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Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

The Importance of ‘Learner-Centered’ Professional Development

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(This is the second post in a three-part series. You can see Part One here .)

The new question of the week is:

What is the best professional-development session you ever participated in, and what made it so good?

Nancy Frey, Ph.D., Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., Justin Lopez-Cardoze, and Marina Rodriguez kicked off this series .

Today, Pat Brown, Mary K. Tedrow, Jeremy Hyler, and Altagracia H. Delgado share their experiences.

‘Knowledge Is Not Passively Received’

Pat Brown is the executive director of STEM for the Fort Zumwalt school district in Missouri and the author of NSTA’s bestselling book series Instructional Sequence Matters:

Effective professional development relates to the cognitive science research on what we know about the best possible learning environments. The books How People Learn (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, 2000) and How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018) describe three interrelated factors that are essential for ensuring high-quality learning: learner-, knowledge-, and assessment-centeredness.

Learner-Centered

Fundamental to the idea of learner-centeredness is the idea that all knowledge is constructed through active experience. This means that knowledge is not passively received.

The learner-centered principle is rooted in a long-held constructivist idea that acknowledges people learn best when they actively construct knowledge that builds on prior understanding based on firsthand experiences with data and evidence. Long-lasting understanding is promoted when learners construct knowledge, connect details within a broader framework for understanding, and relate information with the knowledge they already have.

The ideas educators construct serves as the framework from which they try to advance their understanding. How educators think about their ideas, monitor, and reflect on their developing understanding is critical for regulating and being more self-reliant. Thus, professional development is most impactful if it allows educators to play an active role in learning. Passive professional-development experiences do not tap into the most potent, constructivist learning needed to develop deeper conceptual understanding from professional-development experiences.

Knowledge-Centered

If we all try to fit new experiences with prior knowledge, as learners, it follows that we learn most readily if the targeted ideas fit in a broader framework for what we should know and be able to do as educators. Knowledge-centered professional development focuses on the types of ideas, practices, and skills educators need to succeed. Knowledge-centered professional development homes in on the most crucial ideas and helps educators organize and optimize learning for educators. We have difficulty implementing overly challenging or multiple unrelated plans. Thus, focused knowledge development is vital to realize the full benefits of professional-development experiences.

Assessment-Centered

Finally, effective professional development is assessment-centered. As educators, we need high standards for learning and frequent feedback so we know we are developing skills necessary for success. Having means to assess our knowledge development is a way to evaluate our growth in knowledge (metacognition) and the effectiveness of our professional development on programmatic changes and student learning.

The Learning Culture

The principles underlying How People Learn and How People Learn II do not operate in isolation but are overlapping and deeply entrenched in one another to form the learning culture of the classroom. While I have described them as separate entities, the best learning environments operate at the nexus of the principles associated with learner-, assessment-, and knowledge-centered domains.

For example, the feedback advocated by assessment-centered learning directly influences individuals and their abilities to reflect on their developing understanding. In addition, the knowledge and standards used to design instruction directly impact the activities used to help people construct knowledge.

Finally, the goals chosen to guide instruction should closely align with the evaluations used to assess student understanding. The ideas behind How People Learn and How People Learn II show that a holistic approach is necessary to accommodate the intricacies of learning. The overlap of these three dimensions can create a positive school culture and climate that focuses on professional growth and uses best practices for adult learners.

Teachers Seen as ‘Knowledge Creators’

Mary K. Tedrow taught in the high school English classroom beginning in 1978, ending her K-12 career as the Porterfield Endowed English Chair at John Handley High School in 2016. She currently directs the Shenandoah Valley Writing Project at Shenandoah University in Winchester Va. Tedrow is also a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Write, Think, Learn: Tapping the Power of Daily Student Writing Across Content Areas :

The hands-down, not-even-a-close-second professional development of my four-decade-spanning teaching career was the Invitational Summer Institute of the National Writing Project held on the campus of George Mason University in 1998 under the direction of the Northern Virginia Writing Project.

I am not the first, nor hopefully the last, teacher to identify the social practices of the NWP as the transformative milestone in my teaching practice.

What makes it so good?

First, teachers are welcomed as knowledge creators rather than knowledge receivers. Each fellow reflects on and reads about one of their own successful teaching practices and presents a lesson to the fellowship. The premise of the writing project is that teachers already have expertise in delivering instruction worth sharing. A trusting community is formed where that expertise is shared. From the very first day, we were treated with professional respect. Our group spanned K-university. Seeing language development across these grade levels made the experience surprisingly rich.

Secondly, we spent time working as writers. We were immersed in the writing process from invention through revision and finally to publication. The NWP believes we all need to be writers (students and teachers) and the best way to develop a writing process is to experience one.

Finally, we learned by doing. All presentations were demonstration lessons where the teacher/participants experienced the strategies and moves by the teacher presenter. This is far different from sit-and-get presentations. We experienced quickwrites, small-group collaboration, draft writing and revising, writing to learn, and more from a student perspective. We reflected regularly on how these practices could be adapted for use in our classrooms. Regular reflection became a professional habit.

The changes following the summer were immediate and ongoing. After feeling the confidence born of living up to expectations, I strove to create that climate for students. We wrote frequently in low-pressure situations long before students were asked for high-stakes writing. We shared our thoughts. I asked for student evaluations just as my leaders had included me in on the evaluation process. (What worked? What would you do differently?)

The NWP model works because teachers are treated the way we are often told to treat students but rarely experience ourselves in our working lives. The weeks spent in the summer changed my classroom into a place I did not want to leave and kept me in a continual search for solutions to my own classroom-based inquiries.

Learning How to Teach Writing

Jeremy Hyler is a middle school English and media-literacy teacher in Michigan. He has co-authored Create, Compose, Connect! Reading, Writing, and Learning with Digital Tools (Routledge/Eye on Education), From Texting to Teaching: Grammar Instruction in a Digital Age , as well as Ask, Explore, Write . Jeremy blogs at MiddleWeb and hosts his own podcast, Middle School Hallways. He can be found on Twitter @jeremybballer and at his website jeremyhyler40.com :

The best professional development I have ever been a part of was the summer institute for the Chippewa River Writing Project , a satellite site of the National Writing Project .

I attended the summer institute as my flame for teaching was almost burnt out. I really wasn’t sure how to reach students with their writing anymore. The professional development was a four-week intense writing institute where I learned not only how to write as a teacher but how to teach good writing to my students. In addition, I also learned what it meant to give meaningful feedback to peers and students.

Throughout the institute, I watched teachers become vulnerable with their own writing. They also shared their own writing lessons they did in their classrooms to get constructive feedback on what was quality instructional practice and what could be improved. As an added bonus, we were all taught how to effectively add technology into our classroom. We learned about Google Documents and created beautiful digital stories throughout the institute, along with being introduced to other digital tools.

For me, it was the best professional development because it lit my teaching fire again. I had renewed passion for what I wanted to do with my students. It was organized in a way that helped me build confidence in my own writing, so I could share it with my students and help them with the struggles they may have in being confident writers. Furthermore, I learned there are a network of teachers out there beyond the walls of my own school who are willing to help and be supportive when it comes to teaching. My writing-project peers are the best!

The support and the network of educators I have been exposed to because I attended the summer institute have led me down a road of continuous opportunities. Ever since I have been a part of the Chippewa River Writing Project, I have co-authored three books, presented at many conferences both in my own state and nationally, and have had many leadership roles. Without the writing project, my voice would have never been heard.

It continues to be the best professional development even today because I have been a part of the summer institute leadership team and have also been a participant for two additional summers. Plus, I continue to work on the leadership team to bring the best professional-development opportunities to teachers across the nation. I would highly recommend without hesitation to anyone to attend the summer institute at their local writing project site and make their voice heard.

‘Research-Based Strategies’

Altagracia H. Delgado (Grace) has been in the education field for 27 years. In those years, she has worked as a bilingual teacher, literacy coach, and school and central-office administrator. Grace is currently the executive director of multilingual services for the Aldine ISD, in the Houston area:

A few years ago, I participated in the Center for Applied Linguistics’ Spanish Literacy Institute: Fostering Spanish Language and Literacy Development. In this training, we learned research-based strategies to provide effective language and literacy instruction in Spanish in transitional bilingual and dual-language education programs.

The sessions were interactive and provided engaging activities for teaching academic language and literacy in Spanish and English to students in elementary grades instructional programs where Spanish and English are the languages of instruction. The presenters taught us about classroom practices by framing the understanding of how Spanish and English linguistic features are the same and different, helping us see where connections can be facilitated, where languages connect, and where specific instruction needs to be given due to the differences.

This training was the best I have ever attended because it modeled for us what real bilingual and dual-language classrooms teachers need to do during their day. By providing the sessions in both English and Spanish and having a combination of research and interaction among adults, we were able to experience the daily interactions of multilingual students and their teachers. The information was practical and applicable in a classroom setting, but it also provided answers for the many questions bilingual educators encounter in their professions, specifically those addressing the similarities and differences in the languages and how to systematically teach language acquisition for Spanish-speaking students.

Although this professional-development session took place six years ago, I still lean back on the principles learned at that time, especially when working with teachers of emergent bilingual students. In the years after that training, I have had the opportunity to provide professional-development sessions to classroom teachers and school leaders and I have used many of the practices and research learned during this training to engage adults in their own learning. I have also been able to witness teachers’ classrooms where the learning and connections have happened, as they have been able to apply this knowledge and experiences with their multilingual students.

Thanks to Pat, Mary, Jeremy, and Altagracia for contributing their thoughts!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It’s titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching .

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email (The RSS feed for this blog, and for all Ed Week articles, has been changed by the new redesign—new ones are not yet available). And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 10 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below.

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13 Key Theories of Learning and Development

Key theories of learning and development.

Unlearning Box

“He is just so lazy – sits there and refuses to do any work. And his parents are no help – they never return phone calls or emails. Why bother?”

This is an actual statement by a teacher frustrated with a fourth grader in her classroom. What this teacher did not know was the context in which the student was living. He was homeless and living out of his mother’s car. His mother couldn’t pay her cell phone bill, so had no way of receiving phone calls or emails. The teacher failed to realize what else could be contributing to his “laziness”: hunger, fear, lack of adequate care, and a parent unavailable to him with her own struggle to survive.

In order to teach our students, we have to know them. Multiple influences affect our students and their environments.

Chapter Outline

Systems that influence student learning, theoretical perspectives on development.

In this chapter, we will investigate how different systems influence learning and we will explore two theoretical perspectives on development. 

As humans grow and develop, there are many different systems that influence this development. Think about systems as interrelated parts of a whole, just like the solar system is made up of planets and other celestial objects. Two theories that consider various impacts on student learning are Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

One way to conceptualize influences on student learning is through need systems. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (see Figure 2.2) theorized that people are motivated by a succession of hierarchical needs (McLeod, 2020). Originally, Maslow discussed five levels of needs shaped in the form of a pyramid. He later adjusted the pyramid to include eight levels of needs, incorporating need for knowledge and understanding, aesthetic needs, and transcendence. Figure 2.2 depicts these eight needs in hierarchical order. The first four levels are deficiency needs, and the upper four are growth needs. The first four are essential to a student’s well being, and they build on each other. These deficiency needs must be satisfied before a person can move on to the growth needs. Moving to the growth needs is essential for learning to truly occur. Now we will examine each of the elements within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in more depth.

Of the eight levels, the first is physiological needs. These needs include food, water, and shelter. In this case, do students have a home where they are properly nourished? If not, students who are not attending to their work may be hungry, not just daydreaming. This is why free and reduced breakfast and lunch programs are so essential in schools.

Safety and security needs are the second level of the pyramid. Students need to feel that they are not in harm’s way. Schools are responsible for maintaining safe environments for students and classrooms need to feel safe and secure. This requires classroom rules that all students follow, including protecting students from bullying and threatening behavior. There are effective and less effective ways to structure a classroom so that it is safe for all students.

The third level of Maslow’s hierarchy is love and belonging. In schools, these needs are met primarily through positive relationships with teachers and peers, and people with whom students regularly interact. Feelings of acceptance are necessary here, and teachers can play a huge role in creating these feelings for students. It is critical that teachers are non-judgmental towards their students. It does not matter how you, as a teacher, may feel about a student’s lifestyle choices, beliefs, political views or family structures; it matters how a student perceives you as someone who accepts them, no matter what.

The fourth and final level of deficiency needs is esteem needs: self-worth and self-esteem. Students must have experiences in schools and classrooms that lead them to feel positive about themselves. Self-esteem is what students think and feel about themselves, and it contributes to their confidence. Self-worth is students knowing that they are valuable and lovable.

Figure 2.2: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Following the four deficiency needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are growth needs. Once students reach growth needs, they are ready for true, meaningful learning. The fifth element, the need to know and understand, is also  referred to as cognitive needs. It is our job as educators to motivate students to want to know and understand the world around them. In order to do this, we must be sure we are providing our students with questions that move them to higher-order thinking skills. An instructional model that is well-developed and utilized in many classrooms is Bloom’s Taxonomy . It can be used to classify learning objectives, and it is a way to encourage students to think more deeply about content and motivate them to want to know more.

The sixth level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is aesthetic needs. At this level, we can learn to appreciate the beauty of the natural world. When we are focused on deficiency needs in the lower levels of Maslow’s theory, it is more difficult to see the beauty in our environment and surroundings. In education, students need to be exposed to the beauty that is reflected in the arts: music, visual arts and theatre. Most schools separate these into distinct periods or blocks; however, it is essential that arts are also integrated into the curriculum. Additionally, students should be exposed to arts outside of Western art so they encounter art forms that include representations of all cultures, including their own.

Self-actualization is the seventh need on the pyramid and is another growth need. Maslow indicated that this happens as we age. It is our intrinsic need to make the most of our lives and reach our full potential. A way of thinking about this is to consider what we think of our ideal selves–or, for young people, how they see themselves or what they see themselves having achieved and broadly experienced as they get to later stages in life.

Finally, transcendence needs are the highest on Maslow’s hierarchy. Maslow (1971) stated, “transcendence refers to the very highest levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos” (p. 269). Though most of us in K-12 schools will not experience students at this level, it is important to note that this is the goal in life, according to Maslow.

Critical Lens: Origins of Theories

Sometimes we hold theories as universal truths without stopping to consider the context in which they were made. For example, Bridgman, Cummings, and Ballard ( 2019 ) recently investigated the origin of Maslow’s theory and discovered that he himself never created the well-known pyramid model to represent the hierarchy of needs. Furthermore, there are concerns that Maslow appropriated his theory from the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation. Dr. Cindy Blackstock (Gitksan First Nation member, as cited in Michel, 2014 ) explains the Blackfoot belief involves a tipi with three levels: self-actualization at the base; community actualization in the middle; and cultural perpetuity at the top. Maslow visited the Siksika Nation in 1938 and published his theory in 1943. Bray (2019) explains more about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and its alignment with the Siksika Nation. You should be informed of Maslow’s hierarchy, but you should also be aware that critiques of this theory exist.

Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Teachers need to determine students’ areas of strength and need to allow students to work and grow in those areas. One approach to doing this is to determine students’ strengths in different intelligence areas. Theorist Howard Gardner (2004, 2006) initially proposed eight multiple intelligences (see Figure 2.3), but he later added two more areas: existential and moral intelligence. Though there is little educational research evidence to support instructing students in these eight intelligences (for example, you should not plan a lesson eight different ways to address all eight intelligences in one lesson!), Gardner’s goal was to ensure that teachers did not just focus on verbal and mathematical intelligences in their teaching, which are two very common foci of instruction in schools.

Figure 2.3: Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

Similarly, while we often can hear reference to learning styles (often including visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinesthetic, or VARK), they have no research-based support. Instead, “people’s approaches to learning can, do, and should vary with context. Rather than assessing and labeling students as particular kinds of learners and planning accordingly, a wise teacher will do the following:

• Offer students options for learning and expressing learning
• Help them reflect on strategies for mastering and using critical content
• Guide them in knowing when to modify an approach to learning when it proves to be inefficient or ineffective in achieving the student’s goals” (Sousa & Tomlinson, 2018, p. 161-162).

Learn more about the myth of learning styles in the video below.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://mtsu.pressbooks.pub/introtoedshell/?p=515#oembed-1

While all human beings are unique and grow, learn, and change at different rates and in different ways, there are some common trends of development that impact the trajectories our students follow. Two foundational theories of development are Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory and Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory.

Cognitive Developmental Theory: Piaget

Cognitive developmental theorists such as Jean Piaget posit that we move from birth to adulthood in predictable stages (Huitt & Hummel, 2003). These theorists argue these stages of development do not vary and are distinct from one other. While rates of progress vary by child, the sequence is the same and skipping stages is impossible. Therefore, progression through stages is essentially similar for each child.

In 1936, Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive development for children:

• the sensorimotor stage , which ranges from birth to age two;
• the preoperational stage , ranging from age two through age six or seven;
• the concrete operational stage , ranging from age six or seven through age 11 or 12;
• and the formal operational stage , ranging from age 11 or 12 through adulthood.

Piaget argued that key abilities are acquired at each stage. We will now look at each stage in depth, along with videos demonstrating these abilities in action.

In the sensorimotor stage , little children learn about their surroundings through their senses.  In addition, the idea of object permanence is emphasized. This is a child’s realization that things continue to exist even if they are not in view. An example is when parents play peek-a-boo with their infants. The child sees that the parent or caregiver is actually gone when the parent’s or caregiver’s hands are in front of their faces. The video below demonstrates the idea of object permanence.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://mtsu.pressbooks.pub/introtoedshell/?p=515#oembed-2

In the preoperational stage , children develop language, imagination, and memory, working toward symbolic thought. One of the key ideas is the principle of conservation , meaning that specific properties of objects remain the same even if other properties change. The notion of centration is critical here in that children only pay attention to one aspect of a situation. An example is filling a shallow round container with water, then pouring the same amount of water into a skinny container. The child in the preoperational stage will say that there is now more water in the skinny container, even though no additional liquid was added. The video below demonstrates the principle of conservation.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://mtsu.pressbooks.pub/introtoedshell/?p=515#oembed-3

Additionally, in the preoperational stage, Piaget suggested that children have egocentric thinking, meaning that they lack the ability to see situations from another person’s point of view. The video below demonstrates the idea of egocentrism .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OinqFgsIbh0&feature=related

In the concrete operational stage , children begin to think more logically and abstractly and can now master the idea of conservation as they work toward operational thought. Children in this stage are less egocentric than before. Key developments in this stage include the notions of reversibility , which is defined as the ability to change direction in linear thinking to return to starting point, and transitivity , which is the ability to infer relationships between two objects based upon objects’ relation to a third object in serial order. The video below demonstrates the ideas of reversibility and transitivity.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://mtsu.pressbooks.pub/introtoedshell/?p=515#oembed-4

Finally, the formal operational stage continues through adulthood. This is when we can better reason and understand hypothetical situations as we develop abstract thought. Key ideas include metacognition , which is the ability to monitor and think about your own thinking; and the ability to compare abstract relationships, such as to generate laws, principles, or theories. The video below demonstrates the idea of hypothetical thinking, where we see how a boy in the concrete operational stage and a woman in the formal operations stage respond to the same scenario.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://mtsu.pressbooks.pub/introtoedshell/?p=515#oembed-5

In addition to his four stages of cognitive development for children, Piaget also discussed how we add new information to our existing understandings. Key terms in his conceptualization of cognitive constructivism include schema, assimilation, accommodation, disequilibrium, and equilibrium. Schema refers to the ways in which we organize information as we confront new ideas. For example, children learn what a wallet is and that it generally contains money. Next they learn that a wallet can be carried in various places, i.e. a pocket or a purse. The child is making a connection now between the idea of a wallet and the category of places where it can be carried. The child’s schema is developing as ideas begin to interconnect and form what we can call a blueprint of concepts and their connections.

In order to develop schema, Piaget would have said that children (and all of us) need to experience disequilibrium . Children are in a state of equilibrium as they go about in the world. As they encounter a new concept to add to their schema, they experience disequilibrium where they need to process how this new information fits into their schema. They do this in two ways: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation uses existing schema to interpret new situations. Accommodation involves changing schema to accommodate new schema and return to a state of equilibrium. Let’s try an example. A child knows that banging a fork on a table makes noise, and the fork does not break. That child and concept are in a state of equilibrium, with the existing schema of knowing banging things on tables does not break the item. The next day, a parent gives the child a sippy cup. The child bangs it on the table and it also does not break, so the child assimilates this new object into their existing understanding that banging items on tables does not break the item. One day, a parent gives the child an egg. The child proceeds to bang it on the table, but what happens? The egg breaks, sending the child’s schema–everything that they bang on the table remains unbroken–into a state of disequilibrium. That child must accommodate that new information into their schema. Once this new information is accommodated, the child can once again move into equilibrium. The video below explains the idea of schema, assimilation and accommodation.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://mtsu.pressbooks.pub/introtoedshell/?p=515#oembed-6

Sociocultural Theory: Vygotsky

Whereas Piaget viewed learning in specific stages where children engage in cognitive constructivism (Huitt & Hummel, 2003), thus emphasizing the role of the individual in learning, Lev Vygotsky viewed learning as socially constructed (Vygotsky, 1986). Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist in the 1920s and 1930s, but his work was not known to the Western world until the 1970s. He emphasized the role that other people have in an individual’s construction of knowledge, known as social constructivism . He realized that we learned more with other people than we learned all by ourselves.

