out to raise a genius is the last thing we’d advise any parent to do,” says Camilla Benbow, dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. That goal, she says, “can lead to all sorts of social and emotional problems”.
Benbow and other talent-development researchers offer the following tips to encourage both achievement and happiness for smart children.
- Expose children to diverse experiences.
- When a child exhibits strong interests or talents, provide opportunities to develop them.
- Support both intellectual and emotional needs.
- Help children to develop a ‘growth mindset’ by praising effort, not ability.
- Encourage children to take intellectual risks and to be open to failures that help them learn.
- Beware of labels: being identified as gifted can be an emotional burden.
- Work with teachers to meet your child’s needs. Smart students often need more-challenging material, extra support or the freedom to learn at their own pace.
- Have your child’s abilities tested. This can support a parent’s arguments for more-advanced work, and can reveal issues such as dyslexia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or social and emotional challenges.
In March 1972, Stanley rounded up 450 bright 12- to 14-year-olds from the Baltimore area and gave them the mathematics portion of the SAT. It was the first standardized academic ‘talent search’. (Later, researchers included the verbal portion and other assessments.)
“The first big surprise was how many adolescents could figure out math problems that they hadn’t encountered in their course work,” says developmental psychologist Daniel Keating, then a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University. “The second surprise was how many of these young kids scored well above the admissions cut-off for many elite universities.”
Stanley hadn’t envisioned SMPY as a multi-decade longitudinal study. But after the first follow-up survey, five years later, Benbow proposed extending the study to track subjects through their lives, adding cohorts and including assessments of interests, preferences, and occupational and other life accomplishments. The study’s first four cohorts range from the top 3% to the top 0.01% in their SAT scores. The SMPY team added a fifth cohort of the leading mathematics and science graduate students in 1992 to test the generalizability of the talent-search model for identifying scientific potential.
“I don’t know of any other study in the world that has given us such a comprehensive look at exactly how and why STEM talent develops,” says Christoph Perleth, a psychologist at the University of Rostock in Germany who studies intelligence and talent development.
Spatial skills
As the data flowed in, it quickly became apparent that a one-size-fits-all approach to gifted education, and education in general, was inadequate.
“SMPY gave us the first large-sample basis for the field to move away from general intelligence toward assessments of specific cognitive abilities, interests and other factors,” says Rena Subotnik, who directs the Center for Gifted Education Policy at the American Psychological Association in Washington DC.
In 1976, Stanley started to test his second cohort (a sample of 563 13-year-olds who scored in the top 0.5% on the SAT) on spatial ability — the capacity to understand and remember spatial relationships between objects5. Tests for spatial ability might include matching objects that are seen from different perspectives, determining which cross-section will result when an object is cut in certain ways, or estimating water levels on tilted bottles of various shapes. Stanley was curious about whether spatial ability might better predict educational and occupational outcomes than could measures of quantitative and verbal reasoning on their own.
Follow-up surveys — at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48 — backed up his hunch. A 2013 analysis5 found a correlation between the number of patents and peer-refereed publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on SATs and spatial-ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11% of the variance; spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%.
The findings, which dovetail with those of other recent studies, suggest that spatial ability plays a major part in creativity and technical innovation. “I think it may be the largest known untapped source of human potential,” says Lubinski, who adds that students who are only marginally impressive in mathematics or verbal ability but high in spatial ability often make exceptional engineers, architects and surgeons. “And yet, no admissions directors I know of are looking at this, and it’s generally overlooked in school-based assessments.”
Although studies such as SMPY have given educators the ability to identify and support gifted youngsters, worldwide interest in this population is uneven. In the Middle East and east Asia, high-performing STEM students have received significant attention over the past decade. South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore screen children for giftedness and steer high performers into innovative programmes. In 2010, China launched a ten-year National Talent Development Plan to support and guide top students into science, technology and other high-demand fields.
In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed, as the focus has moved more towards inclusion. England decided in 2010 to scrap the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, and redirected funds towards an effort to get more poor students into leading universities.
On the fast track
When Stanley began his work, the choices for bright children in the United States were limited, so he sought out environments in which early talent could blossom. “It was clear to Julian that it’s not enough to identify potential; it has to be developed in appropriate ways if you’re going to keep that flame well lit,” says Linda Brody, who studied with Stanley and now runs a programme at Johns Hopkins focused on counselling profoundly gifted children.
At first, the efforts were on a case-by-case basis. Parents of other bright children began to approach Stanley after hearing about his work with Bates, who thrived after entering university. By 17, he had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and was pursuing a doctorate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Later, as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he would become a pioneer in artificial intelligence.
“I was shy and the social pressures of high school wouldn’t have made it a good fit for me,” says Bates, now 60. “But at college, with the other science and math nerds, I fit right in, even though I was much younger. I could grow up on the social side at my own rate and also on the intellectual side, because the faster pace kept me interested in the content.”
“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society.”
The SMPY data supported the idea of accelerating fast learners by allowing them to skip school grades. In a comparison of children who bypassed a grade with a control group of similarly smart children who didn’t, the grade-skippers were 60% more likely to earn doctorates or patents and more than twice as likely to get a PhD in a STEM field6. Acceleration is common in SMPY’s elite 1-in-10,000 cohort, whose intellectual diversity and rapid pace of learning make them among the most challenging to educate. Advancing these students costs little or nothing, and in some cases may save schools money, says Lubinski. “These kids often don’t need anything innovative or novel,” he says, “they just need earlier access to what’s already available to older kids.”
Many educators and parents continue to believe that acceleration is bad for children — that it will hurt them socially, push them out of childhood or create knowledge gaps. But education researchers generally agree that acceleration benefits the vast majority of gifted children socially and emotionally, as well as academically and professionally7.
Skipping grades is not the only option. SMPY researchers say that even modest interventions — for example, access to challenging material such as college-level Advanced Placement courses — have a demonstrable effect. Among students with high ability, those who were given a richer density of advanced precollegiate educational opportunities in STEM went on to publish more academic papers, earn more patents and pursue higher-level careers than their equally smart peers who didn’t have these opportunities8.
Despite SMPY’s many insights, researchers still have an incomplete picture of giftedness and achievement. “We don’t know why, even at the high end, some people will do well and others won’t,” says Douglas Detterman, a psychologist who studies cognitive ability at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “Intelligence won’t account for all the differences between people; motivation, personality factors, how hard you work and other things are important.”
Some insights have come from German studies9, 10, 11 that have a methodology similar to SMPY’s. The Munich Longitudinal Study of Giftedness, which started tracking 26,000 gifted students in the mid-1980s, found that cognitive factors were the most predictive, but that some personal traits — such as motivation, curiosity and ability to cope with stress — had a limited influence on performance. Environmental factors, such as family, school and peers, also had an impact.
The data from such intellectual-talent searches also contribute to knowledge of how people develop expertise in subjects. Some researchers and writers, notably psychologist Anders Ericsson at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author Malcolm Gladwell, have popularized the idea of an ability threshold. This holds that for individuals beyond a certain IQ barrier (120 is often cited), concentrated practice time is much more important than additional intellectual abilities in acquiring expertise. But data from SMPY and the Duke talent programme dispute that hypothesis (see ‘Top of the charts‘). A study published this year12 compared the outcomes of students in the top 1% of childhood intellectual ability with those in the top 0.01%. Whereas the first group gain advanced degrees at about 25 times the rate of the general population, the more elite students earn PhDs at about 50 times the base rate.
But some of the work is controversial. In North America and Europe, some child-development experts lament that much of the research on talent development is driven by the urge to predict who will rise to the top, and educators have expressed considerable unease about the concept of identifying and labelling a group of pupils as gifted or talented13.
“A high test score tells you only that a person has high ability and is a good match for that particular test at that point in time,” says Matthews. “A low test score tells you practically nothing,” she says, because many factors can depress students’ performance, including their cultural backgrounds and how comfortable they are with taking high-stakes tests. Matthews contends that when children who are near the high and low extremes of early achievement feel assessed in terms of future success, it can damage their motivation to learn and can contribute to what Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset. It’s far better, Dweck says, to encourage a growth mindset, in which children believe that brains and talent are merely a starting point, and that abilities can be developed through hard work and continued intellectual risk-taking.
“Students focus on improvement instead of worrying about how smart they are and hungering for approval,” says Dweck. “They work hard to learn more and get smarter.” Research by Dweck and her colleagues shows that students who learn with this mindset show greater motivation at school, get better marks and have higher test scores14.