One of the major tenets in Vygotsky’s theory of learning (Vygotsky, 1986) is the zone of proximal development. As shown in Figure 2.4, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what they can do with help.

Figure 2.4: Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

Vygotsky’s often-quoted definition of zone of proximal development says ZPD is “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). The concept of scaffolding is closely related to the ZPD. Scaffolding is a process through which a teacher or more competent peer gives aid to the student in her/his ZPD as necessary, and tapers off this aid as it becomes unnecessary, much as a scaffold is removed from a building during construction. While we often think of a teacher as the more “expert other” in ZPD, this individual does not have to be a teacher. In fact, sometimes our own students are the more “expert other” in certain areas. Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory emphasizes that we can learn more with and through each other.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://mtsu.pressbooks.pub/introtoedshell/?p=515#oembed-7

CRITICAL LENS: CONTEXT MATTERS

As we examine these four theories, it is also important to analyze the context of this work: these theorists and researchers all identified as White, often working with individuals close to them to conduct research (for example, Piaget studied his own children). We all absorb certain beliefs and social norms from our communities, so knowing that these theories came from communities that represented fairly limited diversity is important.

In this chapter, we surveyed two systems that influence students’ learning (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences) and two theoretical perspectives on development (Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory and Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory).

As we saw in the Unlearning Box at the beginning of this chapter, all of our students bring different characteristics with them to our classrooms. While some (not all!) students may share certain characteristics and overall developmental trajectories, teachers must acknowledge that each student in the classroom has individual strengths and needs. Only once we know our students as individual learners will we be able to teach them effectively.

Introduction to Education Copyright © 2022 by David Rodriguez Sanfiorenzo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Education is Fundamental to Development and Growth

Elizabeth king.

Education is fundamental to development and growth. The human mind makes possible all development achievements, from health advances and agricultural innovations to efficient public administration and private sector growth. For countries to reap these benefits fully, they need to unleash the potential of the human mind. And there is no better tool for doing so than education.

Twenty years ago, government officials and development partners met to affirm the importance of education in development—on economic development and broadly on improving people’s lives—and together declared Education for All as a goal. While enrolments have risen in promising fashion around the world, learning levels have remained disappointingly and many remain left behind. Because growth, development, and poverty reduction depend on the knowledge and skills that people acquire, not the number of years that they sit in a classroom, we must transform our call to action from Education for All to Learning for All.

The World Bank’s forthcoming Education Strategy will emphasize several core ideas: Invest early. Invest smartly. Invest in learning for all .

First, foundational skills acquired early in childhood make possible a lifetime of learning. The traditional view of education as starting in primary school takes up the challenge too late. The science of brain development shows that learning needs to be encouraged early and often, both inside and outside of the formal schooling system. Prenatal health and early childhood development programs that include education and health are consequently important to realize this potential. In the primary years, quality teaching is essential to give students the foundational literacy and numeracy on which lifelong learning depends. Adolescence is also a period of high potential for learning, but many teenagers leave school at this point, lured by the prospect of a job, the need to help their families, or turned away by the cost of schooling. For those who drop out too early, second-chance and nonformal learning opportunities are essential to ensure that all youth can acquire skills for the labor market. 

Second, getting results requires smart investments —that is, investments that prioritize and monitor learning, beyond traditional metrics, such as the number of teachers trained or number of students enrolled. Quality needs to be the focus of education investments, with learning gains as the key metric of quality.  Resources are too limited and the challenges too big to be designing policies and programs in the dark. We need evidence on what works in order to invest smartly.

Third, learning for all means ensuring that all students, and not just the most privileged or gifted, acquire the knowledge and skills that they need. Major challenges of access remain for disadvantaged populations at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. We must lower the barriers that keep girls, children with disabilities, and ethnolinguistic minorities from attaining as much education as other population groups. “Learning for All” promotes the equity goals that underlie Education for All and the MDGs. Without confronting equity issues, it will be impossible to achieve the objective of learning for all.

Achieving learning for all will be challenging, but it is the right agenda for the next decade. It is the knowledge and skills that children and youth acquire today—not simply their school attendance—that will drive their employability, productivity, health, and well-being in the decades to come, and that will help ensure that their communities and nations thrive.

Read the full text of my speech to the Education World Forum here.

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Theories of Child Development and Their Impact on Early Childhood Education and Care

• Published: 29 October 2021
• Volume 51 , pages 15–30, ( 2023 )

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• Olivia N. Saracho   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4108-7790 1  

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Developmental theorists use their research to generate philosophies on children’s development. They organize and interpret data based on a scheme to develop their theory. A theory refers to a systematic statement of principles related to observed phenomena and their relationship to each other. A theory of child development looks at the children's growth and behavior and interprets it. It suggests elements in the child's genetic makeup and the environmental conditions that influence development and behavior and how these elements are related. Many developmental theories offer insights about how the performance of individuals is stimulated, sustained, directed, and encouraged. Psychologists have established several developmental theories. Many different competing theories exist, some dealing with only limited domains of development, and are continuously revised. This article describes the developmental theories and their founders who have had the greatest influence on the fields of child development, early childhood education, and care. The following sections discuss some influences on the individuals’ development, such as theories, theorists, theoretical conceptions, and specific principles. It focuses on five theories that have had the most impact: maturationist, constructivist, behavioral, psychoanalytic, and ecological. Each theory offers interpretations on the meaning of children's development and behavior. Although the theories are clustered collectively into schools of thought, they differ within each school.

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The author is grateful to Mary Jalongo for her expert editing and her keen eye for the smallest details.

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Saracho, O.N. Theories of Child Development and Their Impact on Early Childhood Education and Care. Early Childhood Educ J 51 , 15–30 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-021-01271-5

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The Developing Learner

Theme:  how the learner is developing physically, cognitively, and psychosocially.

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Learning Objectives:

• Describe fundamental issues in the study of development
• Explain  Bronfenbrenner’s   Bioecological  Theory
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• Contrast psychological versus social  constructivism
• Explain Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
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• Describe Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development
• Compare and contrast self-concept and self-esteem
• Describe Marcia’s identity statuses and the development of identity
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The essential components of a successful L&D strategy

Over the past decade, the global workforce has been continually evolving because of a number of factors. An increasingly competitive business landscape, rising complexity, and the digital revolution are reshaping the mix of employees. Meanwhile, persistent uncertainty, a multigenerational workforce, and a shorter shelf life for knowledge have placed a premium on reskilling and upskilling. The shift to a digital, knowledge-based economy means that a vibrant workforce is more important than ever: research suggests that a very significant percentage of market capitalization in public companies is based on intangible assets—skilled employees, exceptional leaders, and knowledge. 1 Intangible Asset Market Value Study, Ocean Tomo.

Learning and development—From evolution to revolution

We began in 2014 by surveying 1,500 executives about capability building. In 2016, we added 120 L&D leaders at 91 organizations to our database, gathering information on their traditional training strategies and aspirations for future programs. We also interviewed 15 chief learning officers or L&D heads at major companies.

Historically, the L&D function has been relatively successful in helping employees build skills and perform well in their existing roles. The main focus of L&D has been on upskilling. However, the pace of change continues to accelerate; McKinsey research estimates that as many as 800 million jobs could be displaced by automation by 2030.

Employee roles are expected to continue evolving, and a large number of people will need to learn new skills to remain employable. Unsurprisingly, our research confirmed our initial hypothesis: corporate learning must undergo revolutionary changes over the next few years to keep pace with constant technological advances. In addition to updating training content, companies must increase their focus on blended-learning solutions, which combine digital learning, fieldwork, and highly immersive classroom sessions. With the growth of user-friendly digital-learning platforms, employees will take more ownership of their professional development, logging in to take courses when the need arises rather than waiting for a scheduled classroom session.

Such innovations will require companies to devote more resources to training: our survey revealed that 60 percent of respondents plan to increase L&D spending over the next few years, and 66 percent want to boost the number of employee-training hours. As they commit more time and money, companies must ensure that the transformation of the L&D function proceeds smoothly.

All of these trends have elevated the importance of the learning-and-development (L&D) function. We undertook several phases of research to understand trends and current priorities in L&D (see sidebar, “Learning and development—From evolution to revolution”). Our efforts highlighted how the L&D function is adapting to meet the changing needs of organizations, as well as the growing levels of investment in professional development.

To get the most out of investments in training programs and curriculum development, L&D leaders must embrace a broader role within the organization and formulate an ambitious vision for the function. An essential component of this effort is a comprehensive, coordinated strategy that engages the organization and encourages collaboration. The ACADEMIES© framework, which consists of nine dimensions of L&D, can help to strengthen the function and position it to serve the organization more effectively.

The strategic role of L&D

One of L&D’s primary responsibilities is to manage the development of people—and to do so in a way that supports other key business priorities. L&D’s strategic role spans five areas (Exhibit 1). 2 Nick van Dam, 25 Best Practices in Learning & Talent Development , second edition, Raleigh, NC: Lulu Publishing, 2008.

• Attract and retain talent. Traditionally, learning focused solely on improving productivity. Today, learning also contributes to employability. Over the past several decades, employment has shifted from staying with the same company for a lifetime to a model where workers are being retained only as long as they can add value to an enterprise. Workers are now in charge of their personal and professional growth and development—one reason that people list “opportunities for learning and development” among the top criteria for joining an organization. Conversely, a lack of L&D is one of the key reasons people cite for leaving a company.
• Develop people capabilities. Human capital requires ongoing investments in L&D to retain its value. When knowledge becomes outdated or forgotten—a more rapid occurrence today—the value of human capital declines and needs to be supplemented by new learning and relevant work experiences. 3 Gary S. Becker, “Investment in human capital: A theoretical analysis,” Journal of Political Economy , 1962, Volume 70, Number 5, Part 2, pp. 9–49, jstor.org. Companies that make investments in the next generation of leaders are seeing an impressive return. Research indicates that companies in the top quartile of leadership outperform other organizations by nearly two times on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA). Moreover, companies that invest in developing leaders during significant transformations are 2.4 times more likely to hit their performance targets . 4 “ Economic Conditions Snapshot, June 2009: McKinsey Global Survey results ,” June 2009.
• Create a values-based culture. As the workforce in many companies becomes increasingly virtual and globally dispersed, L&D can help to build a values-based culture and a sense of community. In particular, millennials are particularly interested in working for values-based, sustainable enterprises that contribute to the welfare of society.
• Build an employer brand. An organization’s brand is one of its most important assets and conveys a great deal about the company’s success in the market, financial strengths, position in the industry, and products and services. Investments in L&D can help to enhance company’s brand and boost its reputation as an “employer of choice.” As large segments of the workforce prepare to retire, employers must work harder to compete for a shrinking talent pool. To do so, they must communicate their brand strength explicitly through an employer value proposition.
• Motivate and engage employees. The most important way to engage employees is to provide them with opportunities to learn and develop new competencies. Research suggests that lifelong learning contributes to happiness. 5 John Coleman, “Lifelong learning is good for your health, your wallet, and your social life,” Harvard Business Review , February 7, 2017, hbr.org. When highly engaged employees are challenged and given the skills to grow and develop within their chosen career path, they are more likely to be energized by new opportunities at work and satisfied with their current organization.

The L&D function in transition

Over the years, we have identified and field-tested nine dimensions that contribute to a strong L&D function. We combined these dimensions to create the ACADEMIES framework, which covers all aspects of L&D functions, from setting aspirations to measuring impact (Exhibit 2). Although many companies regularly execute on several dimensions of this framework, our recent research found that only a few companies are fully mature in all dimensions.

1. Alignment with business strategy

One of an L&D executive’s primary tasks is to develop and shape a learning strategy based on the company’s business and talent strategies. The learning strategy seeks to support professional development and build capabilities across the company, on time, and in a cost-effective manner. In addition, the learning strategy can enhance the company culture and encourage employees to live the company’s values.

For many organizations, the L&D function supports the implementation of the business strategy. For example, if one of the business strategies is a digital transformation, L&D will focus on building the necessary people capabilities to make that possible.

Every business leader would agree that L&D must align with a company’s overall priorities. Yet research has found that many L&D functions fall short on this dimension. Only 40 percent of companies say that their learning strategy is aligned with business goals. 6 Human Capital Management Excellence Conference 2018, Brandon Hall Group. For 60 percent, then, learning has no explicit connection to the company’s strategic objectives. L&D functions may be out of sync with the business because of outdated approaches or because budgets have been based on priorities from previous years rather than today’s imperatives, such as a digital transformation.

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To be effective, L&D must take a hard look at employee capabilities and determine which are most essential to support the execution of the company’s business strategy. L&D leaders should reevaluate this alignment on a yearly basis to ensure they are creating a people-capability agenda that truly reflects business priorities and strategic objectives.

2. Co-ownership between business units and HR

With new tools and technologies constantly emerging, companies must become more agile, ready to adapt their business processes and practices. L&D functions must likewise be prepared to rapidly launch capability-building programs—for example, if new business needs suddenly arise or staff members require immediate training on new technologies such as cloud-based collaboration tools.

L&D functions can enhance their partnership with business leaders by establishing a governance structure in which leadership from both groups share responsibility for defining, prioritizing, designing, and securing funds for capability-building programs. Under this governance model, a company’s chief experience officer (CXO), senior executives, and business-unit heads will develop the people-capability agenda for segments of the enterprise and ensure that it aligns with the company’s overall strategic goals. Top business executives will also help firmly embed the learning function and all L&D initiatives in the organizational culture. The involvement of senior leadership enables full commitment to the L&D function’s longer-term vision.

3. Assessment of capability gaps and estimated value

After companies identify their business priorities, they must verify that their employees can deliver on them—a task that may be more difficult than it sounds. Some companies make no effort to assess employee capabilities, while others do so only at a high level. Conversations with L&D, HR, and senior executives suggest that many companies are ineffective or indifferent at assessing capability gaps, especially when it comes to senior leaders and midlevel managers.

The most effective companies take a deliberate, systematic approach to capability assessment. At the heart of this process is a comprehensive competency or capability model based on the organization’s strategic direction. For example, a key competency for a segment of an e-commerce company’s workforce could be “deep expertise in big data and predictive analytics.”

After identifying the most essential capabilities for various functions or job descriptions, companies should then assess how employees rate in each of these areas. L&D interventions should seek to close these capability gaps.

4. Design of learning journeys

Most corporate learning is delivered through a combination of digital-learning formats and in-person sessions. While our research indicates that immersive L&D experiences in the classroom still have immense value, leaders have told us that they are incredibly busy “from eight to late,” which does not give them a lot of time to sit in a classroom. Furthermore, many said that they prefer to develop and practice new skills and behaviors in a “safe environment,” where they don’t have to worry about public failures that might affect their career paths.

Traditional L&D programs consisted of several days of classroom learning with no follow-up sessions, even though people tend to forget what they have learned without regular reinforcement. As a result, many L&D functions are moving away from stand-alone programs by designing learning journeys—continuous learning opportunities that take place over a period of time and include L&D interventions such as fieldwork, pre- and post-classroom digital learning, social learning, on-the-job coaching and mentoring, and short workshops. The main objectives of a learning journey are to help people develop the required new competencies in the most effective and efficient way and to support the transfer of learning to the job.

5. Execution and scale-up

An established L&D agenda consists of a number of strategic initiatives that support capability building and are aligned with business goals, such as helping leaders develop high-performing teams or roll out safety training. The successful execution of L&D initiatives on time and on budget is critical to build and sustain support from business leaders.

L&D functions often face an overload of initiatives and insufficient funding. L&D leadership needs to maintain an ongoing discussion with business leaders about initiatives and priorities to ensure the requisite resources and support.

Many new L&D initiatives are initially targeted to a limited audience. A successful execution of a small pilot, such as an online orientation program for a specific audience, can lead to an even bigger impact once the program is rolled out to the entire enterprise. The program’s cost per person declines as companies benefit from economies of scale.

6. Measurement of impact on business performance

A learning strategy’s execution and impact should be measured using key performance indicators (KPIs). The first indicator looks at business excellence: how closely aligned all L&D initiatives and investments are with business priorities. The second KPI looks at learning excellence: whether learning interventions change people’s behavior and performance. Last, an operational-excellence KPI measures how well investments and resources in the corporate academy are used.

Accurate measurement is not simple, and many organizations still rely on traditional impact metrics such as learning-program satisfaction and completion scores. But high-performing organizations focus on outcomes-based metrics such as impact on individual performance, employee engagement, team effectiveness, and business-process improvement.

We have identified several lenses for articulating and measuring learning impact:

• Strategic alignment: How effectively does the learning strategy support the organization’s priorities?
• Capabilities: How well does the L&D function help colleagues build the mind-sets, skills, and expertise they need most? This impact can be measured by assessing people’s capability gaps against a comprehensive competency framework.
• Organizational health: To what extent does learning strengthen the overall health and DNA of the organization? Relevant dimensions of the McKinsey Organizational Health Index can provide a baseline.
• Individual peak performance: Beyond raw capabilities, how well does the L&D function help colleagues achieve maximum impact in their role while maintaining a healthy work-life balance?

Access to big data provides L&D functions with more opportunities to assess and predict the business impact of their interventions.

7. Integration of L&D interventions into HR processes

Just as L&D corporate-learning activities need to be aligned with the business, they should also be an integral part of the HR agenda. L&D has an important role to play in recruitment, onboarding, performance management, promotion, workforce, and succession planning. Our research shows that at best, many L&D functions have only loose connections to annual performance reviews and lack a structured approach and follow-up to performance-management practices.

L&D leadership must understand major HR management practices and processes and collaborate closely with HR leaders. The best L&D functions use consolidated development feedback from performance reviews as input for their capability-building agenda. A growing number of companies are replacing annual performance appraisals with frequent, in-the-moment feedback. 7 HCM outlook 2018 , Brandon Hall Group. This is another area in which the L&D function can help managers build skills to provide development feedback effectively.

Elevating Learning & Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field

Another example is onboarding. Companies that have developed high-impact onboarding processes score better on employee engagement and satisfaction and lose fewer new hires. 8 HCM outlook 2018 , Brandon Hall Group. The L&D function can play a critical role in onboarding—for example, by helping people build the skills to be successful in their role, providing new hires with access to digital-learning technologies, and connecting them with other new hires and mentors.

8. Enabling of the 70:20:10 learning framework

Many L&D functions embrace a framework known as “70:20:10,” in which 70 percent of learning takes place on the job, 20 percent through interaction and collaboration, and 10 percent through formal-learning interventions such as classroom training and digital curricula. These percentages are general guidelines and vary by industry and organization. L&D functions have traditionally focused on the formal-learning component.

Today, L&D leaders must design and implement interventions that support informal learning, including coaching and mentoring, on-the-job instruction, apprenticeships, leadership shadowing, action-based learning, on-demand access to digital learning, and lunch-and-learn sessions. Social technologies play a growing role in connecting experts and creating and sharing knowledge.

9. Systems and learning technology applications

The most significant enablers for just-in-time learning are technology platforms and applications. Examples include next-generation learning-management systems, virtual classrooms, mobile-learning apps, embedded performance-support systems, polling software, learning-video platforms, learning-assessment and -measurement platforms, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and small private online courses (SPOCs), to name just a few.

The learning-technology industry has moved entirely to cloud-based platforms, which provide L&D functions with unlimited opportunities to plug and unplug systems and access the latest functionality without having to go through lengthy and expensive implementations of an on-premises system. L&D leaders must make sure that learning technologies fit into an overall system architecture that includes functionality to support the entire talent cycle, including recruitment, onboarding, performance management, L&D, real-time feedback tools, career management, succession planning, and rewards and recognition.

L&D leaders are increasingly aware of the challenges created by the fourth industrial revolution (technologies that are connecting the physical and digital worlds), but few have implemented large-scale transformation programs. Instead, most are slowly adapting their strategy and curricula as needed. However, with technology advancing at an ever-accelerating pace, L&D leaders can delay no longer: human capital is more important than ever and will be the primary factor in sustaining competitive advantage over the next few years.

The leaders of L&D functions need to revolutionize their approach by creating a learning strategy that aligns with business strategy and by identifying and enabling the capabilities needed to achieve success. This approach will result in robust curricula that employ every relevant and available learning method and technology. The most effective companies will invest in innovative L&D programs, remain flexible and agile, and build the human talent needed to master the digital age.

These changes entail some risk, and perhaps some trial and error, but the rewards are great.

A version of this chapter was published in TvOO Magazine in September 2016. It is also included in Elevating Learning & Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field , August 2018.

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Jacqueline Brassey is director of Enduring Priorities Learning in McKinsey’s Amsterdam office, where Nick van Dam is an alumnus and senior adviser to the firm as well as professor and chief of the IE University (Madrid) Center for Learning Innovation; Lisa Christensen is a senior learning expert in the San Francisco office.

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Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, megan kuhfeld , megan kuhfeld senior research scientist - nwea @megankuhfeld jim soland , jim soland assistant professor, school of education and human development - university of virginia, affiliated research fellow - nwea @jsoland karyn lewis , and karyn lewis director, center for school and student progress - nwea @karynlew emily morton emily morton research scientist - nwea @emily_r_morton.

March 3, 2022

As we reach the two-year mark of the initial wave of pandemic-induced school shutdowns, academic normalcy remains out of reach for many students, educators, and parents. In addition to surging COVID-19 cases at the end of 2021, schools have faced severe staff shortages , high rates of absenteeism and quarantines , and rolling school closures . Furthermore, students and educators continue to struggle with mental health challenges , higher rates of violence and misbehavior , and concerns about lost instructional time .

As we outline in our new research study released in January, the cumulative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ academic achievement has been large. We tracked changes in math and reading test scores across the first two years of the pandemic using data from 5.4 million U.S. students in grades 3-8. We focused on test scores from immediately before the pandemic (fall 2019), following the initial onset (fall 2020), and more than one year into pandemic disruptions (fall 2021).

Average fall 2021 math test scores in grades 3-8 were 0.20-0.27 standard deviations (SDs) lower relative to same-grade peers in fall 2019, while reading test scores were 0.09-0.18 SDs lower. This is a sizable drop. For context, the math drops are significantly larger than estimated impacts from other large-scale school disruptions, such as after Hurricane Katrina—math scores dropped 0.17 SDs in one year for New Orleans evacuees .

Even more concerning, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20% in math (corresponding to 0.20 SDs) and 15% in reading (0.13 SDs), primarily during the 2020-21 school year. Further, achievement tended to drop more between fall 2020 and 2021 than between fall 2019 and 2020 (both overall and differentially by school poverty), indicating that disruptions to learning have continued to negatively impact students well past the initial hits following the spring 2020 school closures.

These numbers are alarming and potentially demoralizing, especially given the heroic efforts of students to learn and educators to teach in incredibly trying times. From our perspective, these test-score drops in no way indicate that these students represent a “ lost generation ” or that we should give up hope. Most of us have never lived through a pandemic, and there is so much we don’t know about students’ capacity for resiliency in these circumstances and what a timeline for recovery will look like. Nor are we suggesting that teachers are somehow at fault given the achievement drops that occurred between 2020 and 2021; rather, educators had difficult jobs before the pandemic, and now are contending with huge new challenges, many outside their control.

Clearly, however, there’s work to do. School districts and states are currently making important decisions about which interventions and strategies to implement to mitigate the learning declines during the last two years. Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) investments from the American Rescue Plan provided nearly $200 billion to public schools to spend on COVID-19-related needs. Of that sum, $22 billion is dedicated specifically to addressing learning loss using “evidence-based interventions” focused on the “ disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on underrepresented student subgroups. ” Reviews of district and state spending plans (see Future Ed , EduRecoveryHub , and RAND’s American School District Panel for more details) indicate that districts are spending their ESSER dollars designated for academic recovery on a wide variety of strategies, with summer learning, tutoring, after-school programs, and extended school-day and school-year initiatives rising to the top.

Comparing the negative impacts from learning disruptions to the positive impacts from interventions

To help contextualize the magnitude of the impacts of COVID-19, we situate test-score drops during the pandemic relative to the test-score gains associated with common interventions being employed by districts as part of pandemic recovery efforts. If we assume that such interventions will continue to be as successful in a COVID-19 school environment, can we expect that these strategies will be effective enough to help students catch up? To answer this question, we draw from recent reviews of research on high-dosage tutoring , summer learning programs , reductions in class size , and extending the school day (specifically for literacy instruction) . We report effect sizes for each intervention specific to a grade span and subject wherever possible (e.g., tutoring has been found to have larger effects in elementary math than in reading).

Figure 1 shows the standardized drops in math test scores between students testing in fall 2019 and fall 2021 (separately by elementary and middle school grades) relative to the average effect size of various educational interventions. The average effect size for math tutoring matches or exceeds the average COVID-19 score drop in math. Research on tutoring indicates that it often works best in younger grades, and when provided by a teacher rather than, say, a parent. Further, some of the tutoring programs that produce the biggest effects can be quite intensive (and likely expensive), including having full-time tutors supporting all students (not just those needing remediation) in one-on-one settings during the school day. Meanwhile, the average effect of reducing class size is negative but not significant, with high variability in the impact across different studies. Summer programs in math have been found to be effective (average effect size of .10 SDs), though these programs in isolation likely would not eliminate the COVID-19 test-score drops.

Figure 1: Math COVID-19 test-score drops compared to the effect sizes of various educational interventions

Source: COVID-19 score drops are pulled from Kuhfeld et al. (2022) Table 5; reduction-in-class-size results are from pg. 10 of Figles et al. (2018) Table 2; summer program results are pulled from Lynch et al (2021) Table 2; and tutoring estimates are pulled from Nictow et al (2020) Table 3B. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown with vertical lines on each bar.

Notes: Kuhfeld et al. and Nictow et al. reported effect sizes separately by grade span; Figles et al. and Lynch et al. report an overall effect size across elementary and middle grades. We were unable to find a rigorous study that reported effect sizes for extending the school day/year on math performance. Nictow et al. and Kraft & Falken (2021) also note large variations in tutoring effects depending on the type of tutor, with larger effects for teacher and paraprofessional tutoring programs than for nonprofessional and parent tutoring. Class-size reductions included in the Figles meta-analysis ranged from a minimum of one to minimum of eight students per class.

Figure 2 displays a similar comparison using effect sizes from reading interventions. The average effect of tutoring programs on reading achievement is larger than the effects found for the other interventions, though summer reading programs and class size reduction both produced average effect sizes in the ballpark of the COVID-19 reading score drops.

Figure 2: Reading COVID-19 test-score drops compared to the effect sizes of various educational interventions

Source: COVID-19 score drops are pulled from Kuhfeld et al. (2022) Table 5; extended-school-day results are from Figlio et al. (2018) Table 2; reduction-in-class-size results are from pg. 10 of Figles et al. (2018) ; summer program results are pulled from Kim & Quinn (2013) Table 3; and tutoring estimates are pulled from Nictow et al (2020) Table 3B. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown with vertical lines on each bar.

Notes: While Kuhfeld et al. and Nictow et al. reported effect sizes separately by grade span, Figlio et al. and Kim & Quinn report an overall effect size across elementary and middle grades. Class-size reductions included in the Figles meta-analysis ranged from a minimum of one to minimum of eight students per class.

There are some limitations of drawing on research conducted prior to the pandemic to understand our ability to address the COVID-19 test-score drops. First, these studies were conducted under conditions that are very different from what schools currently face, and it is an open question whether the effectiveness of these interventions during the pandemic will be as consistent as they were before the pandemic. Second, we have little evidence and guidance about the efficacy of these interventions at the unprecedented scale that they are now being considered. For example, many school districts are expanding summer learning programs, but school districts have struggled to find staff interested in teaching summer school to meet the increased demand. Finally, given the widening test-score gaps between low- and high-poverty schools, it’s uncertain whether these interventions can actually combat the range of new challenges educators are facing in order to narrow these gaps. That is, students could catch up overall, yet the pandemic might still have lasting, negative effects on educational equality in this country.

Given that the current initiatives are unlikely to be implemented consistently across (and sometimes within) districts, timely feedback on the effects of initiatives and any needed adjustments will be crucial to districts’ success. The Road to COVID Recovery project and the National Student Support Accelerator are two such large-scale evaluation studies that aim to produce this type of evidence while providing resources for districts to track and evaluate their own programming. Additionally, a growing number of resources have been produced with recommendations on how to best implement recovery programs, including scaling up tutoring , summer learning programs , and expanded learning time .

Ultimately, there is much work to be done, and the challenges for students, educators, and parents are considerable. But this may be a moment when decades of educational reform, intervention, and research pay off. Relying on what we have learned could show the way forward.

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Committee on the Science of Children Birth to Age 8: Deepening and Broadening the Foundation for Success; Board on Children, Youth, and Families; Institute of Medicine; National Research Council; Allen LR, Kelly BB, editors. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2015 Jul 23.

Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation.

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4 Child Development and Early Learning

The domains of child development and early learning are discussed in different terms and categorized in different ways in the various fields and disciplines that are involved in research, practice, and policy related to children from birth through age 8. To organize the discussion in this report, the committee elected to use the approach and overarching terms depicted in Figure 4-1 . The committee does not intend to present this as a single best set of terms or a single best categorical organization. Indeed, it is essential to recognize that the domains shown in Figure 4-1 are not easily separable and that a case can be made for multiple different categorizations. For example, different disciplines and researchers have categorized different general cognitive processes under the categorical term “executive function.” General cognitive processes also relate to learning competencies such as persistence and engagement. Similarly, self-regulation has both cognitive and emotional dimensions. It is sometimes categorized as a part of executive function, as a part of socioemotional competence, or as a part of learning competencies. Attention and memory could be considered a part of general cognitive processes, as embedded within executive function, or linked to learning competencies related to persistence. Mental health is closely linked to socioemotional competence, but is also inseparable from health.

Report's organizational approach for the domains of child development and early learning.

The challenge of cleanly separating these concepts highlights a key attribute of all of these domains, which is that they do not develop or operate in isolation. Each enables and mutually supports learning and development in the others. Therefore, the importance of the interactions among the domains is emphasized throughout this chapter. For example, socioemotional competence is important for self-regulation, as are certain cognitive skills, and both emotional and cognitive self-regulation are important for children to be able to exercise learning competencies. Similarly, although certain skills and concept knowledge are distinct to developing proficiency in particular subject areas, learning in these subject areas also both requires and supports general cognitive skills such as reasoning and attention, as well as learning competencies and socioemotional competence. In an overarching example of interactions, a child's security both physically and in relationships creates the context in which learning is most achievable across all of the domains.

It is less important that all fields of research, practice, and policy adhere to the exact same categorizations, and more important that all conduct their work in a way that is cognizant and inclusive of all the elements that contribute to child development and early learning, and that all fields recognize that they are interactive and mutually reinforcing rather than hierarchical. This point foreshadows a theme that is addressed more fully in subsequent chapters. Because different fields and sectors may not use the same categorizations and vocabulary for these domains and skills, developing practices and policies that support more consistent and continuous development and early learning across birth through age 8 will require a concerted effort to communicate clearly and come to a mutual understanding of the goals for children. To communicate across fields and between research and practice communities requires being aware of the different categorical frameworks and terms that are used and being able to discuss the various concepts and content—and their implications—with clarity across those different frameworks. Practitioners and policy makers will be aided in achieving greater precision and clarity in their actions and decisions if those conducting and communicating future research keep this challenge in mind across domains, especially in those cases in which the taxonomy is most variable (e.g., self-regulation, executive function, general learning competencies).

With these caveats in mind, the remainder of this chapter addresses in turn the domains of child development and early learning depicted in Figure 4-1 : cognitive development, including learning of specific subjects; general learning competencies; socioemotional development; and physical development and health. The final section examines a key overarching issue: the effects on child development and early learning of the stress and adversity that is also an important theme in the discussion of the interaction between biology and environment in Chapter 3 .

• COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

This section highlights what is known about cognitive development in young children. It begins with key concepts from research viewpoints that have contributed to recent advances in understanding of the developing mind, and then presents the implications of this knowledge for early care and education settings. The following section addresses the learning of specific subjects, with a focus on language and mathematics.

Studies of early cognitive development have led researchers to understand the developing mind as astonishingly competent, active, and insightful from a very early age. For example, infants engage in an intuitive analysis of the statistical regularities in the speech sounds they hear en route to constructing language ( Saffran, 2003 ). Infants and toddlers derive implicit theories to explain the actions of objects and the behavior of people; these theories form the foundation for causal learning and more sophisticated understanding of the physical and social worlds. Infants and young children also are keenly responsive to what they can learn from the actions and words directed to them by other people. This capacity for joint attention may be the foundation that enables humans to benefit from culturally transmitted knowledge ( Tomasello et al., 2005 ). Infants respond to cues conveying the communicative intentions of an adult (such as eye contact and infant-directed speech) and tune in to what the adult is referring to and what can be learned about it. This “natural pedagogy” ( Csibra, 2010 ; Csibra and Gergely, 2009 ) becomes more sophisticated in the sensitivity of preschoolers to implicit pedagogical guides in adult speech directed to them ( Butler and Markman, 2012a , b , 2014 ). Young children rely so much on what they learn from others that they become astute, by the preschool years, in distinguishing adult speakers who are likely to provide them with reliable information from those who are not ( Harris, 2012 ; Jaswal, 2010 ; Koenig and Doebel, 2013 ). This connection of relationships and social interactions to cognitive development is consistent with how the brain develops and how the mind grows, and is a theme throughout this chapter.

Much of what current research shows is going on in young children's minds is not transparent in their behavior. Infants and young children may not show what they know because of competing demands on their attention, limitations in what they can do, and immature self-regulation. This is one of the reasons why developmental scientists use carefully designed experiments for elucidating what young children know and understand about the world. By designing research procedures that eliminate competing distractions and rely on simple responses (such as looking time and expressions of surprise), researchers seek to uncover cognitive processes that might otherwise be more difficult to see. Evidence derived in this experimental manner, such as the examples in the sections that follow, can be helpful in explaining young children's rapid growth in language learning, imitation, problem solving, and other skills.

Implicit Theories

One of the most important discoveries about the developing mind is how early and significantly very young children, even starting in infancy, are uniting disparate observations or discrete facts into coherent conceptual systems ( Carey, 2009 ; Gopnik and Wellman, 2012 ; Spelke and Kinzler, 2007 ). From very early on, children are not simply passive observers, registering the superficial appearance of things. Rather, they are building explanatory systems—implicit theories—that organize their knowledge. Such implicit theories contain causal principles and causal relations; these theories enable children to predict, explain, and reason about relevant phenomena and, in some cases, intervene to change them. As early as the first year of life, babies are developing incipient theories about how the world of people, other living things, objects, and numbers operates. It is important to point out that these foundational theories are not simply isolated forms of knowledge, but play a profound role in children's everyday lives and subsequent education.

One major example of an implicit theory that is already developing as early as infancy is “theory of mind,” which refers to the conceptual framework people use to reason about the mental lives of others as well as themselves. This example is discussed in detail below. Some additional illustrative examples of the development of implicit theories are provided in Box 4-1 .

Examples of the Development of Implicit Theories. Even babies hold some fundamental principles about how objects move about in space and time (Baillargeon et al., 2009). For example, babies are surprised (as measured by their increased looking time) if (more...)

Theory of Mind

People intuitively understand others' actions as motivated by desires, goals, feelings, intentions, thoughts, and other mental states, and we understand how these mental states affect one another (for example, an unfulfilled desire can evoke negative feelings and a motivation to continue trying to achieve the goal). One remarkable discovery of research on young children is that they are developing their own intuitive “map” of mental processes like these from very early in life ( Baillargeon et al., 2010 ; Saxe, 2013 ; Wellman and Woolley, 1990 ). Children's developing theory of mind transforms how they respond to people and what they learn from them. Infants and young children are beginning to understand what goes on in people's minds, and how others' feelings and thoughts are similar to and different from their own.

Infants first have a relatively simple theory of mind. They are aware of some basic characteristics: what people are looking at is a sign of what they are paying attention to; people act intentionally and are goal directed; people have positive and negative feelings in response to things around them; and people have different perceptions, goals, and feelings. Children add to this mental map as their awareness grows. From infancy on, developing theory of mind permeates everyday social interactions—affecting what and how children learn, how they react to and interact with other people, how they assess the fairness of an action, and how they evaluate themselves.

One-year-olds, for example, will look in their mother's direction when faced with someone or something unfamiliar to “read” mother's expression and determine whether this is a dangerous or benign unfamiliarity. Infants also detect when an adult makes eye contact, speaks in an infant-directed manner (such as using higher pitch and melodic intonations), and responds contingently to the infant's behavior. Under these circumstances, infants are especially attentive to what the adult says and does, thus devoting special attention to social situations in which the adult's intentions are likely to represent learning opportunities.

Other examples also illustrate how a developing theory of mind underlies children's emerging understanding of the intentions of others. Take imitation, for example. It is well established that babies and young children imitate the actions of others. Children as young as 14 to 18 months are often imitating not the literal observed action but the action they thought the actor intended—the goal or the rationale behind the action ( Gergely et al., 2002 ; Meltzoff, 1995 ). Word learning is another example in which babies' reasoning based on theory of mind plays a crucial role. By at least 15 months old, when babies hear an adult label an object, they take the speaker's intent into account by checking the speaker's focus of attention and deciding whether they think the adult indicated the object intentionally. Only when babies have evidence that the speaker intended to refer to a particular object with a label will they learn that word ( Baldwin, 1991 ; Baldwin and Moses, 2001 ; Baldwin and Tomasello, 1998 ).

Babies also can perceive the unfulfilled goals of others and intervene to help them; this is called “shared intentionality.” Babies as young as 14 months old who witness an adult struggling to reach for an object will interrupt their play to crawl over and hand the object to the adult ( Warneken and Tomasello, 2007 ). By the time they are 18 months old, shared intentionality enables toddlers to act helpfully in a variety of situations; for example, they pick up dropped objects for adults who indicate that they need assistance (but not for adults who dropped the object intentionally) ( Warneken and Tomasello, 2006 ). Developing an understanding of others' goals and preferences and how to facilitate them affects how young children interpret the behavior of people they observe and provides a basis for developing a sense of helpful versus undesirable human activity that is a foundation for later development of moral understanding (cf. Bloom, 2013 ; Hamlin et al., 2007 ; Thompson, 2012 , 2015 ).

Developing Implicit Theories: Implications for Adults

The research on the development of implicit theories in children has important implications for how adults work with and educate young children. Failure to recognize the extent to which they are construing information in terms of their lay theories can result in educational strategies that oversimplify material for children. Educational materials guided by the assumption that young children are “concrete” thinkers—that they cannot deal with abstraction or reason hypothetically—leads educators to focus on simple, descriptive activities that can deprive children of opportunities to advance their conceptual frameworks. Designing effective materials in a given domain or subject matter requires knowing what implicit theories children hold, what core causal principles they use, and what misconceptions and gaps in knowledge they have, and then using empirically validated steps to help lead them to a more accurate, more advanced conceptual framework.

Statistical Learning

Statistical learning refers to the range of ways in which children, even babies, are implicitly sensitive to the statistical regularities in their environment, although they are not explicitly learning or applying statistics. Like the development of implicit theories, this concept of statistical learning counters the possible misconception of babies as passive learners and bears on the vital importance of their having opportunities to observe and interact with the environment. Several examples of statistical learning are provided in Box 4-2 .

Examples of Statistical Learning. Infants can use information about the statistics of syllables in the speech they hear to help them parse words. How do we know from hearing prettybaby that baby is more likely to be a word than tyba ? One way is that the (more...)

Understanding Causal Inference

Children's intuitive understanding of causal inference has long been recognized as a fundamental component of conceptual development. Young children, although not explicitly or consciously experimenting with causality, can experience observations and learning that allow them to conclude that a particular variable X causes (or prevents) an effect Y. Recent advances in the field have documented the ways young children can implicitly use the statistics of how events covary to infer causal relations, make predictions, generate explanations, guide their exploration, and enable them to intervene in the environment. The understanding of causal inference also provides an example of how different cognitive abilities—such as a sensitivity to statistical regularities and the development of implicit theories based on observation and learning (discussed in the two preceding sections and Box 4-2 )—interact with and can mutually support each other. There is now a substantial literature on young children's implicit ability to use what they observe in different conditions to understand the relations between variables. Several examples of young children developing the ability to understand causal inference are provided in Box 4-3 .

Examples of Understanding Causal Inference. One of the first studies of children's understanding of causal inference showed that children can rule out one variable and isolate another (Gopnik et al., 2001). Preschool children were presented with a machine (more...)

Sensitivity to Teaching Cues

Csibra and Gergely (2009) argue that humans are equipped with a capacity to realize when someone is communicating something for their benefit and that they construe that information differently than when they merely witness it. As noted previously in the discussion of developing theory of mind, children as early as infancy devote special attention to social situations that are likely to represent learning opportunities because adults communicate that intention. Information learned in such communicative contexts is treated as more generalizable and robust than that learned in a noncommunicative context.

In one study, for example, 9-month-old babies saw an adult either reach for an object (a noncommunicative act) or point to an object (a communicative act). The entire display was then screened from view, and after a brief delay, the curtains were opened, and babies saw either the same object in a new location or a new object in the same location. The short delay imposed a memory requirement, and for babies this young, encoding both the location and the identity of the object taxes their memory. The location of the object will typically be more salient and memorable to babies than the object's properties, but the prediction of this study was that babies who saw the adult point to the object would construe the pointing as a communicative act—“this adult is showing me something”—and would thus be more likely to encode the properties as opposed to the location of the object. Babies' looking times served as a measure of their surprise at or interest in an unexpected event. As predicted, babies appeared to encode different aspects of the event in the different conditions. When they had previously witnessed the adult reaching for the object, they were surprised when the object was in a new location but showed no renewed interest when there was a different object in the old location. In contrast, when babies first saw an adult point to the object, they were surprised when a new object appeared in the old location but not when the old object had changed locations ( Yoon et al., 2008 ).

Infants' Sensitivity to Teaching Cues: Implications for Adults

Babies have the capacity to realize when someone is communicating something for their benefit and therefore to construe information differently than when they merely witness it. When adults use face-to-face contact, call a baby's name, and point for the baby's benefit, these signals lead babies to recognize that someone is teaching them something, and this awareness can affect how and what they learn.

The significance of eye contact and other communication cues also is evident in research on whether, how, and when young children learn from video and other forms of digital media. Experiments conducted with 24-month-olds, for example, revealed that they can learn from a person on a video screen if that person is communicating with them through a webcam-like environment, but they showed no evidence of learning from a prerecorded video of that person. The webcam environment included social cues, such as back-and-forth conversation and other forms of social contact that are not possible in prerecorded video. Other studies found that toddlers learned verbs better during Skype video chats than during prerecorded video chats that did not allow for authentic eye contact or back-and-forth interaction ( Roseberry et al., 2014 ; Troseth et al., 2006 ). (See also Chapter 6 for more on technology and learning.)