Benbow agrees that standardized tests should not be used to limit students’ options, but rather to develop learning and teaching strategies appropriate to children’s abilities, which allow students at every level to reach their potential.
Next year, Benbow and Lubinski plan to launch a mid-life survey of the profoundly gifted cohort (the 1 in 10,000), with an emphasis on career achievements and life satisfaction, and to re-survey their 1992 sample of graduate students at leading US universities. The forthcoming studies may further erode the enduring misperception that gifted children are bright enough to succeed on their own, without much help.
“The education community is still resistant to this message,” says David Geary, a cognitive developmental psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who specializes in mathematical learning. “There’s a general belief that kids who have advantages, cognitive or otherwise, shouldn’t be given extra encouragement; that we should focus more on lower-performing kids.”
Although gifted-education specialists herald the expansion of talent-development options in the United States, the benefits have mostly been limited so far to students who are at the top of both the talent and socio-economic curves.
“We know how to identify these kids, and we know how to help them,” says Lubinski. “And yet we’re missing a lot of the smartest kids in the country.”
As Lubinski and Benbow walk through the quadrangle, the clock strikes noon, releasing packs of enthusiastic adolescents racing towards the dining hall. Many are participants in the Vanderbilt Programs for Talented Youth, summer enrichment courses in which gifted students spend three weeks gorging themselves on a year’s worth of mathematics, science or literature. Others are participants in Vanderbilt’s sports camps.
“They’re just developing different talents,” says Lubinski, a former high-school and college wrestler. “But our society has been much more encouraging of athletic talents than we are of intellectual talents.”
And yet these gifted students, the ‘mathletes’ of the world, can shape the future. “When you look at the issues facing society now — whether it’s health care, climate change, terrorism, energy — these are the kids who have the most potential to solve these problems,” says Lubinski. “These are the kids we’d do well to bet on.”
Raising Trilingual Children
One of the questions parents ask me most is, if my child speaks more than one language at home, will this be a problem on the test? Teaching your child multiple languages has all kinds of life advantages, however, helping the child perform better on early tests isn’t one of them. If there is a language portion to the test (as there is in NYC with the OLSAT, in other cities with the CogAT, or on any IQ test), a child might be disadvantaged if they are speaking more than one language at home. The reason is that kids who speak just one language develop a deeper, richer understanding of the vocabulary of that language than kids who are master 2, 3 or more languages at the same time. If your child is speaking multiple languages at home and you have the option to test her in more than one language (as they offer in NYC), choose to have her tested in whatever language she is strongest in. You might want to consult with your child’s pre-school teacher when making this decision. When you do practice questions with your child, you will have to translate them into the language your child will be tested in.
Often, you will only be offered the option to have your child tested in English. For example, if you live in NYC, they will only administer the test for Hunter College Elementary in English, which puts bilingual or trilingual kids at a disadvantage. This is true in many other school districts around the country – tests are often only administered in English. If your multi-lingual child must be tested in English, I would recommend that in the 6 months before the test, you step up your use of English at home in place of other languages you have been using at home. As soon as the test is over, go back to what you were doing before. This is not an ideal solution, but if you want your child to have the best chance to perform optimally on the test, this is your best strategy. In NYC, kids fare worse on the OLSAT (the verbal test) than the NNAT (the non-verbal test). I’m convinced that is partly because so many kids in NYC come from multi-language homes and many kids just don’t have as deep a mastery of testing vocabulary because of this.
If you are a www.TestingMom.com member, be sure to look at our OLSAT or NYC GIFTED TESTING sections, where we give you a report called “Parent Guide – Essential Vocabulary and Concepts Your Child Must Know for OLSAT Verbal Questions” – Even if your child isn’t taking the OLSAT, but is taking another verbal test, print this out and use the words listed here when you speak with your child. These are words like “between,” “next to,” “first,” “last,” “above,” “below,” and more – words that are used in all tests given to young children.
Here is an article that was in today’s Wall Street Journal. It talks about the many benefits of raising children to speak more than one language.
Raising a Trilingual Child
When Mom speaks one language and Dad another, and the family lives in a city with a third, what language to use for playing, scolding and keeping secrets?