The benefits of communicative pedagogical contexts for the conceptual development of preschool children also have been investigated. In one set of studies, 4-year-old children were exposed to a novel object's function either by seeing an adult deliberately use the object or by seeing the adult deliberately use the object after maintaining eye contact with the child and saying “watch this.” In both conditions, children noticed the object's property and attempted to elicit it from other similar objects. But when those objects were doctored to be nonfunctional, the children in the nonpedagogical condition quickly abandoned their attempts to elicit the property and played with the objects in some other way. Children who saw the same evidence but with direct communication for their benefit persisted in trying to elicit the property from other objects ( Butler and Markman, 2012a , b ). In other words, children's conviction that other similar objects should have the same unforeseen property was bolstered by their belief that the adult was performing the function for their benefit. Moreover the intentional (but nonpedagogical) condition versus the pedagogical condition produced strikingly different conceptions of the function ( Butler and Markman, 2014 ). Four- and 5-year-old children witnessed an object's function and were then given a set of objects to play with. Some objects were identical in appearance to the first object, while some differed in color (in one study) or shape (in another). Half of the objects of each color (or shape) had the unforeseen property, and half did not. Children were told they could play with the objects for a while and then should put them away in their appropriate boxes when done. The goal was to see whether children would sort the objects by the salient perceptual property (color or shape) or by function. Children in the pedagogical condition viewed the function as definitive and classified the objects by systematically testing each to see whether it had the function, while children in the nonpedagogical condition sorted by the salient color or shape. Thus, identical evidence is construed differently when children believe it has been produced for their benefit.

Effects of Adult Language on Cognition

Understanding the power of language is important for people who interact with children. Simple labels can help children unify disparate-looking things into coherent categories; thus labeling is a powerful way to foster conceptual development. Labels also can reify categories or concepts in ways that may or may not be intended. For example, frequently hearing “boys and girls” line up for recess, quiet down, etc. implicitly reinforces gender as an important dimension, compared with saying “children.” Box 4-4 presents examples of linguistic distinctions that affect children's construction of conceptual systems.

Examples of the Effects of Adult Language on Cognition. Some kinds of categories—two round balls, for example—are fairly easy to form, such that even babies treat the objects as similar. But many objects that adults view as members of (more...)

Effects of Language Used by Adults on Children's Cognitive Development: Implications for Adults

Awareness of the benefits and pitfalls of the language used by adults is important for people who interact with children. The language used by adults affects cognitive growth and learning in children in many subtle ways. Labeling is a powerful way to foster conceptual development. Simple labels can help children unify disparate things into coherent categories, but can also have the unintended consequence of reinforcing categories or concepts that are not desirable.

Conclusions About Cognitive Development and Early Learning Learning begins prenatally, and children are not only “ready to learn” but already actively learning from the time they are born. From birth, children's minds are active and inquisitive, and early thinking is insightful and complex. Many of the foundations of sophisticated forms of learning, including those important to academic success, are established in the earliest years of life. Development and early learning can be supported continuously as a child develops, and early knowledge and skills inform and influence future learning. When adults understand how the mind develops, what progress children make in their cognitive abilities, and how active inquiry and learning are children's natural inclination, they can foster cognitive growth by supporting children's active engagement with new experiences and providing developmentally appropriate stimulation of new learning through responsive, secure, and sustained caregiving relationships.

Implications for Care and Education Settings and Practitioners

The research findings on cognitive development in young children summarized above reflect an evolving understanding of how the mind develops during the early years and should be part of the core knowledge that influences how care and education professionals support young children's learning, as discussed in Chapter 7 . Many of these concepts describe cognitive processes that are implicit. By contrast with the explicit knowledge that older children and adults can put into words, implicit knowledge is tacit or nonconscious understanding that cannot readily be consciously described (see, e.g., Mandler, 2004 ). Examples of implicit knowledge in very young children include many of the early achievements discussed above, such as their implicit theories of living things and of the human mind and their nonconscious awareness of the statistical frequency of the associations among speech sounds in the language they are hearing. Infants' and young children's “statistical learning” does not mean that they can count, nor are their “implicit theories” consciously worked out. Not all early learning is implicit, of course. Very young children are taking significant strides in their explicit knowledge of language, the functioning of objects, and the characteristics of people and animals in the world around them. Thus early learning occurs on two levels: the growth of knowledge that is visible and apparent, and the growth of implicit understanding that is sometimes more difficult to observe.

This distinction between implicit and explicit learning can be confusing to early childhood practitioners (and parents), who often do not observe or recognize evidence for the sophisticated implicit learning—or even the explicit learning—taking place in the young children in their care. Many of the astonishingly competent, active, and insightful things that research on early cognitive development shows are going on in young children's minds are not transparent in their behavior. Instead, toddlers and young children seem highly distractable, emotional, and not very capable of managing their impulses. All of these observations about young children are true, but at the same time, their astonishing growth in language skills, their very different ways of interacting with objects and living things, and their efforts to share attention (such as through pointing) or goals (such as through helping) with an adult suggest that the cognitive achievements demonstrated in experimental settings have relevance to their everyday behavior.

This point is especially important because the cognitive abilities of young children are so easily underestimated. In the past, for example, the prevalent belief that infants lack conceptual knowledge meant that parents and practitioners missed opportunities to explore with them cause and effect, number, or symbolic play. Similarly, the view that young children are egocentric caused many adults to conclude that there was little benefit to talking about people's feelings until children were older—this despite the fact that most people could see how attentive young children were to others' emotions and how curious about their causes.

In light of these observations, how do early educators contribute to the cognitive growth of children in their first 3 years? One way is by providing appropriate support for the learning that is occurring in these very young children (see, e.g., Copple et al., 2013 ). Using an abundance of child-directed language during social interaction, playing counting games (e.g., while stacking blocks), putting into words what a classroom pet can do or why somebody looks sad, exploring together what happens when objects collide, engaging in imitative play and categorization (sorting) games—these and other shared activities can be cognitively provocative as long as they remain within the young child's capacities for interest and attention. They also build on understandings that young children are implicitly developing related to language; number; object characteristics; and implicit theories of animate and inanimate objects, physical causality, and people's minds. The purpose of these and other activities is not just to provide young children with cognitive stimulation, but also to embed that stimulation in social interaction that provokes young children's interest, elicits their curiosity, and provides an emotional context that enables them to focus their thinking on new discoveries. The central and consistent feature of all these activities is the young child's shared activity with an adult who thoughtfully capitalizes on his or her interests to provoke cognitive growth. The implications for instructional practices and curricula for educators working with infants and toddlers are discussed further in Chapter 6 .

Another way that educators contribute to the cognitive growth of infants and toddlers is through the emotional support they provide ( Jamison et al., 2014 ). Emotional support is afforded by the educator's responsiveness to young children's interests and needs (including each child's individual temperament), the educator's development of warm relationships with children, and the educator's accessibility to help when young children are exploring on their own or interacting with other children ( Thompson, 2006 ). Emotional support of this kind is important not only as a positive accompaniment to the task of learning but also as an essential prerequisite to the cognitive and attentional engagement necessary for young children to benefit from learning opportunities. Because early capacities to self-regulate emotion are so limited, a young child's frustration or distress can easily derail cognitive engagement in new discoveries, and children can lose focus because their attentional self-regulatory skills are comparably limited. An educator's emotional support can help keep young children focused and persistent, and can also increase the likelihood that early learning experiences will yield successful outcomes. Moreover, the secure attachments that young children develop with educators contribute to an expectation of adult support that enables young children to approach learning opportunities more positively and confidently. Emotional support and socioemotional development are discussed further later in this chapter.

The characteristics of early learning call for specific curricular approaches and thoughtful professional learning for educators, but it is also true that less formal opportunities to stimulate early cognitive growth emerge naturally in children's everyday interactions with a responsive adult. Consider, for example, a parent or other caregiver interacting with a 1-year-old over a shape-sorting toy. As they together are choosing shapes of different colors and the child is placing them in the appropriate (or inappropriate) cutout in the bin, the adult can accompany this task with language that describes what they are doing and why, and narrates the child's experiences of puzzlement, experimentation, and accomplishment. The adult may also be using number words to count the blocks as they are deposited. The baby's attention is focused by the constellation of adult behavior—infant-directed language, eye contact, and responsiveness—that signals the adult's teaching, and this “pedagogical orientation” helps focus the young child's attention and involvement. The back-and-forth interaction of child and adult activity provides stimulus for the baby's developing awareness of the adult's thinking (e.g., she looks at each block before commenting on it or acting intentionally on it) and use of language (e.g., colors are identified for each block, and generic language is used to describe blocks in general). In this interaction, moreover, the baby is developing both expectations for what this adult is like—safe, positive, responsive—and skills for social interaction (such as turn taking). Although these qualities and the learning derived from them are natural accompaniments to child-focused responsive social interaction with an adult caregiver, the caregiver's awareness of the child's cognitive growth at this time contributes significantly to the adult's ability to intentionally support new discovery and learning.

As children further develop cognitively as preschoolers, their growth calls for both similar and different behavior by the adults who work with them. While the educator's emotional support and responsiveness remain important, children from age 3 to 5 years become different kinds of thinkers than they were as infants and toddlers ( NRC, 2001 ). First, they are more consciously aware of their knowledge—much more of their understanding is now explicit. This means they are more capable of deliberately enlisting what they know into new learning situations, although they are not yet as competent or strategic in doing so as they will be in the primary grades. When faced with a problem or asked a question, they are more capable of offering an answer based on what they know, even when their knowledge is limited. Second, preschoolers are more competent in learning from their deliberate efforts to do so, such as trial-and-error or informal experimentation. While their success in this regard pales by comparison with the more strategic efforts of a grade-schooler, their “let's find out” approach to new challenges reflects their greater behavioral and mental competence in figuring things out. Third, preschoolers also are intuitive and experiential, learning by doing rather than figuring things out “in the head.” This makes shared activities with educators and peers potent opportunities for cognitive growth.

Nonetheless, the potential to underestimate the cognitive abilities of young children persists in the preschool and kindergarten years. In one study, for example, children's actual performance was six to eight times what was estimated by their own preschool teachers and other experts in consulting, teacher education, educational research, and educational development ( Claessens et al., 2014 ; Van den Heuvel-Panhuizen, 1996 ). Such underestimation represents a lost opportunity that can hinder children's progress. A study in kindergarten revealed that teachers spent most of their time in basic content that children already knew, yet the children benefited more from advanced reading and mathematics content ( Claessens et al., 2014 )—an issue discussed in depth in Chapter 6 . Unfortunately, when care and education professionals underestimate children's abilities to understand and learn subject-matter content, the negative impact is greatest on those with the fewest prior learning experiences ( Bennett et al., 1984 ; Clements and Sarama, 2014 ).

Conversely, when educators practice in a way that is cognizant of the cognitive progress of children at this age, they can more deliberately enlist the preschool child's existing knowledge and skills into new learning situations. One example is interactive storybook reading, in which children describe the pictures and label their elements while the adult and child ask and answer questions of each other about the narrative. Language and literacy skills also are fostered at this age by the adult's use of varied vocabulary in interaction with the child, as well as by extending conversation on a single topic (rather than frequently switching topics), asking open-ended questions of the child, and initiating conversation related to the child's experiences and interests ( Dickinson, 2003 ; Dickinson and Porche, 2011 ; Dickinson and Tabors, 2001 ). In each case, dialogic conversation about text or experience draws on while also extending children's prior knowledge and language skills. Language and literacy skills are discussed further in a subsequent section of this chapter, as well as in Chapter 6 .

Another implication of these cognitive changes is that educators can engage preschool children's intentional activity in new learning opportunities. Children's interest in learning by doing is naturally suited to experimental inquiry related to science or other kinds of inquiry-based learning involving hypothesis and testing, especially in light of the implicit theories of living things and physical causality that children bring to such inquiry ( Samarapungavan et al., 2011 ). In a similar manner, board games can provide a basis for learning and extending number concepts. In several experimental demonstrations, when preschool children played number board games specifically designed to foster their mental representations of numerical quantities, they showed improvements in number line estimates, count-on skill, numerical identification, and other important quantitative concepts ( Laski and Siegler, 2014 ).

Other research has shown that instructional strategies that promote higher-level thinking, creativity, and even abstract understanding, such as talking about ideas or about future events, is associated with greater cognitive achievement by preschool-age children (e.g., Diamond et al., 2013 ; Mashburn et al., 2008 ). For example, when educators point out how cardinal numbers can be used to describe diverse sets of elements (four blocks, four children, 4 o'clock), it helps them generalize an abstract concept (“fourness”) that describes a set rather than the characteristics of each element alone. These activities also can be integrated into other instructional practices during a typical day.

Another implication of the changes in young children's thinking during the preschool years concerns the motivational features of early learning. Preschool-age children are developing a sense of themselves and their competencies, including their academic skills ( Marsh et al., 1998 , 2002 ). Their beliefs about their abilities in reading, counting, vocabulary, number games, and other academic competencies derive from several sources, including spontaneous social comparison with other children and feedback from teachers (and parents) concerning their achievement and the reasons they have done well or poorly. These beliefs influence, in turn, children's self-confidence, persistence, intrinsic motivation to succeed, and other characteristics that may be described as learning skills (and are discussed more extensively later in this chapter). Consequently, how teachers provide performance feedback to young children and support for their self-confidence in learning situations also is an important predictor of children's academic success ( Hamre, 2014 ).

In the early elementary years, children's cognitive processes develop further, which accordingly influences the strategies for educators in early elementary classrooms. Primary grade children are using more complex vocabulary and grammar. They are growing in their ability to make mental representations, but they still have difficulty grasping abstract concepts without the aid of real-life references and materials ( Tomlinson, 2014 ). This is a critical time for children to develop confidence in all areas of life. Children at this age show more independence from parents and family, while friendship, being liked and accepted by peers, becomes more important. Being in school most of the day means greater contact with a larger world, and children begin to develop a greater understanding of their place in that world ( CDC, 2014 ).

Children's growing ability to self-regulate their emotions also is evident in this period (discussed more extensively later in this chapter). Children understand their own feelings more and more, and learn better ways to describe experiences and express thoughts and feelings. They better understand the consequences of their actions, and their focus on concern for others grows. They are very observant, are willing to play cooperatively and work in teams, and can resolve some conflicts without seeking adult intervention ( CDC, 2014 ). Children also come to understand that they can affect others' perception of their emotions by changing their affective displays ( Aloise-Young, 1993 ). Children who are unable to self-regulate have emotional difficulties that may interfere with their learning. Just as with younger children, significant adults in a child's life can help the child learn to self-regulate ( Tomlinson, 2014 ).

Children's increasing self-regulation means they have a greater ability to follow instructions independently in a manner that would not be true of preschool or younger children. Educators can rely on the growing cognitive abilities in elementary school children in using instructional approaches that depend more independently on children's own discoveries, their use of alternative inquiry strategies, and their greater persistence in problem solving. Educators in these settings are scaffolding the skills that began to develop earlier, so that children are able to gradually apply those skills with less and less external support. This serves as a bridge to succeeding in upper primary grades, so if students lack necessary knowledge and skills in any domain of development and learning, their experience during the early elementary grades is crucial in helping them gain those competencies.

Building on many of the themes that have emerged from this discussion, the following sections continue by looking in more depth at cognitive development with respect to learning specific subjects and then at other major elements of development, including general learning competencies, socioemotional development, and physical development and health.

• LEARNING SPECIFIC SUBJECTS

Interrelationships among different kinds of skills and abilities contribute to young children's acquisition of content knowledge and competencies, which form a foundation for later academic success. These skills and abilities include the general cognitive development discussed above, the general learning competencies that allow children to control their own attention and thinking; and the emotion regulation that allows children to control their own emotions and participate in classroom activities in a productive way (the latter two are discussed in sections later in this chapter). Still another important category of skills and abilities, the focus of this section, is subject-matter content knowledge and skills, such as competencies needed specifically for learning language and literacy or mathematics.

Content knowledge and skills are acquired through a developmental process. As children learn about a topic, they progress through increasingly sophisticated levels of thinking with accompanying cognitive components. These developmental learning paths can be used as the core of a learning trajectory through which students can be supported by educators who understand both the content and those levels of thinking. Each learning trajectory has three parts: a goal (to develop a certain competence in a topic), a developmental progression (children constructing each level of thinking in turn), and instructional activities (tasks and teaching practices designed to enable thinking at each higher level). Learning trajectories also promote the learning of skills and concepts together—an effective approach that leads to both mastery and more fluent, flexible use of skills, as well as to superior conceptual understanding ( Fuson and Kwon, 1992 ; National Mathematics Advisory Panel, 2008 ). See Chapter 6 for additional discussion of using learning trajectories and other instructional practices.

Every subject area requires specific content knowledge and skills that are acquired through developmental learning processes. It is not possible to cover the specifics here for every subject area a young child learns. To maintain a feasible scope, this chapter covers two core subject areas: (1) language and literacy and (2) mathematics. This scope is not meant to imply that learning in other areas, such as science, engineering, social studies, or the arts, is unimportant or less subject specific. Rather, these two were selected because they are foundational for other subject areas and for later academic achievement, and because how they are learned has been well studied in young children compared with many other subject areas.

Language and Literacy

Children's language development and literacy development are central to each other. The development of language and literacy includes knowledge and skills in such areas as vocabulary, syntax, grammar, phonological awareness, writing, reading, comprehension, and discourse skills. The following sections address the development of language and literacy skills, including the relationship between the two; the role of the language-learning environment; socioeconomic disparities in early language environments; and language and literacy development in dual language learners.

Development of Oral Language Skills

Language skills build in a developmental progression over time as children increase their vocabulary, average sentence length, complexity and sophistication of sentence structure and grammar, and ability to express new ideas through words ( Kipping et al., 2012 ). Catts and Kamhi (1999) define five features of language that both work independently and interact as children develop language skills: phonology (speech sounds of language), semantics (meanings of words and phrases), morphology (meaningful parts of words and word tenses), syntax (rules for combining and ordering words in phrases), and pragmatics (appropriate use of language in context). The first three parameters combined (phonology, semantics, and morphology) enable listening and speaking vocabulary to develop, and they also contribute to the ability to read individual words. All five features of language contribute to the ability to understand sentences, whether heard or read (O' Connor, 2014 ). Thus, while children's development of listening and speaking abilities are important in their own right, oral language development also contributes to reading skills.

Developing oral communication skills are closely linked to the interactions and social bonds between adults and children. As discussed earlier in this chapter, parents' and caregivers' talk with infants stimulates—and affects—language comprehension long before children utter their first words. This comprehension begins with pragmatics—the social aspects of language that include facial and body language as well as words, such that infants recognize positive (and negative) interactions. Semantics (understanding meanings of words and clusters of words that are related) soon follows, in which toddlers link objects and their attributes to words. Between the ages of 2 and 4, most children show dramatic growth in language, particularly in understanding the meanings of words, their interrelationships, and grammatical forms ( Scarborough, 2001 ).

Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith (2001) suggest that children build webs among words with similar semantics, which leads to broader generalizations among classes of related words. When adults are responsive to children's questions and new experiences, children expand their knowledge of words and the relationships among them. Then, as new words arise from conversation, storytelling, and book reading, these words are linked to existing webs to further expand the store of words children understand through receptive language and use in their own conversation. The more often adults use particular words in conversation with young children, the sooner children will use those words in their own speech ( Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith, 2001 ). Research has linked the size of vocabulary of 2-year-olds to their reading comprehension through fifth grade ( Lee, 2011 ).

One of the best-documented methods for improving children's vocabularies is interactive storybook reading between children and their caregivers (O' Connor, 2014 ). Conversations as stories are read improve children's vocabulary ( Hindman et al., 2008 ; Weizman and Snow, 2001 ), especially when children are encouraged to build on the possibilities of storybooks by following their interests ( Whitehurst et al., 1988 ; Zucker et al., 2013 ). Book reading stimulates conversation outside the immediate context—for example, children ask questions about the illustrations that may or may not be central to the story. This introduces new words, which children attach to the features of the illustrations they point out and incorporate into book-centered conversations. This type of language, removed from the here and now, is decontextualized language. Children exposed to experiences not occurring in their immediate environment are more likely to understand and use decontextualized language ( Hindman et al., 2008 ). Repeated routines also contribute to language development. As books are read repeatedly, children become familiar with the vocabulary of the story and their conversations can be elaborated. Routines help children with developmental delays acquire language and use it more intelligibly ( van Kleek, 2004 ).

Conversation around a story's content and emphasis on specific words in the text (i.e., the phonological and print features of words alongside their meanings) have long-term effects ( Zucker et al., 2013 ). The quality of adult readers' interactions with children appears to be especially important to children's vocabulary growth (see also Coyne et al., 2009 ; Justice et al., 2005 ). In a study with preschool children, Zucker and colleagues (2013) found that teachers' intentional talk during reading had a longer-lasting effect on the children's language skills than the frequency of the teachers' reading to the children. Moreover, the effect of the teachers' talk during reading was not moderated by the children's initial vocabulary or literacy abilities. The long-term effect of high-quality teacher–child book-centered interactions in preschool lasted through the end of first grade.

New research shows that the effects of interactive reading also hold when adapted to the use of digital media as a platform for decontextualized language and other forms of language development. A study of videobooks showed that when adults were trained to use dialogic questioning techniques with the videos, 3-year-olds learned new words and recalled the books' storylines ( Strouse et al., 2013 ). However, a few studies of e-books also have shown that the bells and whistles of the devices can get in the way of those back-and-forth conversations if the readers and the e-book designers are not intentional about using the e-books to develop content knowledge and language skills ( Parish-Morris et al., 2013 ). (See also the discussion of effective use of technology in instruction in Chapter 6 .)

Alongside developing depth of vocabulary (including the meaning of words and phrases and their appropriate use in context), other important parameters of language development are syntax (rules for combining and ordering words in phrases, as in rules of grammar) and morphology (meaningful parts of words and word tenses). Even before the age of 2, toddlers parse a speech stream into grammatical units ( Hawthorne and Gerken, 2014 ). Long before preschool, most children join words together into sentences and begin to use the rules of grammar (i.e., syntax) to change the forms of words (e.g., adding s for plurals or ed for past tense). Along with these morphemic changes to words, understanding syntax helps children order the words and phrases in their sentences to convey and to change meaning. Before children learn to read, the rules of syntax help them derive meaning from what they hear and convey meaning through speech. Cunningham and Zibulsky (2014 , p. 45) describe syntactic development as “the ability to understand the structure of a sentence, including its tense, subject, and object.”

Although syntactic understanding develops for most children through conversation with adults and older children, children also use these rules of syntax to extract meaning from printed words. This becomes an important reading skill after first grade, when text meaning is less likely to be supported with pictures. Construction of sentences with passive voice and other complex, decontextualized word forms are more likely to be found in books and stories than in directive conversations with young children. An experimental study illustrates the role of exposure to syntactic structures in the development of language comprehension ( Vasilyeva et al., 2006 ). Four-year-olds listened to stories in active or passive voice. After listening to ten stories, their understanding of passages containing these syntactic structures was assessed. Although students in both groups understood and could use active voice (similar to routine conversation), those who listened to stories with passive voice scored higher on comprehension of this structure.

Children's understanding of morphology—the meaningful parts of words—begins in preschool for most children, as they recognize and use inflected endings to represent verb tense (e.g., -ing, -ed, -s) and plurals, and continues in the primary grades as children understand and use prefixes and suffixes. By second and third grade, children's use of morphemes predicts their reading comprehension ( Nagy et al., 2006 ; Nunes et al., 2012 ).

Development of Literacy Skills

Literacy skills follow a developmental trajectory such that early skills and stages lead into more complex and integrated skills and stages ( Adams, 1990 ). For example, phonemic awareness is necessary for decoding printed words ( Ball and Blachman, 1991 ; Bradley and Bryant, 1983 ; O'Connor et al., 1995 ), but it is not sufficient. Students need to understand the alphabetic principle (that speech sounds can be represented by letters of the alphabet, which is how speech is captured in print) before they can use their phonemic awareness (the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken words) to independently decode words they have never seen before ( Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley, 1989 ; O'Connor and >Jenkins, 1995 ). Thus, instruction that combines skill development for 4- to 6-year-old children in phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and conceptual understanding and use of these skills is more effective than teaching the skills in isolation ( Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley, 1989 ; O'Connor and Jenkins, 1995 ).

Seminal theories and studies of reading describe an inextricable link between language development and reading achievement (e.g., Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley, 1995 ; Gough and Tunmer, 1986 ; Hoover and Gough, 1990 ; Johnston and Kirby, 2006 ; Joshi and Aaron, 2000 ; Tunmer and Hoover, 1993 ; Vellutino et al., 2007 ). Early oral language competencies predict later literacy ( Pearson and Hiebert, 2010 ). Not only do young children with stronger oral language competencies acquire new language skills faster than students with poorly developed oral language competencies ( Dickinson and Porche, 2011 ), but they also learn key literacy skills faster, such as phonemic awareness and understanding of the alphabetic principle ( Cooper et al., 2002 ). Both of these literacy skills in turn facilitate learning to read in kindergarten and first grade. By preschool and kindergarten listening and speaking abilities have long-term impacts on children's reading and writing abilities in third through fifth grade ( Lee, 2011 ; Nation and Snowling, 1999 ; Sénéchal et al., 2006 ).

Vocabulary development (a complex and integrative feature of language that grows continuously) and reading words (a skill that most children master by third or fourth grade) ( Ehri, 2005 ) are reciprocally related, and both reading words accurately and understanding what words mean contribute to reading comprehension ( Gough et al., 1996 ). Because comprehending and learning from text depend largely upon a deep understanding of the language used to communicate the ideas and concepts expressed, oral language skills (i.e., vocabulary, syntax, listening comprehension) are at the core of this relationship between language and reading ( NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005 ; Perfetti, 1985 ; Perfetti and Hart, 2002 ). For example, children with larger speaking vocabularies in preschool may have an easier time with phoneme awareness and the alphabetic principle because they can draw on more words to explore the similarities among the sounds they hear in spoken words and the letters that form the words ( Metsala and Walley, 1998 ). Each word a child knows can influence how well she or he understands a sentence that uses that word, which in turn can influence the acquisition of knowledge and the ability to learn new words. A stronger speaking and listening vocabulary provides a deeper and wider field of words students can attempt to match to printed words. Being bogged down by figuring out what a given word means slows the rate of information processing and limits what is learned from a sentence. Thus, differences in early vocabulary can have cascading, cumulative effects ( Fernald et al., 2013 ; Huttenlocher, 1998 ). The transition from speaking and listening to reading and writing is not a smooth one for many children. Although a well-developed vocabulary can make that transition easier, many children also have difficulty learning the production and meanings of words. Longitudinal studies of reading disability have found that 70 percent of poor readers had a history of language difficulties ( Catts et al., 1999 ).

Conclusion About the Development of Language and Literacy Skills The oral language and vocabulary children learn through interactions with parents, siblings, and caregivers and through high-quality interactions with educators provide the foundation for later literacy and for learning across all subject areas, as well as for their socioemotional well-being. The language interactions children experience at home and in school influence their developing minds and their understanding of concepts and ideas.

Role of the Language-Learning Environment

Today's science of reading development focuses more broadly than on teaching children to read the actual words on a page. As stressed throughout this report, young children's development entails a back-and-forth process of social interactions with knowledgeable others in their environment ( Bruner, 1978 ; NRC and IOM, 2000 ; Vygotsky, 1978 , 1986 ), and research has focused on the language of these interactions, examining how children's linguistic experiences influence aspects of their development over time, including their literacy development. The daily talk to which children are exposed and in which they participate is essential for developing their minds—a key ingredient for building their knowledge of the world and their understanding of concepts and ideas. In turn, this conceptual knowledge is a cornerstone of reading success.

The bulk of the research on early linguistic experiences has investigated language input in the home environment, demonstrating the features of caregivers' (usually the mother's) speech that promote language development among young children. The evidence accumulated emphasizes the importance of the quantity of communicative input (i.e., the number of words and sentences spoken) as well as the quality of that input, as measured by the variety of words and syntactic structures used (for relevant reviews, see Rowe, 2012 ; Vasilyeva and Waterfall, 2011 ). Because children's language development is sensitive to these inputs, variability in children's language-based interactions in the home environment explains some of the variance in their language development.

A smaller but growing and compelling research base is focused on how children's literacy skills are influenced by language use in early care and education settings and schools—for example, linguistic features of these settings or elementary school teachers' speech and its relationship to children's reading outcomes ( Greenwood et al., 2011 ). This research has particularly relevant implications for educational practices (discussed further in Chapter 6 ).

The language environment of the classroom can function as a support for developing the kind of language that is characteristic of the school curriculum—for example, giving children opportunities to develop the sophisticated vocabulary and complex syntax found in texts, beginning at a very early age ( Schleppegrell, 2003 ; Snow and Uccelli, 2009 ). Moreover, advances in cognitive science suggest that it is not enough to be immersed in environments that offer multiple opportunities for exposure to varied and rich language experiences. Rather, the process also needs to be socially mediated through more knowledgeable persons who can impart their knowledge to the learner; again, social interaction is a critical component of cognitive development and learning. Early childhood settings and elementary classrooms thus not only present opportunities for exposure to varied language- and literacy-rich activities (whether written or spoken), but also provide a person who is expert in mediating the learning process—the educator.

Research demonstrates that teachers' use of high-quality language is linked to individual differences in language and literacy skills; this work likewise shows the substantial variation in the quality of teacher talk in early childhood classrooms (e.g., Bowers and Vasilyeva, 2011 ; Gámez and Levine, 2013 ; Greenwood et al., 2011 ; Huttenlocher et al., 2002 ). For example, Huttenlocher and colleagues (2002) found greater syntactic skills in preschoolers exposed to teachers who used more syntactically complex utterances. Another study found for monolingual English-speaking children that fourth-grade reading comprehension levels were predicted by exposure to sophisticated vocabulary in preschool. These effects were mediated by children's vocabulary and literacy skills in kindergarten ( Dickinson and Porche, 2011 ).

In classroom studies focused on the linguistic environment, the level of analysis has involved broad measures of language use, such as amount of talk (i.e., teacher–student interactions by minute: Connor et al., 2006 ), amount of instruction (i.e., in teacher-managed versus child-managed instruction: Connor et al., 2007 ), type of interaction style (i.e., didactic versus cognitively demanding talk or the amount of extended discourse: Dickinson and Smith, 1991 ; Jacoby and Lesaux, 2014 ; Smith and Dickinson, 1994 ), or instructional moves made by the teacher (e.g., modeling: see review in Lawrence and Snow, 2011 ). A commonly included measurement that has been linked to children's literacy development is extended discourse, defined as talk that “requires participants to develop understandings beyond the here and now and that requires the use of several utterances or turns to build a linguistic structure, such as in explanations, narratives, or pretend” ( Snow et al., 2001 , p. 2). Children are better prepared to comprehend narrative texts they encounter in school if their early language environments provide more exposure to and opportunities to participate in extended discourse. This is because extended discourse and narrative texts share similar patterns for communicating ideas ( Uccelli et al., 2006 ).

Engaging groups of children in effective extended discourse involves asking and discussing open-ended questions and encouraging turn taking, as well as monitoring the group to involve nonparticipating children ( Girolametto and Weitzman, 2002 ). In addition to using interactive storybook and text reading as a platform for back-and-forth conversations (often referred to as interactive or dialogic reading, as described in the preceding section) ( Mol et al., 2009 ; Zucker et al., 2013 ), engaging children in extended discourse throughout classroom activities (e.g., small-group learning activities, transitions and routines [ van Kleek, 2004 ], dramatic play [ Mages, 2008 ; Morrow and Schickedanz, 2006 ]) is fundamental to providing a high-quality language-learning environment ( Jacoby and Lesaux, 2014 ).

In an example of the influence of the quantity and quality of teachers' language input in linguistically diverse classrooms, Bowers and Vasilyeva (2011) found that the total number of words produced by teachers and the diversity of their speech (which was entirely in English) were related to vocabulary gains for children from both English-only households and households in which English was not the primary language, respectively. Thus, they found that preschool dual language learners benefited only from increased quantities of language exposure and showed a negative relationship between vocabulary growth and teachers' syntactic complexity. By contrast, the English-only children—who presumably had more developed English language proficiency skills—benefited from the diversity of teachers' vocabulary and syntactic complexity. These findings are consistent with the notion that to promote language learning, different inputs are needed at different developmental stages ( Dickinson and Freiberg, 2009 ; Gámez and Lesaux, 2012 ). Children benefit from hearing simplified speech during very early word learning ( Furrow et al., 1979 ). With more exposure to language and more advanced vocabulary development, they benefit from speech input that is more complex (i.e., Hoff and Naigles, 2002 ). Hoff (2006) suggests that if input is too complex, children filter it out without negative consequences—as long as sufficient beneficial input is available to them. On the other hand, “children have no way to make up for input that is too simple” ( Hoff, 2006 , p. 75).

An important consideration in light of these findings is that recent research in early childhood classrooms serving children from low-income backgrounds suggests that daily high-quality language-building experiences may be rare for these children. For example, in a Head Start organization serving large numbers of Latino children a recent observational study found a preschool environment lacking in the frequent and high-quality teacher–child language interactions that are needed to support language and literacy development ( Jacoby and Lesaux, 2014 ). Literacy instruction was highly routine based and with low-level language structures. Extended discourse was infrequently used; only 22 percent of observed literacy-based lessons included at least one instance of extended discourse between a teacher and a child or group of children. Instead, teachers asked questions that yielded short answers or linked only to the here and now (e.g., What day is it today? What is the weather today? ). These features of infrequent extended discourse and predominantly routine-based literacy instruction were remarkably stable across teachers and classrooms. Other research investigating teacher talk in Head Start preschool classrooms has produced similar findings (e.g., Dickinson et al., 2008 ).

This is consistent with findings that there are sizable cultural and socioeconomic differences in high-quality language-promoting experiences in the home and in the classroom environment in early childhood ( Dickinson, 2003 ; Dickinson and Porche, 2011 ; Dickinson and Tabors, 2001 ; Raikes et al., 2006 ), just as such differences have been found in the number of words children hear by the time they enter school ( Bradley and Corwyn, 2002 ; Fernald et al., 2013 ; Hart and Risley, 1995 ; Schneidman et al., 2013 ; Weisleder and Fernald, 2013 ). At the same time, for children from low-resource backgrounds oral language skills show an even stronger connection to later academic outcomes than for children from high-resource backgrounds. Given these findings, rich linguistic experiences at early ages may therefore be especially important for these children. Even small improvements in the literacy environment can have especially strong effects for children who are raised in low-income households ( Dearing et al., 2001 ; Dickinson and Porche, 2011 ).

In sum, the language environment has important effects on children's learning, and children benefit from extensive opportunities to listen to and use complex spoken language ( National Early Literacy Panel, 2008 ). Teachers' use of high-quality language is linked to individual differences in language and literacy skills, and there is considerable variation in the quantity and quality of teachers' language use across classrooms. The quality of the classroom language environment is a lever for lasting improvements in children's language and literacy development, and it is important to tailor classroom talk to match the developmental stage of children's language acquisition.

Creating a Rich Language Environment: Implications for Adults

Improving language environments for young children requires daily learning opportunities that focus on the diversity and complexity of language used with young children. Practically speaking, this can be achieved through extended discourse, with multiple exchanges or turns that go beyond the immediate “here and now” using explanations, narratives, or pretend. Extended discourse can take place throughout all activities and in specific interactions, especially using book reading as a platform for back-and-forth conversations.

Further research is needed to advance understanding of language-based classroom processes and how dynamic and ongoing interactions facilitate or impede children's literacy. Such studies could advance existing research in at least two ways. In particular, it could further elucidate how language-based social processes in the classroom affect literacy development for the many students who enter schools and other care and education settings with limited proficiency in English. The majority of published studies focused on language-based interactions are focused on English-only learners, despite the fact that social processes can be experienced differently by different groups, even within the same setting ( Rogoff and Angelillo, 2002 ; Tseng and Seidman, 2007 ). Gámez and Levine (2013) suggest that future research examine the influence of dual-language input on dual language learners' language development; the nature of teacher talk during different parts of the instructional day, including joint book reading, and how these language experiences predict dual language learners' language skills; and the impact of classroom talk interventions—those that aim to manipulate the frequency and complexity of teachers' language—on both the language environment and dual language learners' language development.

In addition, prior research has measured a two-way process in a largely unidirectional manner—measuring speech only from parent to child or educator to student. It would be more valuable going forward if research were guided by the notion that the language-based interactions between students and educators mediate instruction, and were therefore to explore how communicative feedback loops, both adult–child and child–peer interactions, influence children's learning and development. Taking into account the student's contribution to the classroom language environment is particularly important in light of evidence that teachers modify their speech to conform to their students' limited language proficiency levels, potentially leading to a lower-quality language environment that impedes students' language growth ( Ellis, 2008 ; see Huttenlocher et al., 2010 ; Justice et al., 2013 ). More specifically, Justice and colleagues (2013) suggest that future research examine teacher–child language interactions in a multidimensional way to explore how syntactic complexity, cognitive demand, and even linguistic form (e.g., questions, comments) relate to each other; the links between children's use of complex syntax in classroom-based interactions and their future general language ability; and interventions designed to enhance classroom language interactions, focusing on both proximal and distal outcomes for children. Finally, greater understanding is needed of the ways in which the classroom language processes described in this section might act as a foundational mediator of the efficacy of interventions focused on learning outcomes in other domains and subject areas.

Alongside student–educator interactions, studies show that peer-to-peer interactions in the classroom may also have positive impacts on children's vocabulary and expressive language abilities. Children spend a significant amount of time interacting with other children in classroom settings, and a 2009 study examining the language growth and abilities of 4-year-olds in prekindergarten classrooms found that peers who have higher language abilities positively affect other children's language development. This study also found that children with advanced language skills will receive greater benefits from interacting with peers who also have advanced language skills ( Mashburn et al., 2009 ). These findings are similar to another study showing that peer interactions in the classroom, along with the ability level of the peers, have positive effects on the child's cognitive, prereading, expressive language skills ( Henry and Rickman, 2007 ). In order to achieve these benefits, however, the preschool classrooms need to be designed so that peers can interact with one another, and include activities such as reading books and engaging in play together. Children with teachers who organize the day with optimal amounts of time for peer-to-peer interactions may achieve greater language growth ( Mashburn et al., 2009 ).

Language and Literacy Development in Dual Language Learners 1

For children whose home language is not the predominant language of their school, educators and schools need to ensure the development of English proficiency. Both parents and preschool teachers can be particularly useful in improving these children's depth of vocabulary ( Aukrust, 2007 ; Roberts, 2008 ). At the same time, children can be helped to both build and maintain their first language while adding language and literacy skills in English ( Espinosa, 2005 ). In support of this as a long-term goal are the potential advantages of being bilingual, including maintaining a cultural and linguistic heritage and conferring an advantage in the ability to communicate with a broader population in future social, educational, and work environments. Additionally, an emerging field of research, albeit with mixed results to date, explores potential advantages of being bilingual that are linked more directly to cognitive development, starting in early childhood and extending to preserving cognitive function and delaying the symptoms of dementia in the elderly ( Bialystok, 2011 ; de Bruin et al., 2015 ).

Bilingual or multilingual children are faced with more communicative challenges than their monolingual peers. A child who frequently experiences failure to be understood or to understand may be driven to pay more attention to context, paralinguistic cues, and gestures in order to interpret an utterance, and thus become better at reading such cues. The result may be improved development of theory of mind and understanding of pragmatics ( Yow and Markman, 2011a , b ). In addition, the need to continually suppress one language for another affords ongoing practice in inhibitory or executive control, which could confer advantages on a range of inhibitory control tasks in children and helps preserve this fundamental ability in aging adults ( Bialystok, 2011 ; Bialystok and Craik, 2010 ; Bialystok et al., 2009 ).

One challenge in the education of dual language learners is that they sometimes are classified along with children with special needs. One reason for this is the lack of good assessment tools to help distinguish the nature of the difficulties experienced by dual language learners—whether due to a learning disability or to the fact that learning a second language is difficult, takes time, and develops differently in different children ( Hamayan et al., 2013 ).

Mathematics

Children's early knowledge of mathematics is surprisingly important, and it strongly predicts later success in mathematics ( Denton and West, 2002 ; Koponen et al., 2013 ; Passolunghi et al., 2007 ). Mathematics knowledge in preschool predicts mathematics achievement even into high school ( National Mathematics Advisory Panel, 2008 ; NRC, 2009 ; Stevenson and Newman, 1986 ). Mathematics ability and language ability also are interrelated as mutually reinforcing skills ( Duncan et al., 2007 ; Farran et al., 2005 ; Lerkkanen et al., 2005 ; O'Neill et al., 2004 ; Praet et al., 2013 ; Purpura et al., 2011 ). Indeed, mathematical thinking reaches beyond competence with numbers and shapes to form a foundation for general cognition and learning ( Clements and Sarama, 2009 ; Sarama et al., 2012 ), and problems with mathematics are the best predictor of failure to graduate high school. Mathematics therefore appears to be a core subject and a core component of thinking and learning ( Duncan and Magnuson, 2011 ; Duncan et al., 2007 ).

Given its general importance to academic success ( Sadler and Tai, 2007 ), children need a robust foundation in mathematics knowledge in their earliest years. Multiple analyses suggest that mathematics learning should begin early, especially for children at risk for later difficulties in school ( Byrnes and Wasik, 2009 ; Clements and Sarama, 2014 ). Well before first grade, children can learn the skills and concepts that support more complex mathematics understanding later. Particularly important areas of mathematics for young children to learn include number, which includes whole number, operations, and relations; geometry; spatial thinking; and measurement. Children also need to develop proficiency in processes for both general and specific mathematical reasoning ( NRC, 2009 ).

If given opportunities to learn, young children possess a remarkably broad, complex, and sophisticated—albeit informal—knowledge of mathematics ( Baroody, 2004 ; Clarke et al., 2006 ; Clements et al., 1999 ; Fuson, 2004 ; Geary, 1994 ; Thomson et al., 2005 ). In their free play, almost all preschoolers engage in substantial amounts of premathematical activity. They count objects; compare magnitudes; and explore patterns, shapes, and spatial relations. Importantly, this is true regardless of a child's income level or gender ( Seo and Ginsburg, 2004 ). Preschoolers can also, for example, learn to invent solutions to simple arithmetic problems ( Sarama and Clements, 2009 ).