Raising a bilingual child is a goal for many parents. For others, it is just the first step.
Stefano Striuli, an IT executive in Atlanta, speaks to his daughters, Letizia, 10, and Maite (Mah-ee-tay), 7, in his native Italian. The girls speak to their mother, Pilar Guzman, in her native Spanish. The girls switch into English when speaking to each other at home, and they are learning French at school. When the whole family is together, they speak mostly Italian, or English when in public.
There are many reasons for encouraging children to learn a third or fourth language. Parents from two different countries often want to create a home for their children where both native languages are spoken. A bilingual family temporarily living overseas might want to encourage children to become fluent in the local language.
To work, a trilingual household needs rules, and rules must be enforced. Mr. Striuli says if his daughters get confused and use English at home, he ignores them—“but not in a rude way”—until he hears Italian.
“They know that Daddy equals Italian and Mommy equals Spanish,” he says.
The right time to commit to introducing a second or third language to a child is at birth. Parents need to create an environment where children are comfortable speaking, says Annick De Houwer, professor of language acquisition and multilingualism at the Universitat Erfurt in Erfurt, Germany.
“Children do not just pick up a language,” she says. “They must be in a continuous language bath, where they also get a chance to talk.”
Before elementary school age, children usually can learn a second, third or even fourth language without much formal instruction, says Xiao-lei Wang, acting dean at the School of Education, at Pace University, in New York City, and author of a book, “Growing Up With Three Languages.” In many trilingual households, the unwritten rule is each parent speaks only one language to the children and encourages the children to reply only in that language, she says.
Parents can start with baby talk, Dr. De Houwer says. Language-based play groups or frequent video chats with grandparents all help children understand the value of learning another language and culture. “It’s a lot of work,” she adds.
There are more than 1,000 language-immersion programs in U.S. public schools, says Nancy Rhodes, a foreign language education consultant at the Center of Applied Linguistics, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that works to promote language learning and cultural understanding.
Being bilingual or trilingual can put young children somewhat behind their peers in English vocabulary development or grammar, but most catch up by seventh grade, says Camille Du Aime, head of the primary school at the Atlanta International School, a private school with immersion programs in Spanish, French and German. “We see some delay in the mechanics of spelling or punctuation,” she says.
But eventually, when efforts pay off, the result is the envy of any adult struggling to learn a foreign language—a child who can converse with ease in three languages. Mr. Striuli’s daughter Letizia says she is the go-to translator between English and Spanish in her fifth-grade class. It’s a bother sometimes, she says, but ultimately “really cool.” She is still searching for the perfect translation for one of her favorite English adjectives: “I haven’t found the substitute for ‘awesome’ yet,” she says.
The downside? When one parent and a child share a language, the other spouse can feel left out. “There’s concern about family cohesion” in trilingual families, Dr. Wang says.
“They’ve learned already that if they watch it in Polish or Romanian then I’ll let them watch it longer,” Dr. Sikora says.
As children get older and spend more time at school and friends’ homes, it can get harder to maintain second and third language skills.
Caroline Scriven, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mother in Princeton, N.J., put time into studying and refreshing her Spanish skills, and spoke the language with her sons when they were very young. Her husband, Thomas Scriven, speaks to the boys in his native Swiss German.
Lately, though, 6-year-old Oliver and 4-year-old Henry often use English to reply to one of her questions in Spanish. And she has reverted to English when explaining concepts to them such as death, or the Hail Mary pass.
As they get older, she says, “we can’t pretend we don’t speak English.”
Vanessa Liu speaks her native Cantonese at home in New York City with her children, 8-year-old Nara and 6-year-old Vik. Her husband, Harold Brunink, uses English when disciplining the children, she says, so they have a positive association with his native language, Dutch.
When they are all together, they converse in one of the three languages, using Dutch most often outside the home, so they can discuss private matters in public, Ms. Liu says. “We refer to Dutch as our ‘secret language.’ ”
Write to Alina Dizik at alina.dizik@wsj.com
Should You Let Your Child Win?
An article in Today’s Wall Street Journal tells us that we aren’t really helping our kids if we let them win all the time. According to the study cited, doing this may give kids a false sense of confidence that could interfere with their learning. Other research shows that losing at games teaches kids to recover from failure. So when playing games with your children, or when doing questions with them for homework or test prep, letting them make mistakes and then recover from them may be just the right ticket!