High-quality mathematics education can help children realize their potential in mathematics achievement ( Doig et al., 2003 ; Thomson et al., 2005 ). However, without such education starting, and continuing throughout, the early years, many children will be on a trajectory in which they will have great difficulty catching up to their peers ( Rouse et al., 2005 ). As discussed further in Chapter 6 , early childhood classrooms typically are ill suited to helping children learn mathematics and underestimate their ability to do so. In some cases, children can even experience a regression on some mathematics skills during prekindergarten and kindergarten ( Farran et al., 2007 ; Wright, 1994 ). Mathematics needs to be conceptualized as more than skills, and its content as more than counting and simple shapes. Without building a robust understanding of mathematics in the early years, children too often come to believe that math is a guessing game and a system of rules without reason ( Munn, 2006 ).

Both education and experience can make a difference, as evidenced by data from the latest international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which added data collection on early mathematics education ( Mullis et al., 2012 ). Students with higher mathematics achievement at fourth and sixth grades had parents who reported that they often engaged their children in early numeracy activities and that their children had attended preprimary education and started school able to do early numeracy tasks (e.g., simple addition and subtraction). Those children who had attended preschool or kindergarten had higher achievement, while the 13 percent who had attended no preprimary school had much lower average mathematics achievement ( Mullis et al., 2012 ).

Developmental Progression of Learning Mathematics

Children move through a developmental progression in specific mathematical domains, which informs learning trajectories as important tools for supporting learning and teaching. Recent work based on empirical research and emphasizing a cognitive science perspective conceptualizes learning trajectories for mathematics as “descriptions of children's thinking and learning in a specific mathematical domain, and a related, conjectured route through a set of instructional tasks designed to engender those mental processes or actions hypothesized to move children through a developmental progression of levels of thinking, created with the intent of supporting children's achievement of specific goals in that mathematical domain” ( Clements and Sarama, 2004 , p. 83).

Box 4-5 illustrates the concept of a developmental progression through the example of subitizing , an oft-neglected mathematical goal for young children. Research shows that subitizing, the rapid and accurate recognition of the number in a small group, is one of the main abilities very young children should develop ( Palmer and Baroody, 2011 ; Reigosa-Crespo et al., 2013 ). Through subitizing, children can discover critical properties of number, such as conservation and compensation ( Clements and Sarama, 2014 ; Maclellan, 2012 ) and develop such capabilities as unitizing and arithmetic. Subitizing is not the only way children think and learn about number. Counting is the other method of quantification. It is the first and most basic mathematical algorithm and one of the more critical early mathematics competencies ( Aunola et al., 2004 ; National Mathematics Advisory Panel, 2008 ). Chapter 6 includes examples from a complete learning trajectory—goal, developmental progression, and instructional activities—for counting ( Clements and Sarama, 2014 ).

Subitizing: A Developmental Progression. A quantitative, or numerical, “sense” is innate or develops early. For example, very young children possess approximate number systems (ANSs) that allow them to discriminate large and small sets, (more...)

Children with Special Needs

Children with special needs in learning mathematics fall into two categories. Those with mathematical difficulties struggle to learn mathematics for any reason; this category may apply to as many as 35-40 percent of students ( Berch and Mazzocco, 2007 ). Those with specific mathematics learning disabilities are more severe cases; these students have a memory or cognitive deficit that interferes with their ability to learn math ( Geary, 2004 ). This category may apply to about 6-7 percent ( Berch and Mazzocco, 2007 ; Mazzocco and Myers, 2003 ). In one study, this classification persisted in third grade for 63 percent of those classified as having mathematics learning disabilities in kindergarten ( Mazzocco and Myers, 2003 ).

Mathematics learning disabilities, while assumed to have a genetic basis, currently are defined by students' behaviors—yet with ongoing debate among experts about what those behaviors are. One consistent finding is that students with mathematics learning disabilities have difficulty retrieving basic arithmetic facts quickly. This has been hypothesized to be the result of an inability to store or retrieve facts and impairments in visual-spatial representation. As early as kindergarten, limited working memory and speed of cognitive processing may be problems for these children ( Geary et al., 2007 ). Many young children with learning disabilities in reading show a similar rapid-naming deficit for letters and words ( Siegel and Mazabel, 2013 ; Steacy et al., 2014 ). Another possibility is that a lack of higher-order, or executive, control of verbal material causes difficulty learning basic arithmetic facts or combinations. For example, students with mathematics learning disabilities may have difficulty inhibiting irrelevant associations. An illustration of this would be hearing “5 + 4” and saying “6” because it follows 5.

One explanation for the difficulty students with mathematics learning disabilities have learning basic arithmetic combinations might be delays in understanding counting. These students may not fully understand counting nor recognize errors in counting as late as second grade. They persist in using immature counting strategies, such as counting “one-by-one” on their fingers, throughout elementary school ( Geary et al., 1992 ; Ostad, 1998 ). Other experts, however, claim that a lack of specific competencies, such as subitizing, is more important ( Berch and Mazzocco, 2007 ).

Some evidence suggests that it is possible to predict which kindergartners are at risk for mathematics learning disabilities based on skill including reading numerals, number constancy, magnitude judgments of one-digit numbers, or mental addition of one-digit numbers ( Mazzocco and Thompson, 2005 ). However, until more is known, students should be classified as having mathematics learning disabilities only with great caution and after good mathematics instruction has been provided. Such labeling in the earliest years could do more harm than good ( Clements and Sarama, 2012 ).

Interrelationships Between Mathematics and Language

It can appear that language is less of a concern in mathematics compared to other subjects because it is assumed to be based on numbers or symbols, but this is not the case ( Clements et al., 2013a ). In fact, children learn math mainly from oral language, rather than from mathematical symbolism or textbooks ( Janzen, 2008 ). In addition, “talking math” is more than just using mathematics terms ( Clements and Sarama, 2014 ). Therefore, both oral language and literacy in general, as well as the “language of mathematics,” are important for learning ( Vukovic and Lesaux, 2013 ). Vocabulary and knowledge of print are both predictors of later numeracy ( Purpura et al., 2011 ). Similarly, growth in mathematics from kindergarten to third grade is related to both early numerical skills and phonological processing ( Vukovic, 2012 ). In one study of linguistically and ethnically diverse children aged 6-9 years, language ability predicted gains in geometry, probability, and data analysis but not in arithmetic or algebra (controlling for reading ability, visual–spatial working memory, and gender) ( Vukovic and Lesaux, 2013 ). Thus, language may affect how children make meaning of mathematics but not its complex arithmetic procedures.

Moreover, there is an important bidirectional relationship between learning in mathematics and language ( Sarama et al., 2012 ). Each has related developmental milestones. Children learn number words at the same time as other linguistic labels. Most children recognize by the age of 2 which words are for numbers and use them only in appropriate contexts ( Fuson, 1988 ). Each also has related developmental patterns, with learning progressing along similar paths. In both, children recognize the whole before its parts. In learning language, this is word before syllable, syllable before rime-onset, and rime-onset before phoneme (see also Anthony et al., 2003 ; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005 ). Similarly in mathematics, numbers are first conceptualized as unbreakable categories and then later as composites (e.g., 5 is composed of 3 and 2) ( Butterworth, 2005 ; Sarama and Clements, 2009 ). By 6 years old in most cultures, children have been exposed to symbol representations that are both alphabetic and numerical, and they begin to be able to segment words into phonemes and numbers into singletons (e.g., understanding that 3 is 1 and 1 and 1) ( Butterworth, 2005 ; Sarama and Clements, 2009 ; Wagner et al., 1993 ). The ability to identify the component nature of words and numbers predicts the ability to read ( Adams, 1990 ; Stanovich and Siegel, 1994 ) and to compute ( Geary, 1990 , 1993 ). In addition to these similarities in typical developmental pathways, many children with learning disabilities experience deficits in competencies related to both language/literacy and numeracy ( Geary, 1993 ; Hecht et al., 2001 ; NRC, 1998 ).

Furthermore, there appear to be shared competencies between the two subject areas. For example, preschoolers' narrative abilities (i.e., their abilities to convey all the main events of a story and offer a perspective on its events) have been shown to predict mathematics achievement 2 years later ( O'Neill et al., 2004 ). Beginning mathematics scores have been shown to be highly predictive of subsequent achievement in both reading and mathematics although beginning reading skills (such as letter recognition, word identification, and word sounds) were shown to be highly predictive of later reading (advanced competencies such as evaluation) but not mathematics learning ( Duncan et al., 2007 ).

A causal relationship between rich mathematics learning and developing language and literacy skills is supported by a randomized study of the effects of a math curriculum called Building Blocks on prekindergarten children's letter recognition and oral language skills. Building Blocks children performed the same as the children in the control group on letter recognition and on three oral language subscales but outperformed them on four subscales: ability to recall key words, use of complex utterances, willingness to reproduce narratives independently, and inference ( Sarama et al., 2012 ). These skills had no explicit relation to the math curriculum. Similarly, a study of 5- to 7-year-olds showed that an early mathematics and logical-mathematical intervention increased later scores in English by 14 percentile points ( Shayer and Adhami, 2010 ).

Time on task (or time on instruction) does affect learning, which naturally leads to consideration of potential conflicts or tradeoffs between time spent on different subjects (e.g., Bodovski and Farkas, 2007 ). Indeed, a frequent concern is that introducing a mathematics curriculum may decrease the time devoted to language and literacy, impeding children's development in those areas, which are heavily emphasized in early learning goals (see Clements and Sarama, 2009 ; Farran et al., 2007 ; Lee and Ginsburg, 2007 ; Sarama and Clements, 2009 ). However, this assumes that mathematics activities will not have a positive effect on language and literacy. Yet as described here, evidence from both educational and psychological research suggests the potential for high-quality instruction in each to have mutual benefits for learning in both subjects. Rich mathematical activities, such as discussing multiple solutions and solving narrative story problems, can help lay the groundwork for literacy through language development, while rich literacy activities can help lay the groundwork for mathematics development ( Sarama et al., 2012 ).

Children Who Are Dual Language Learners

For mathematics learning in children who are dual language learners, the language, not just the vocabulary, of mathematics need to be addressed ( Clements and Sarama, 2014 ). Challenges for dual language learners include both technical vocabulary, which can range in how similar or distinct terms are from everyday language, and the use of complex noun phrases. On the other hand, bilingual children often can understand a mathematical idea more readily because, after using different terms for it in different languages, they comprehend that the mathematical idea is abstract, and not tied to a specific term (see Secada, 1992 ).

There is evidence that the best approach is to teach these young children in their first language ( Celedón-Pattichis et al., 2010 ; Espada, 2012 ). At a minimum, their teachers need to connect everyday language with the language of math ( Janzen, 2008 ). It is also essential to build on the resources that bilingual children bring to learning mathematics—all cultures have “funds of knowledge” (culturally developed and historically accumulated bodies of knowledge and skills) that can be used to develop mathematical contexts and understandings ( Moll et al., 1992 ). Instructional practices for teaching mathematics with dual language learners are discussed further in Chapter 6 .

Conclusions About Learning Specific Subjects For subject-matter content knowledge and proficiency, children learn best when supported along a trajectory with three components: (1) their understanding of the subject-matter content itself, (2) their progress through predictable developmental levels and patterns of thinking related to their understanding of the content, and (3) instructional tasks and strategies that adults who work with children can employ to promote that learning at each level. For example: Almost all topics in mathematics follow predictable learning trajectories that include number counting and subitizing, number relationships and magnitude comparison, arithmetic operations, geometry and spatial sense, and measurement. Learning trajectories in literacy include specific developmental sequences in children's learning of phonological awareness and phonics (letter-sound correspondences), which together contribute to children's understanding of how spoken words are captured in reading and writing and thus to their advancement through broader levels of early literacy. Some principles of how children learn along a trajectory hold across subject-matter domains, but there are also substantive differences among subjects in the specific skills children need and in the learning trajectories. Both generalizable principles and subject-specific distinctions have implications for the knowledge and competencies needed to work with children. An important factor in children's learning of subject-matter content is how each of the components of learning trajectories both requires and develops aspects of learning that are not content specific, such as critical reasoning, executive function, self-regulation, learning skills, positive dispositions toward learning, and relationships.

• GENERAL LEARNING COMPETENCIES

Educators, developmental scientists, and economists have long known that academic achievement is a result of both the growth of specific knowledge and the development of general learning competencies that regulate how children enlist cognitive resources when they encounter learning challenges, motivate advances in learning, and strengthen children's self-confidence as learners.

These general learning competencies have been labeled and categorized in various ways. Considerable recent research on some of these learning competencies has been conducted using the concept of “executive function,” which generally refers to a set of supervisory functions that regulate and control cognitive activity that affects learning ( Vitiello et al., 2011 ) and allow children to persevere with tasks, including learning tasks, even when facing fatigue, distraction, or decreased motivation. In the field of human development “mastery motivation” in infancy typically is indexed by the baby's persistence, focus, and curiosity in exploration and problem solving ( Morgan et al., 1990 ; Wang and Barrett, 2013 ). In preschool-age children, these skills often are conceptualized as the quality of the child's “approaches to learning,” which include motivation, engagement, and interest in learning activities. Heckman (2007) has used the term “noncognitive skills” to refer to many of these learning competencies, including self-control, persistence, self-discipline, motivation, and self-esteem, as well as future orientedness (i.e., the capacity to substitute long-term goals for immediate satisfactions). This label is used in contrast to the “cognitive skills” that are more often measured to predict children's later success, although there is considerable research that the “noncognitive skills” also support learning and achievement (see, e.g., Cunha and Heckman, 2010 ; Heckman, 2007 ), and they are highly relevant to cognitive skills in such areas as language, mathematics, science, and other traditional academic fields.

Here the alternative conceptualizations for these important aspects of child development and early learning are grouped as “learning competencies” to reflect their importance for early learning. Individual differences in these competencies are important determinants of learning and academic motivation, and children's experiences at home and in the classroom contribute to some of these differences. This section examines these competencies as well as their interrelationships with the previously discussed subject-matter domains of language and literacy and mathematics.

General Cognitive Skills

Several cognitive control processes are important for planning and executing goal-directed activity, which is needed for successful learning (e.g., Blair, 2002 ; Lyon and Krasnegor, 1996 ). These processes include, for example, short-term and working memory, attention control and shifting, cognitive flexibility (changing thinking between different concepts and thinking about multiple concepts simultaneously), inhibitory control (suppressing unproductive responses or strategies), and cognitive self-regulation. These processes also are closely related to emotion regulation, which is discussed later in the section on socioemotional development, and which also contributes to children's classroom success.

As noted previously, many general cognitive processes often are referred to collectively as “executive function,” although not everyone defines this construct in the same way (e.g., Miyake et al., 2000 ; Raver, 2013 ), and different disciplines and researchers differ as to which cognitive skills it includes. Other theoretical frameworks exist as well. For example, cognitive control and complexity theory postulates that executive function is an outcome, not an explanatory construct, and is the result of children's creation and application of rules (driven perhaps by an increase in reflection afforded by experience-dependent maturation of the prefrontal cortex) ( Müller et al., 2008 ; Zelazo and Carlson, 2012 ; Zelazo and Lyons, 2012 ). As with the overall domains of development displayed earlier in Figure 4-1 , the committee did not attempt to reconcile those different perspectives.

This variation in perspectives makes it difficult to parse the literature produced by different fields of research and practice. In general, however, executive function appears to improve most rapidly in young children ( Best et al., 2011 ; Blair, 2002 ; Hughes and Ensor, 2011 ; Romine and Reynolds, 2005 ; Schoemaker et al., 2014 ; Zelazo and Carlson, 2012 ). Executive function processes appear to be partially dependent on the development of the prefrontal cortex (the site of higher-order cognitive processes), notably through the preschool and kindergarten age range ( Bassett et al., 2012 ; Blair, 2002 ).

Short-Term and Working Memory

Short-term memory is the ability for short-term recall, such as of a sentence or important details from conversation and reading. Working memory allows children to hold in their memory information from multiple sources, whether heard or read, so they can use and link that information. Updating working memory is the ability to keep and use relevant information while engaging in another cognitively demanding task ( Conway et al., 2003 ; DeYoung, 2011 ).

Attention Control and Shifting

Attention control is the ability to focus attention and disregard distracting stimuli (e.g., a continuous performance task that requires a child to identify when some familiar object appears onscreen and ignore other objects that appear, or a task that requires ignoring extraneous information in a mathematics word problem). Attention shifting is a related process of switching a “mental set” while simultaneously ignoring distractions (e.g., counting by different units—tens and ones). Attention shifting and cognitive flexibility are often grouped.

Cognitive Flexibility

Cognitive flexibility capacities develop gradually throughout early childhood and have significant influences on children's social and academic competence. Cognitive flexibility is important, for example, for reading ( Duke and Block, 2012 ). Children who are better able to consider, at the same time, both letter-sound and semantic (meaning) information about words have better reading comprehension ( Cartwright, 2002 ; Cartwright et al., 2010 ). Reading comprehension also appears to improve when children are taught about words with multiple meanings (e.g., spell or plane ), and sentences with multiple meanings (e.g., “The woman chased the man on a motorcycle.”) ( Yuill, 1996 ; Zipke et al., 2009 ). In addition, interventions in young children that focus on cognitive flexibility have shown significant benefits for reading comprehension ( Cartwright, 2008 ).

Inhibitory Control

Inhibitory control involves controlling a dominant response (e.g., the first answer that comes to mind) so as to think about better strategies or ideas. The skill of simple response inhibition (withholding an initial, sometimes impulsive, response) develops during infancy through toddlerhood. Infants also develop some control of cognitive conflict in tasks in which an item of interest to them is first hidden in one location and then another, and the child must resist the response of searching in the first location ( Diamond, 1991 ; Müller et al., 2008 ; Rothbart and Rueda, 2005 ) (see Marcovitch and Zelazo, 2009 , for a model of possible mechanisms). Later in their first year, children can resolve conflict between their line of sight and their line of reaching ( Diamond, 1991 ). By about 30 months, they can successfully complete a spatial conflict task ( Rothbart and Rueda, 2005 ). From 3 to 5 years of age, complex response inhibition and response shifting develop, with attention shifting developing at about age 4 ( Bassett et al., 2012 ). The most rapid increase in inhibitory control is between 5 and 8 years of age, although moderate improvements are seen up to young adulthood ( Best et al., 2011 ).

Inhibitory control supports children's learning across subject-matter areas. As one example of its importance for mathematics, when the initial reading of a problem is not the correct one, children need to inhibit their impulse to answer (incorrectly) and carefully examine the problem. Consider the following problem: “There were six birds in a tree. Three birds already flew away. How many birds were there from the start?” Children have to inhibit the immediate desire to subtract prompted by the words “flew away” and perform addition instead.

Cognitive Self-Regulation

Cognitive self-regulation is what helps children plan ahead, focus attention, and remember past experiences. The construct of self-regulation and related concepts have a long history in psychology (e.g., Glaser, 1991 ; Markman, 1977 , 1981 ; Piaget and Szeminska, 1952 ; Sternberg, 1985 ; Vygotsky, 1978 ; Zelazo et al., 2003 ) and education (e.g., McGillicuddy-De Lisi, 1982 ; Steffe and Tzur, 1994 ). Most recently, researchers and educators have used the broad term self-regulation to refer to the processes involved in intentionally controlling attention, thinking, impulses, emotions, and behavior. In this way, self-regulation can be thought of in relation to several aspects of development, including the cognitive processes discussed here and the social and emotional processes discussed later in this chapter. Developmental psychobiological research and neuroimaging indicate that these subclasses are both neurally and behaviorally distinct while also being related and correlated ( Bassett et al., 2012 ; Hofmann et al., 2012 ; Hongwanishkul et al., 2005 ; Neuenschwander et al., 2012 ; Willoughby et al., 2011 ). Together, these types of self-regulation allow children to persevere with tasks even when facing difficulties in problem solving or learning, fatigue, distraction, or decreased motivation ( Blair and Razza, 2007 ; Neuenschwander et al., 2012 ). It is thus unsurprising that kindergarten teachers believe self-regulation is as important as academics ( Bassok and Rorem, 2014 ).

Both cognitive self-regulation and emotional self-regulation (discussed later in this chapter) contribute to socioemotional development and also play a role in learning. Although the relationship between various features of cognitive self-regulation and academic achievement has been well documented for older students (e.g., Bielaczyc et al., 1995 ; Zimmerman, 2002 ), less was known until recently about how self-regulation developed in the early years contributes to the later development of cognitive and emotional self-regulation and academic achievement ( NRC and IOM, 2000 ).

Children's self-regulation and their ability to successfully function in school settings are related in two ways. First, emotional self-regulation enables children to benefit from learning in various social contexts, including their capacities to manage emotions in interactions with educators as well as peers (e.g., one-on-one, in cooperative pairs, in large and small groups). It also assists them in conforming to classroom rules and routines. Second, cognitive self-regulation enables children to develop and make use of cognitive processes that are necessary for academic learning ( Anghel, 2010 ).

Although most studies have focused on specific effects of either cognitive or emotional self-regulation, evidence suggests that the two are interconnected. This link is probably due to the commonality of the neurological mechanisms governing both emotional and cognitive self-regulation. For example, children lacking emotion regulation are likely also to have problems with regulating cognitive processes, such as attention ( Derryberry and Reed, 1996 ; LeDoux, 1996 ). Moreover, earlier patterns in the development of emotion control have been shown to be predictive of children's later ability to exercise control over their cognitive functioning ( Blair, 2002 ).

Several studies have shown positive correlations between self-regulation and achievement in young children (e.g., Bierman et al., 2008b ; Blair and Razza, 2007 ; Blair et al., 2010 ; Bull et al., 1999 ; Cameron et al., 2012 ; Neuenschwander et al., 2012 ; Roebers et al., 2012 ; Welsh et al., 2010 ), although there are exceptions ( Edens and Potter, 2013 ). Preschoolers' cognitive self-regulation, including inhibitory control and attention shifting, were found to be related to measures of literacy and mathematics ability in kindergarten ( Blair and Razza, 2007 ). In another study, children with higher self-regulation, including attention, working memory, and inhibitory control, achieved at higher levels in literacy, language, and mathematics ( McClelland et al., 2007 ). Interventions in the area of self-regulation have shown positive effects for reading achievement ( Best et al., 2011 ; Bierman et al., 2008a ; Blair and Diamond, 2008 ; Blair and Razza, 2007 ; Diamond and Lee, 2011 ). Among struggling first graders in an effective reading intervention, those who were retained in grade showed significantly weaker self-regulation skills ( Dombek and Connor, 2012 ). Cognitive self-regulation appears to be strongly associated with academic learning ( Willoughby et al., 2011 ), but emotional self-regulation also contributes through children's adjustment to school and attitudes toward learning. In addition, both cognitive and emotional self-regulation contribute to variance in attention, competence motivation, and persistence ( Bassett et al., 2012 ; Willoughby et al., 2011 ).

In addition, differences in self-regulation competencies raise important issues related to disparities in educational achievement. Children in poverty can have lower self-regulation competencies (e.g., Blair and Razza, 2007 ; Blair et al., 2010 ; Bull and Scerif, 2001 ; Hackman and Farah, 2009 ; Jenks et al., 2012 ; Kishiyama et al., 2009 ; Masten et al., 2012 ; Mazzocco and Hanich, 2010 ; McLean and Hitch, 1999 ; Raver, 2013 ). One reason is the effect of chronic stress on behavioral and biological capacities for self-control (see discussion of chronic stress and adversity later in this chapter). This risk is exacerbated for children who are also dual language learners ( Wanless et al., 2011 ). Students with special needs are another population who may require focused interventions to develop self-regulation competencies ( Harris et al., 2005 ; Jenks et al., 2012 ; Lyon and Krasnegor, 1996 ; Mazzocco and Hanich, 2010 ; McLean and Hitch, 1999 ; Raches and Mazzocco, 2012 ; Toll et al., 2010 ; Zelazo et al., 2002 ). Students who are gifted and talented may also have exceptional needs in this domain (e.g., Mooji, 2010 ).

Adults who work with children have the opportunity to provide environments, experiences, and curricula that can help develop the competencies needed, including for children whose skills were not optimally developed in the earliest years. Importantly, the goal of such interventions is not to “train” children to suppress behaviors and follow rules. Rather, effective educators and programs provide learning activities and environments that increase children's capacity and disposition to set a goal (e.g., join a pretend play activity, complete a puzzle); develop a plan or strategy; and muster their social, emotional, and cognitive faculties to execute that plan. The science of how children develop and learn indicates that integrating academic learning and self-regulation is a sound approach.

Executive Functions and Learning in Specific Subjects

As already noted and shown in several examples, executive function processes are closely related to achievement in both language and literacy and mathematics ( Best et al., 2011 ; Blair and Razza, 2007 ; Blair et al., 2010 ; Neuenschwander et al., 2012 ), and this has also been shown in science ( Nayfeld et al., 2013 ). In some research, executive function has been correlated similarly with both reading and mathematics achievement across a wide age span (5 to 17 years), suggesting its significant role in academic learning ( Best et al., 2011 ; Blair and Razza, 2007 ; Neuenschwander et al., 2012 ). In contrast, some studies have found that executive function is more strongly associated with mathematics than with literacy or language ( Barata, 2010 ; Blair et al., 2010 ; Ponitz et al., 2009 ; von Suchodoletz and Gunzenhauser, 2013 ). A strong relationship between executive function and mathematics may reflect that mathematics relies heavily on working memory and attention control, requiring the ability to inhibit an automatic response to a single aspect of a problem, to hold relevant information in mind, and to operate on it while shifting attention appropriately among different elements of a problem ( Welsh et al., 2010 ). This relationship is especially important given that mathematics curricula increasingly require higher-order skills, which executive function competencies provides ( Baker et al., 2010 ).

Some research indicates that most executive function competencies correlate significantly with mathematics achievement ( Bull and Scerif, 2001 ), while other studies suggest a greater role for particular executive function competencies in the learning of mathematics for young children—especially inhibitory control ( Blair and Razza, 2007 ) or working memory ( Bull et al., 2008 ; Geary, 2011 ; see also, Geary et al., 2012 ; cf. Neuenschwander et al., 2012 ; Szűcs et al., 2014 ; Van der Ven et al., 2012 ). These latter two competencies have been shown to predict success in mathematics in primary school students ( Toll et al., 2010 ). Working memory tasks have also been shown to predict mathematics learning disabilities, even more so than early mathematical abilities ( Toll et al., 2010 ). Several studies have identified lack of inhibition and working memory as specific deficits for children of lower mathematical ability, resulting in difficulty with switching to and evaluating new strategies for dealing with a particular task ( Bull and Scerif [2001] and Lan and colleagues [2011] found similar results). Persistence, another learning skill that is interrelated with cognitive processes, also has been linked to mathematics achievement for both 3- and 4-year-olds ( Maier and Greenfield, 2008 ).

Executive function competencies may be differentially associated with distinct areas of mathematics. For example, executive function was found to be correlated more with solving word problems than with calculation ( Best et al., 2011 ), and appears to play a role in acquiring new mathematics procedures and developing automatic access to arithmetic facts ( LeFevre et al., 2013 ). Different aspects of working memory also may be related to different mathematical areas ( Simmons et al., 2012 ). Parallel observations have been made for executive function and reading, with executive function playing a larger role in reading comprehension than in decoding.

In addition to the role of executive function in learning mathematics, mathematics activities also contribute to developing executive function. Some mathematics activities may require children to suppress prepotent responses, manipulate abstract information, and remain cognitively flexible. Importantly, neuroimaging studies suggest that executive function may be developed through learning mathematics in challenging activities but not in exercising mathematics once learned ( Ansari et al., 2005 ; Butterworth et al., 2011 ).

Cognitive Skills and Executive Function in Children with Special Needs

Some students with special needs may have a specific lack of certain executive function competencies ( Harris et al., 2005 ; Jenks et al., 2012 ; Lyon and Krasnegor, 1996 ; McLean and Hitch, 1999 ; Raches and Mazzocco, 2012 ; Schoemaker et al., 2014 ; Toll et al., 2010 ; Zelazo et al., 2002 ). Most of the research on executive function deficits in relation to disabilities that affect young children has focused on specific disorders, particularly attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). An early theory posited that ADHD is a lack of the behavioral inhibition required for proficiency with executive functions such as self-regulation of affect, motivation, and arousal; working memory; and synthesis analysis of internally represented information ( Barkley, 1997 ). Research has found that children diagnosed with ADHD are more likely than children without ADHD to have two or more deficits in executive function ( Biederman et al., 2004 ; cf. Shuai et al., 2011 ). A meta-analysis of studies of one measure of executive function, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, suggests that the performance of individuals with ADHD is fairly consistently poorer than that of individuals without clinical diagnoses ( Romine et al., 2004 ). In another study, children with ADHD were found not to have learning problems but rather problems in a measure of inhibitory control, which affected arithmetic calculation (as well as written language) ( Semrud-Clikeman, 2012 ). Other evidence suggests that children diagnosed with ADHD may have deficits not in executive processes themselves but in motivation or response to contingencies, that is, the regulation of effort allocation ( Huang-Pollock et al., 2012 ).

Having ADHD with deficits in executive function, compared to ADHD alone, is associated with an increased risk for grade retention and a decrease in academic achievement ( Biederman et al., 2004 ). The relationship between ADHD and executive functions may also depend on subtype. One study found that children with an inattention ADHD subtype showed deficits in several executive function competencies ( Tymms and Merrell, 2011 ), whereas children with the hyperactive-impulsive ADHD subtype may have fewer executive function deficits ( Shuai et al., 2011 ) and may even have strengths that could be developed in appropriate educational environments.

Deficits in executive function have been studied in other developmental disorders as well, albeit often in less detail. They include autism ( Bühler et al., 2011 ; Hill, 2004 ; Zelazo et al., 2002 ); attention and disruptive behavior problems ( Fahie and Symons, 2003 ; Hughes and Ensor, 2011 ); intellectual disabilities ( Nader-Grosbois and Lefèvre, 2011 ; Neece et al., 2011 ; Vieillevoye and Nader-Grosbois, 2008 ); cerebral palsy ( Jenks et al., 2012 ); Turner syndrome ( Mazzocco and Hanich, 2010 ); developmental dyslexia ( Brosnan et al., 2002 ; cf. Romine and Reynolds, 2005 ); and mathematics learning disabilities ( Toll et al., 2010 ).

Other Learning Skills and Dispositions

Other learning skills that are important to early academic achievement include persistence, curiosity, self-confidence, intrinsic motivation, time perspective (e.g., the willingness to prioritize long-term goals over immediate gratifications), and self-control. The growth of emotional and cognitive self-regulation is also fundamentally related to many of these developing learning skills. In addition, social experiences, discussed later in this chapter, are important for the growth of these learning skills. Note also that although these skills are referred to sometimes as dispositions, they are fostered through early experience and can be supported through intentional caregiving and instructional practices; they are not simply intrinsic traits in the child.

A capacity for focused engagement in learning is apparent from very early in life, although it is also true that these learning competencies develop significantly throughout early childhood as processes of neurobiological development interact with children's social experiences to enable greater persistence, focused attention, delayed gratification, and other components of effective learning and problem solving. As a consequence, very young children are likely to approach new learning situations with enthusiasm and self-confidence but at young ages may not necessarily bring persistence or creativity in confronting and solving challenging problems. Older preschoolers, by contrast, are more self-regulated learners. They approach new learning opportunities with initiative and involvement, and they are more persistent and more likely to solve problems creatively, by proposing their own ideas ( NRC, 2001 ).

Considerable research confirms the importance of these skills to early learning. Individual differences in infants' “mastery motivation” skills—persistence, focus, and curiosity in exploration and problem solving—predict later cognitive abilities and achievement motivation ( Busch-Rossnagel, 2005 ; Morgan et al., 1990 ; Wang and Barrett, 2013 ). In preschool-age children, learning skills that include motivation, engagement, and interest in learning activities have been found in longitudinal studies to predict children's cognitive skills at school entry ( Duncan et al., 2005 , 2007 ). Similarly, these characteristics continue to be associated with reading and mathematics achievement in the early elementary grades ( Alexander et al., 1993 ). Differences in these learning skills are especially associated with academic achievement for children in circumstances of economic disadvantage who face various kinds of self-regulatory challenges ( Blair and Raver, 2012 ; Howse et al., 2003a ).

Much of school success requires that children prioritize longer-term rewards requiring current effort over immediate satisfactions. The classic demonstration of this skill comes from a series of studies led by Walter Mischel beginning in the 1960s. Young children were offered the option of choosing an immediate, smaller reward or a larger reward if they waited to receive it later. For several years developmental outcomes for these children were tracked, which revealed that children who were better able to delay gratification at age 4 scored higher on measures of language skills, academic achievement, planful behaviors, self-reliance, capacity to cope with stress and frustration, and social competence measured in adolescence and adulthood ( Mischel et al., 1988 ). Other studies have reported consistent findings. Early development in the ability to prioritize future, long-term goals over short-term lesser gains improves children's chances of academic achievement and securing and maintaining employment ( Rachlin, 2000 ). Conversely, the inability to delay gratification is associated with young children's aggressive behavior, conduct problems, poorer peer relationships, and academic difficulty during preschool and the transition to elementary school ( Olson and Hoza, 1993 ) as well as later outcomes, including academic failure, delinquency, and substance abuse in adolescence ( Lynam et al., 1993 ; Wulfert et al., 2002 ).

The ways that children view themselves as learners are also important. Young children's self-perceived capability to master learning challenges develops early and exerts a continuing influence on their academic success. Early self-evaluations of competence are based on the positive and negative evaluations of children's behavior and competence by parents ( Stipek et al., 1992 ). Parent and educator expectations for children's success remain important. High parent expectations for children's school achievement are associated with children's later academic performance, and this is also true of educator expectations. In one longitudinal study, teacher expectations for children's math achievement in grades 1 and 3 directly predicted children's scores on standardized achievement tests 2 years later, and expectations for reading achievement had indirect associations with later reading scores. There was also evidence in this study that expectations were especially influential for academically at-risk students ( Hinnant et al., 2009 ).

Messages from parents and educators are also important in shaping how children attribute their own success and failure which, in turn, predicts their future effort and expectations of success. Children develop implicit theories in the early years about who they are as a person and what it means to be intelligent. Some children come to view intelligence as a fixed trait (i.e., one is either smart or not), whereas others see it as a more malleable trait that can be changed through effort and persistence. Educators and parents who approach learning goals by promoting and rewarding effort, persistence, and willingness to take on challenging problems increase children's motivation and their endorsement of effort as a path to success. In contrast, children receiving messages that intelligence is stable and cannot be improved through hard work are discouraged from pursuing difficult tasks, particularly if they view their abilities as low ( Heyman and Dweck, 1992 ). These patterns of “helpless” versus “mastery-oriented” motivation are learned in the preschool years and remain stable over time ( Smiley and Dweck, 1994 ).

These perceptions and patterns of motivation can be especially significant as children learn academic subjects, such as mathematics ( Clements and Sarama, 2012 ). People in the United States have many negative beliefs and attitudes about mathematics ( Ashcraft, 2006 ). One deeply embedded cultural belief is that achievement in mathematics depends mainly on native aptitude or ability rather than effort. Research shows that the belief in the primacy of native ability hurts students and, further, it is simply untrue.

Throughout their school careers, students who believe—or are helped to understand—that they can learn if they try working longer on tasks have better achievement than those who believe that either one “has it” (or “gets it”) or does not ( McLeod and Adams, 1989 ; Weiner, 1986 ). Researchers have estimated that students should be successful about 70 percent of the time to maximize motivation ( Middleton and Spanias, 1999 ). If students are directly assured that working hard to figure out problems, including making errors and being frustrated, are part of the learning process it can diminish feelings of embarrassment and other negative emotions at being incorrect. In contrast, students' learning can be impeded if educators define success only as rapid, correct responses and accuracy only as following the educator's example ( Middleton and Spanias, 1999 ). In addition, students will build positive feelings about mathematics if they experience it as a sense-making activity. Most young students are motivated to explore numbers and shapes and have positive feelings about mathematics ( Middleton and Spanias, 1999 ). However, after only a couple of years in typical schools, they begin to believe that only some people have the ability to do math.

A related pattern relating perceptions and emotions to learning is seen with students who experience mathematics anxiety. Primary grade students who have strong math anxiety, even alongside strong working memory, have been found to have lower mathematics achievement because working memory capacity is co-opted by math anxiety ( Beilock, 2001 ; Ramirez et al., 2013 ). Research has shown that primary grade students who “feel panicky” about math have increased activity in brain regions that are associated with fear, which decreases activity in brain regions associated with problem solving ( Young et al., 2012 ). Early identification and treatment of math anxiety may prevent children with high potential from avoiding mathematics and mathematics courses ( Ramirez et al., 2013 ).

• SOCIOEMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The development of social and emotional competence is an important part of child development and early learning. Socioemotional competence has been described as a multidimensional construct that contributes to the ability to understand and manage emotions and behavior; to make decisions and achieve goals; and to establish and maintain positive relationships, including feeling and showing empathy for others. Although their importance is widely recognized, universal agreement is lacking on how to categorize and define these areas of development. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning offers a summary construct with five interrelated groups of competencies that together encompass the areas typically considered to be part of socioemotional competence (see Figure 4-2 ).

Elements of socioemotional competence. SOURCE: Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (http://www.casel.org/social-and-emotional-learning/core-competencies, accessed March 24, 2015).

Socioemotional competence increasingly is viewed as important for a child's early school adjustment and for academic success at both the preschool and K-12 levels ( Bierman et al., 2008a , b ; Denham and Brown, 2010 ; Heckman et al., 2013 ; La Paro and Pianta, 2000 ; Leerkes et al., 2008 ). A growing body of research addresses the relationship between dimensions of socioemotional competence and cognitive and other skills related to early learning and later academic achievement ( Bierman et al., 2008a , b ; Graziano et al., 2007 ; Howse et al., 2003b ; Miller et al., 2006 ). Socioemotional development early in life also increasingly is understood to be critically important for later mental well-being, and for contributing to subsequent mental health problems when there are enduring disturbances in socioemotional functions ( IOM and NRC, 2009 ; Leckman and March, 2011 ).

There are several reasons why socioemotional development is important to early learning and academic success. As discussed in detail later in this section, early learning is a social activity in which these skills are important to the interactions through which learning occurs and is collaboratively shared. Socioemotional competence gives children the capacity to engage in academic tasks by increasing their ability to interact constructively with teachers, work collaboratively with and learn from peers, and dedicate sustained attention to learning ( Denham and Brown, 2010 ). Further, behavioral and emotional problems not only impede early learning but also pose other risks to long-term success. Substantial research has examined the relationship between delays and deficits in children's social skills and challenging behavior, such as serious problems getting along with peers or cooperating with educators ( Zins et al., 2007 ). When challenging behavior is not resolved during the early years, children with persistent early socioemotional difficulties experience problems in socialization, school adjustment, school success, and educational and vocational adaptation in adolescence and adulthood (e.g., Dunlap et al., 2006 ; Lane et al., 2008 ; Nelson et al., 2004 ). Thus attention to socioemotional competence also is important from the perspective of addressing early emerging behavior problems before they become more serious.

A variety of evidence-based approaches can be implemented to strengthen socioemotional competence for young children ( Domitrovich et al., 2012 ; IOM and NRC, 2009 ). These approaches typically entail strategies designed to improve children's emotion identification and understanding combined with the development of social problem-solving skills; practice in simple emotion regulation strategies; and coaching in prosocial behavior through strategies that can involve role playing, modeling, and reinforcement of socially competent behavior. Importantly, as discussed further in Chapter 6 , these strategies can be incorporated into daily classroom practice to provide children with everyday socioemotional learning.

Relational Security and Emotional Well-Being

As noted earlier in the discussion of self-regulation, socioemotional competencies contribute to the development of relationships with parents, educators, and peers. The development of positive relationships enables young children to participate constructively in learning experiences that are inherently social. The emotional support and security provided by positive relationships contributes in multifaceted ways to young children's learning success. Research on the security of attachment between young children and their parents illustrates this point, and provides a basis for considering the nature of children's relationships with educators and peers.

A secure parent–child attachment is widely recognized as foundational for healthy development, and the evolving understanding of the importance of attachment encompasses research in developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience (as discussed in Chapter 3 ) ( Schore and Schore, 2008 ; Thompson, 2013 ). Research has shown that securely attached children receive more sensitively responsive parental care, and in turn develop greater social skills with adults and peers and greater social and emotional understanding of others, show more advanced moral development, and have a more positive self-concept (see Thompson, 2013 , for a review). Securely attached children also have been found to be more advanced in cognitive and language development and to show greater achievement in school ( de Ruiter and van IJzendoorn, 1993 ; van Ijzendoorn et al., 1995 ; West et al., 2013 ). This association has been found for infants, preschool-age children, and older children, suggesting that it is fairly robust.

Most researchers believe that the association between attachment security and cognitive competence derives not from a direct link between the two, but from a number of processes mediating a secure attachment and the development of cognitive and language skills ( O'Connor and McCartney, 2007 ). The mediators that have been studied include the following:

• Early confidence and competence at exploration—One of the functions of a secure attachment is to enable infants and young children to better explore the environment, confident in the caregiver's support and responsiveness if things go awry. An extensive research literature, focused primarily on young children, confirms this expectation ( van Ijzendoorn et al., 1995 ). Early in life, exploratory interest is likely to lead to new discoveries and learning.
• Maternal instruction and guidance—Consistent with the sensitivity that initially contributes to a secure attachment, considerable research has shown that the mothers of securely attached children continue to respond supportively in ways that promote the child's social and cognitive achievements ( Thompson, in press) . In particular, these mothers talk more elaboratively with their children in ways that foster the children's deeper understanding and in so doing help support the children's cognitive growth ( Fivush et al., 2006 ). Furthermore, increased mother–child conversation is likely to foster the child's linguistic skills.
• Children's social competence with adults and peers—Securely attached children develop enhanced social skills and social understanding that enhance their competence in interactions with peers and adults in learning environments. In this light, their greater cognitive and language competencies may derive, at least in part, from more successful interactions with social partners in learning contexts. (See the detailed discussion of social interaction as a forum for cognitive growth later in this section.)
• Self-regulatory competence—Several studies suggest that securely attached children are more skilled in the preschool and early grade school years at self-regulation, especially as it is manifested in greater social competence and emotion regulation. Self-regulatory competence also may extend to children's greater attentional focus, cognitive self-control, and persistence in learning situations. In one recent report, the association of attachment security with measures of school engagement in the early primary grades was mediated by differences in children's social self-control; attentional impulsivity also varied with the security of attachment ( Drake et al., 2014 ; Thompson, 2013 ).
• Stress management—One of the functions of a secure attachment is that it supports the social buffering of stress by providing children with an adult who regularly assists them in challenging circumstances. The social buffering of stress may be an especially important aspect of how a secure attachment contributes to cognitive competence for children in disadvantaged circumstances when stress is likely to be chronic and potentially overwhelming (see Gunnar and Donzella, 2002 , for a review; Nachmias et al., 1996 ) (see also the discussion of chronic stress and adversity later in this chapter).