Letting Children Always Win Is a Losing Strategy
by Ann Lukits, Wall Street Journal
False sense of self-confidence can interfere with learning, study suggests
Letting children always win games and competitions may give them a false sense of self-confidence that could interfere with learning, suggests a study in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Children who were consistently successful at finding a hidden object in a game deliberately rigged in their favor were less likely to acknowledge the help that an adult had provided than children who found the object some of the time, the study found.
Children who only experienced success may have assumed they had special skills and didn’t require help from others, the researchers suggest.
“We all know situations in which adults try to boost children’s self-esteem by giving every kid on the team a trophy, for example,” lead researcher Dr. Carrie Palmquist, assistant professor in the department of psychology at Amherst College, said in an email. “If children only experience success, they may misinterpret the reason and adopt ineffective approaches to problem-solving and learning.”
Researchers recruited 112 children age 4 and 5 years old for four studies involving 16 to 32 participants. In each study, the children tried to find a hidden toy using clues from two adults. One adult gave accurate information about the toy’s whereabouts, and the other was less helpful.
The games, played on laptops, began with eight practice trials that were rigged so half of the children always found the hidden toy, irrespective of the clues, and half found it only by chance. During test trials, the children were asked to identify which adult they would ask for help in finding the object.
In three studies, children who weren’t always successful selected the helpful person 73% of the time, on average, whereas children who always succeeded chose the helpful person just 50% of the time. A fourth study showed the always-successful children were more interested in the helpful person after experiencing failure.
Caveat: The participants were mostly white and middle class. Being overly confident may also have upsides, in that those children may be more willing to try new challenges, the researchers said.
New Media Guidelines for Children
For those of you looking for guidance on how much media is appropriate for children at different ages, the new research-based AAP guidelines were released this which and they include:
- Children younger than 18 months should not use screen media except for video-chatting. These guidelines are different than previously established guidelines recommending that children under 24 months avoid all screen media.
- Children ages 18-24 months should only be exposed to high-quality, educational programming, such as content by Sesame Street and PBS KIDS. Media exposure for children this age should always be accompanied by an adult who can help them understand the content.
- Children ages 2 to 5 years should be limited to an hour of screen time involving high-quality programs. Parents should also co-view media with children to help them understand what they are seeing and apply it to their own lives.
- Children ages 6 and older should have clear limits about both the amount of media time and the type of media content they are allowed to use.
- Families should establish “media-free” times and locations, such as during dinner, driving, and in children’s bedrooms.
- Regardless of children’s age, families should have regular conversations about online safety and etiquette.
In addition to the new media use guidelines, AAP experts launched a “Family Media Use Plan” tool at HealthyChildren.org to help parents establish a healthy media use diet that is appropriate to their family’s unique needs.
There’s a good article on this at the PBS Parents website. It offers additional guidance such as:
Here are a few things you can start doing now. Making small changes today can influence your children’s well-being tomorrow in big ways:
- For 5 or 10 minutes a day, make some time to read a book to your child — with the TV off. Research shows that reading together has all sorts of positive benefits for children.
- Pick a night, maybe Sunday night, and help your little one video chat with Grandma, Grandpa, or another distant relative or friend. There is much we can do to help our kids, even little kids, learn to use media in positive ways.
- During dinner, turn the TV off and put all devices in another room. This might have to start with just one night a week to avoid a total revolt in your house, but one night is a huge step in the right direction.
- For one 24-hour period, keep track of your own media use. One of the biggest predictors of children’s media use is parents’ media use. What you find may surprise you into making small course corrections.
- When your kids are using media, start participating with them. Joint parent-child media use can have an amazing influence on how much children learn from positive media content.
Today’s world is different than the world in which we were raised. Media is everywhere, and it’s not going away. This means that our parenting needs are different than our parents’. The new AAP guidelines reflect our changing world—parents’ role in managing the media diets of our children has never been greater. The whole reason those of us who conduct children and media research is to help parents make evidence-based decisions about the role of media in the lives of children. These new guidelines provide a solid basis for parents to help shape how media is used in the home.
IQ Tests – Measuring Gray Matter is a Gray Area
Variety of IQ Tests Means Measuring Gray Matter Is a Gray Area, By JO CRAVEN MCGINTY
Multiple companies publish different tests, and they don’t all assess the same thing
Measuring smarts is harder than it sounds.
IQ tests are widely accepted measurements of intelligence, but there are many different tests, their content varies, and a person’s scores may fluctuate for a variety of reasons. In most cases, the differences won’t be extreme. But researchers have documented scores for individuals that varied by 10 points in either direction.
“It’s sloppy, and we know that,” said W. Joel Schneider, a psychologist at Illinois State University who blogs about intelligence tests at Assessing Psyche. “It’s too big of a concept to measure precisely in a way we can all agree. Think of a cheap bathroom scale. Every time someone steps on it, it’s slightly different.”
Still, the tests are used to screen children for gifted or special education programs, to determine whether prospective employees are right for a job, and to decide whether someone convicted of a capital offense can be executed.
IQ tests are actually a collection of assessments intended to measure different abilities, such as logic, pattern recognition, verbal aptitude, spatial orientation and short-term memory. But multiple companies publish different tests, and they don’t all measure the same thing. Some emphasize certain abilities over others. Some measure fewer abilities than others. And the narrow focus of abbreviated tests often used for screening could make someone look more, or less, gifted than a full test.
“A lot of people think there is this one test called The IQ Test,” Dr. Schneider said, “but there are many tests.”
Unlike academic achievement tests, which are meant to evaluate what students have learned in school, IQ tests are intended to measure general cognitive ability. A full-scale test could assess seven different abilities or twice that many—there are no hard and fast rules. An abbreviated test might examine only a couple of abilities.
“A lot of people involved in gifted education run into problems with that,” said Kevin McGrew, the Director of the Institute for Applied Psychometrics and a co-author of the Woodcock-Johnson Battery III and IV IQ tests. “You may have a child with an exceptional ability in a certain area, but it’s not measured by the screening test.”
Modern intelligence tests were introduced in France at the turn of the last century to identify children who were likely to struggle in school. The performance of an individual was assessed by calculating the difference between mental and chronological age. An 8-year-old whose score was typical of a 6-year-old, for example, was said to have a mental age that was two years behind.
But mental age levels off after a certain point while chronological age steadily increases throughout life, and psychologists soon realized that expressing the performance as a ratio would be more useful.
Within a decade or so, the convention changed. Mental age was divided by chronological age and then, to get rid of the decimal place, multiplied by 100. The result was by definition a quotient, and the score became known as the intelligence quotient, or IQ.
By this measure, an 8-year-old who performed only as well as a 6-year-old would have an IQ of 75, while a 14-year-old performing at the level of a 12-year-old would have an IQ of 86. This was an improvement, but the scoring still didn’t work for adults. It doesn’t make sense, for example, to relate the mental age of a 40-year-old to that of a 38-year-old.
Today, the term “IQ” is a relic. Individuals are measured against people of the same age on a scale that assumes IQs are normally distributed with an average score of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. (Some tests use a different standard deviation.) Scores are reported with a margin of error. In other words, they are an estimate.
In a normal distribution, two-thirds of individuals will score between 85 and 115. About 95% will fall between 70 and 130. And about 2.5% will fall below 70, the traditional threshold for intellectual disability, or above 130.
Nowadays, IQ tests may be used to assess whether potential employees are right for a job, whether someone qualifies for some Social Security disability benefits or whether a person convicted of a capital offense can be executed. National Football League players, for example, are routinely administered the Wonderlic test, which is intended to predict workplace success. And in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute people who are intellectually disabled.
But IQ tests are primarily used to screen school children for intellectual or learning disabilities or for participation in gifted programs.
Student performance on the best available IQ tests is correlated with academic success, Dr. McGrew said, but he noted that even the best tests explain only about 40% to 50% of school achievement.
“That’s a lot in psychology,” he said. “But it means 50% to 60% is not related to cognitive ability.”
Although no one discounts the importance of raw intelligence, it turns out that qualities such as motivation, determination and a desire to succeed—qualities that IQ tests don’t measure—play a significant role in success.
This isn’t exactly new information. Thomas Edison once summed it up like this: Genius, he said, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Write to Jo Craven McGinty at Jo.McGinty@wsj.com