In addition to the substantial research on parent–child attachment and the development of cognitive competence, a smaller but significant research literature focuses on the development of attachments between children and educators and how those attachments contribute to children's success in structured learning environments (e.g., Ahnert et al., 2006 ; Birch and Ladd, 1998 ; Howes and Hamilton, 1992 ; Howes et al., 1998 ; Ladd et al., 1999 ; Mitchell-Copeland et al., 1997 ; Pianta and Stuhlman, 2004a , b ). In some respects, the processes connecting children's learning achievement with the supportive, secure relationships they develop with educators are similar to those observed with parent–child attachments. As with their parents and other caregivers, children develop attachments to their educators, and the quality of those relationships has a significant and potentially enduring influence on their classroom success ( Hamre and Pianta, 2001 ). Secure, warm relationships with educators facilitate young children's self-confidence when learning and assist in their self-regulatory competence, and there is evidence that children with such relationships in the classroom learn more than those who have more difficult relationships with educators ( NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2003 ; Pianta and Stuhlman, 2004b ).

In one study, preschoolers identified as academically at risk based on demographic characteristics and reports of problems by their kindergarten teachers were followed to the end of first grade ( Hamre and Pianta, 2005 ). The children with first-grade teachers who provided high amounts of instructional and emotional support had achievement scores comparable to those of their low-risk peers. Support was measured by teacher behaviors such as verbal comments promoting effort, persistence, and mastery; conversations using open-ended questions; encouragement of child responsibility; sensitivity; and a positive classroom climate. O'Connor and McCartney (2007) likewise found that positive educator–child relationships from preschool through third grade were associated with higher third-grade achievement, and that much of this achievement derived from how positive relationships promoted children's classroom engagement.

Positive educator–child relationships are especially important during the transition to school, when children's initial expectations about school and adjustment to its social demands take shape ( Ladd et al., 1999 ; Silver et al., 2005 ). Children who develop more positive relationships with their teachers in kindergarten are more positive about attending school, more excited about learning, and more self-confident. In the classroom they achieve more compared with children who experience more conflicted or troubled relationships with their teachers ( Birch and Ladd, 1997 ; NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2003 ; Pianta and Stuhlman, 2004b ). A positive relationship with educators may be especially important for children who are at risk of academic difficulty because such a relationship can provide support for self-confidence and classroom involvement ( Pianta et al., 1995 ).

A similar association is seen for peer relationships. Children who experience greater friendship and peer acceptance tend to feel more positive about coming to school, participate more in activities in the classroom, and achieve more in kindergarten ( Ladd et al., 1996 , 1997 ). Peer rejection is associated with less classroom participation, poorer academic performance, and a desire to avoid school ( Buhs and Ladd, 2001 ).

Taken together, research documenting the association between the security of attachment and the development of cognitive and language competence, as well as the stronger academic performance of securely attached children, highlights the multiple ways in which supportive relationships contribute to early learning. In particular, such relationships with parents, educators, and even peers provide immediate support that helps children focus their energies on learning opportunities, and they also foster the development of social and cognitive skills that children enlist in learning.

Emotion Regulation and Self-Management

Another element of socioemotional competence, touched on earlier in the section on general learning competencies, is self-regulation of emotion, or emotion regulation, which can affect learning behaviors and relationships with adults and peers. As noted in that earlier discussion, emotion regulation is closely intertwined with cognitive self-regulation and executive function. Emotion regulation processes include emotional and motivational responses to situations involving risk and reward (e.g., Kerr and Zelazo, 2004 ). They are frequently inhibitory; that is, they include the ability to suppress one response (e.g., grabbing a toy from another) so as to respond in a better way (asking for or sharing the toy). The development of emotion regulation and other forms of self-management in the early years is based on slowly maturing regions of the prefrontal cortex that continue to develop throughout adolescence and even early adulthood. Thus, early learners are maturationally challenged to manage their attention, emotions, and behavioral impulses effectively in a care setting or classroom.

Because they have difficulty cooperating or resolving conflicts successfully, children who lack effective self-regulation do not participate in a productive way in classroom activities—including learning activities ( Broidy et al., 2003 ; Ladd et al., 1999 ; Saarni et al., 1998 ). Children with poor emotion regulation skills may act disruptively and aggressively; they then receive less support from their peers, which in turn may undermine their learning ( Valiente et al., 2011 ). Poor emotion regulation also diminishes positive educator–child interactions, which, as discussed in the previous section, has been shown to predict poor academic performance and behavior problems ( Hamre and Pianta, 2001 ; Neuenschwander et al., 2012 ; Raver and Knitzer, 2002 ).

Coupled with joint attention and delay of gratification, self-regulation skills are linked to social competence and ease the transition to kindergarten ( Huffman et al., 2000 ; McIntyre et al., 2006 ). Children with difficulty regulating emotion in preschool and kindergarten often display inappropriate behavior, fail to pay attention (affecting whether they recall and process information), and have difficulty following instructions, all of which contribute to learning problems ( Eisenberg et al., 2010 ). Unfortunately, these difficulties tend to be common in preschool and kindergarten. They are an important determinant of whether educators and parents regard young children as “ready for school” ( Rimm-Kaufman et al., 2000 ).

Some researchers also suggest that emotion regulation in preschool and kindergarten serves as an early indicator of later academic success ( Graziano et al., 2007 ; Howse et al., 2003b ; Trentacosta and Izard, 2007 ). In preschool, McClelland and colleagues (2007) found not only that emotion regulation predicted early skills in literacy and mathematics but also that growth in emotion regulation in 4-year-olds over a 1-year period was linked to greater gains in literacy, vocabulary, and math compared with children showing less growth. Reading disability and problem behavior may be a “chicken or egg” problem: students who have behavior problems in first grade are more likely to have reading difficulties in third grade and students who have reading difficulties in first grade are more likely to exhibit behavior problems in third grade ( Morgan et al., 2008 ). Thus a particularly effective learning environment may be one that provides both effective reading instruction and support for behavioral self-regulation ( Connor et al., 2014 ).

Young children are better enabled to exercise self-regulation in the company of educators who have developmentally appropriate expectations for their self-control, provide predictable routines, and offer guidance that scaffolds their developing skills of self-management, especially in the context of carefully designed daily practices in a well-organized setting ( Bodrova and Leong, 2012 ). Indeed, in an intervention for academically at-risk young children, the Chicago School Readiness Project gave Head Start teachers specialized training at the beginning of the year in classroom management strategies to help lower-income preschoolers better regulate their own behavior. At the end of the school year, these children showed less impulsiveness, fewer disruptive behaviors, and better academic performance compared with children in classrooms with teachers who received a different training regimen ( Raver et al., 2009 , 2011 ).

Conclusion About the Ability to Self-Regulate The ability to self-regulate both emotion and cognitive processes is important for learning and academic achievement, affecting children's thinking, motivation, self-control, and social interactions. Children's progress in this ability from birth through age 8 is influenced by the extent to which relationships with adults, learning environments, and learning experiences support this set of skills, and their progress can be impaired by stressful and adverse circumstances.

Social and Emotional Understanding

As described earlier in this chapter, even infants and toddlers have an implicit theory of mind for understanding how certain mental states are associated with people's behavior. From their simple and straightforward awareness that people act intentionally and are goal directed; that people have positive and negative feelings in response to things around them; and that people have different perceptions, goals, and feelings, young children develop increasingly sophisticated understanding of the mental experiences that cause people to act as they do ( Wellman, 2011 ). They realize, for example, that people's beliefs about reality can be accurate or may be mistaken, and this realization leads to their understanding that people can be deceived, that the child's own thoughts and feelings need not be disclosed, and that not everybody can be believed ( Lee, 2013 ; Mills, 2013 ). They appreciate that people's thinking may be biased by expectations, prior experiences, and desires that cause them to interpret the same situation in very different ways ( Lalonde and Chandler, 2002 ). They also begin to appreciate how personality differences among people can cause different individuals to act in the same situation in very different ways ( Heyman and Gelman, 1999 ).

These remarkable advances in social understanding are important to children's developing socioemotional skills for interacting with educators and peers. These advances also are fostered by children's classroom experiences. Children learn about how people think and feel from directly observing; asking questions; and conversing about people's mental states with trusted informants, such as parents ( Bartsch and Wellman, 1995 ; Dunn, 2002 ; Thompson et al., 2003 ). Similarly, interactions with educators and peers provide young children with apt lessons in mutual understanding and perspective taking, cooperation, conflict management, personality differences and similarities, and emotional understanding in an environment where these skills are developing. This is especially so when educators can use children's experiences as forums for developing social and emotional understanding, such as when they explain why peers are feeling the way they do, suggest strategies for resolving conflict over resources or a point of view, or involve children in collective decision making involving different opinions.

Self-Awareness and Early Learning

How young children think of themselves as learners, and in particular their self-perceived efficacy in mastering new understanding, is an early developing and continuously important influence on their academic success. Young children become increasingly sensitive to the positive and negative evaluations of their behavior by parents, which serve as the basis for their self-evaluations ( Stipek et al., 1992 ). In one study, mothers who provided positive evaluations, gentle guidance, and corrective feedback during teaching tasks with their 2-year-olds had children who, 1 year later, were more persistent and less likely to avoid difficult challenges. By contrast, mothers who were intrusively controlling of their toddlers had children who, 1 year later, responded with shame when they had difficulty ( Kelley et al., 2000 ). Gunderson and colleagues (2013) found that 14- to 38-month-old children whose parents praised their efforts during unstructured home observations were more likely, as third graders, to believe that abilities are malleable and can be improved.

An extensive research literature documents the effects of parents' and educators' performance feedback on children's self-concept and motivation to succeed. Most of this research was conducted with older children and adolescents because of their more sophisticated understanding of differences in ability (see Wigfield et al., 2006 , for a review); however, preschoolers and early primary grade students are also sensitive to success and failure and to their imputed causes. In a study by Cimpian and colleagues (2007) , for example, 4-year-old children were represented by puppets whose performance was praised by a teacher using either generic feedback (“You are a good drawer.”) to imply trait-based (ability-centered) success or nongeneric feedback (“You did a good job drawing.”) to imply situation-based (effort-centered) success. The children did not differ in their self-evaluations after hearing praise of either kind, but when their puppet subsequently made a mistake and was criticized for it, the 4-year-olds who had heard generic feedback evaluated their performance and the situation more negatively than did children hearing nongeneric feedback, suggesting that they interpreted criticism as reflecting deficits in their ability. Similar results have been reported with kindergarteners by Kamins and Dweck (1999) and by Zentall and Morris (2010) , with the latter indicating that task persistence as well as self-evaluation were strengthened by the use of nongeneric performance feedback.

Parent and educator expectations for children's academic success also are important influences. High parental expectations for children's school achievement are associated with children's later academic performance, and this association often is mediated by the greater involvement of parents in the preschool or school program and other practices that support children's school success ( Baroody and Dobbs-Oates, 2009 ; Englund et al., 2004 ; Mantzicopoulos, 1997 ). The role of educator expectations in children's success is illustrated by a longitudinal study in which teacher expectations for children's math achievement in grades 1 and 3 directly predicted children's scores on standardized achievement tests 2 years later; teacher expectations for reading achievement had indirect associations with later reading scores. The results of this study also suggest that teacher expectations were especially influential for academically at-risk students ( Hinnant et al., 2009 ).

Social Interaction as a Forum for Cognitive Growth

A wider perspective on the importance of socioemotional skills for academic success is gained by considering the importance of social experiences for early learning. Contemporary research has led developmental scientists to understand the mind's development as deriving jointly from the child's naturally inquisitive activity and the catalysts of social experience. Sometimes these social experiences are in formal teaching and other pedagogical experiences, but often they take the form of adults and children sharing in activities that provide the basis for early learning, in a kind of “guided participation” (e.g., Rogoff, 1991 ). These activities can be as simple as the one-sided “conversation” parents have with their infant or toddler from which language skills develop, or the shared sorting of laundry into piles of similar color, or labeling of another child's feelings during an episode of peer conflict. In short, considerable early learning occurs in the course of a young child's ordinary interactions with a responsive adult.

Social experiences provide emotional security and support that enables learning and can also contribute to the development of language, number skills, problem solving, and other cognitive and learning skills that are foundational for school readiness and academic achievement. Through their interactions with children, adults provide essential stimulation that provides rapidly developing mental processes with catalysts that provoke further learning. Conversely, the lack of these catalysts contributes to learning disparities by the time that children become preschoolers. These processes are well illustrated by considering the growth of language and literacy skills and of mathematical understanding.

It is difficult to think of any child developing language apart from social interactions with others. As discussed earlier in this chapter, variability in these experiences, beginning in infancy, helps account for socioeconomic disparities in language and mathematical skills that are apparent by the time children enter school. In a widely cited study, Hart and Risley (1995) recorded 1 hour of naturally occurring speech in the homes of 42 families at monthly intervals beginning when children were 7-9 months old and continuing until they turned 3 years. They found that by age 3, children living in the most socioeconomically advantaged families had a working vocabulary that was more than twice the size of that of children growing up in the most disadvantaged families. The latter group of children also was adding words more slowly than their advantaged counterparts. The differences in children's vocabulary size were associated, in part, with how many words were spoken to them during the home observations, with a much richer linguistic environment being characteristic of the most advantaged homes. In addition, words were used in functionally different ways, with a much higher ratio of affirmative-to-prohibitive language being used in the most advantaged homes and a much lower ratio (i.e., below 1) being characteristic of the most disadvantaged homes. Differences in the language environment in which children grew up were, in other words, qualitative as well as quantitative in nature. Further research with a subset of 29 families in this sample showed that 3-year-olds' vocabulary size significantly predicted their scores on standardized tests of language skill in third grade ( Hart and Risley, 1995 ).

A later study by Fernald and colleagues (2013) confirms and extends these findings. A sample of 48 English-learning infants from families varying in socioeconomic status was followed from 18 to 24 months. At 18 months, significant differences between infants from higher- and lower-income families were already seen in vocabulary size and in real-time language processing efficiency. By 24 months, a 6-month gap was found between the two groups in processing skills related to language development. A companion study by Weisleder and Fernald (2013) with 29 lower-income Spanish-speaking families found that infants who experienced more child-directed speech at 19 months had larger vocabularies and greater language processing efficiency at 24 months. But adult speech that was simply overheard by infants (i.e., not child directed) at 19 months had no association with later language ( Schneidman et al., 2013 ). These studies indicate that child-directed speech, and perhaps the social interaction that accompanies it, is what strengthens infants' language processing efficiency. As in the Hart and Risley (1995) study, differences in family language environments were both qualitative and quantitative in nature. These findings are important in light of the association between the socioeconomic status of children's families and their language skills ( Bradley and Corwyn, 2002 ).

The findings of these studies are consistent with those of studies of the social experiences in and outside the home that promote language learning in early childhood. (See also the section on language and literacy under “Learning Specific Subjects” earlier in this chapter.) According to one longitudinal study, language and literacy skills in kindergarten were predicted by several aspects of the language environment at home and in classrooms in the preschool years. The characteristics of adult language that stimulated young children's language development included adult use of varied vocabulary during conversations with children; extended discourse on a single topic (rather than frequent topic switching); and diversity of language-related activities, including storybook reading, conversation related to children's experiences and interests, language corrections, and pretend play ( Dickinson, 2003 ; Dickinson and Porche, 2011 ; Dickinson and Tabors, 2001 ). These elements of the early childhood social environment predicted both kindergarten language skills and fourth-grade language and reading abilities. Other studies show that extensive use of descriptive language (e.g., labeling and commenting on people's actions) related to the child's current experience contributes to the quality of children's language development. Shared storybook reading also has been found to enhance the language skills of young children in lower-income homes ( Raikes et al., 2006 ). Stated differently, what matters is not just how much language young children are exposed to but the social and emotional contexts of language shared with an adult.

Language and literacy development is a major focus of instruction in prekindergarten and K-3 classrooms, and the instructional strategies used by teachers are both more formal and more sophisticated than those used in early childhood classrooms. Duke and Block (2012) have noted that in primary grade classrooms, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and conceptual and content knowledge are not adequately emphasized. The practices that would enhance early reading skills are embedded in children's social experiences with educators and peers in the classroom. They involve children interacting with partners throughout reading activity, and teachers explaining and discussing vocabulary terms and encouraging children to make personal connections with the concepts in the text.

Number Concepts and Mathematics

Language and literacy skills are the best-studied area in which early social experiences are influential, but they are not the only skills for which social interactions are important. Social experiences also are important for mathematics, such as for developing an understanding of numbers as well as early number and spatial/geometric language. Infants have an approximate number system that enables them to distinguish different quantities provided that the numerical ratio between them is not small, and this discrimination ability improves with increasing age (see Box 4-5 earlier in this chapter). There is some evidence that early individual differences in this ability are consistent during the first year and predict later mathematical abilities, although the reason for this remains unclear ( Libertus and Brannon, 2010 ; Starr et al., 2013 ). Toddlers also are beginning to comprehend certain number principles, such as one-to-one correspondence ( Slaughter et al., 2011 ). How adults talk about number is important. In one study, everyday parent–child discourse was recorded for 90 minutes every 4 months when the child was between 14 and 30 months old. The amount of parents' spontaneous “number talk” in these conversations (e.g., counting objects, references to time) was predictive of children's cardinal number knowledge (i.e., the knowledge that “four” refers to sets with four items) at 46 months ( Levine et al., 2010 ). Particularly important was when parents counted or labeled fairly large sets of objects within the child's view, providing concrete referents for parent–child interaction over number ( Gunderson and Levine, 2011 ).

Klibanoff and colleagues (2006) found that in early childhood, teachers' “math language”—that is, the frequency of their verbal references to number and geometric concepts—varied greatly for different teachers, but it significantly predicted progress in preschoolers' mathematical knowledge over the course of the school year. Similarly, another study found that parents' number-related activities at home with their young children were highly variable, but parents who engaged in more of these activities had children with stronger mathematical skill on standardized tests ( Blevins-Knabe and Musun-Miller, 1996 ). These practices in the classroom and at home help explain the significant socioeconomic disparities in number understanding by the time children arrive at school ( Klibanoff et al., 2006 ; Saxe et al., 1987 ). In addition to spoken references to numerical and geometric concepts, adults stimulate developing mathematical understanding when they incorporate these concepts into everyday activities, including games and other kinds of play; prompt children's explanations for numerical inferences; probe their understanding; and relate mathematical ideas to everyday experience ( NRC, 2009 ). Unfortunately, the quality of mathematical instruction is highly variable in preschool and early primary grades (discussed further in Chapter 6 ).

Taken together, these studies suggest the diverse ways in which social experiences provide catalysts for children's developing language and number skills that are the focus of later academic work. In these domains, adult practices provide essential cognitive stimulants beginning in infancy. Similar practices—adapted to young children's developing skills—remain important as children proceed through the primary grades.

Relationships and Early Learning: Implications for Adults

The relationship of an adult to a child—the emotional quality of their interaction, the experiences they have shared, the adult's beliefs about the child's capabilities and characteristics—helps motivate young children's learning, inspire their self-confidence, and provide emotional support to engage them in new learning.

Commonplace interactions provide contexts for supporting the development of cognitive and learning skills and the emotional security in which early learning thrives. Applauding a toddler's physical skills or a second-grader's writing skills, counting together the leaves on the sidewalk or the ingredients of a recipe, interactively reading a book, talking about a sibling's temper tantrum or an episode of classroom peer conflict—these and other shared experiences contribute to young children's cognitive development and early learning.

Conclusion About Socioemotional Development Socioemotional development contributes to the growth of emotional security that enables young children to fully invest themselves in new learning and to the growth of cognitive skills and competencies that are important for learning. These capacities are essential because learning is inherently a social process. Young children's relationships—with parents, teachers, and peers—thus are central to the learning experiences that contribute to their later success.

• PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND HEALTH

Child development and early learning are closely intertwined with child health. Indeed, each is a foundation for outcomes in the other: health is a foundation for learning, while education is a determinant of health ( Zimmerman and Woolf, 2014 ). The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2010) has described three foundational areas of child health and development that contribute to physical and mental well-being:

• Stable and responsive relationships—Such relationships provide young children with consistent, nurturing, and protective interactions with adults that enhance their learning and help them develop adaptive capacities that promote well-regulated stress response systems.
• Safe and supportive physical, chemical, and built environments—Such environments provide physical and emotional spaces that are free from toxins and fear, allow active exploration without significant risk of harm, and offer supports for families raising young children.
• Sound and appropriate nutrition—Such nutrition includes health-promoting food intake as well as eating habits, beginning with the future mother's nutritional status even before conception.

This section examines interrelated topics of physical development, child health, nutrition, and physical activity and then touches on partnerships between the health and education sectors (also discussed in Chapter 5 ).

Physical Development

Physical development goes hand-in-hand with cognitive development in young children, and progress in one domain often relies on progress in the other. Similar to cognitive development, typical physical development follows a common trajectory among children but with individual differences in the rate of development. A child's physical development encompasses healthy physical growth; the development of sensory systems, including vision and hearing; and development of the ability to use the musculoskeletal system for gross motor skills that involve large body movements as well as fine motor skills that require precision and the controlled production of sound for speaking. Sensory and motor development are critical for both everyday and classroom activities that contribute to cognitive development, early learning, and eventually academic achievement.

Young children's growth in gross and fine motor skills develops throughout the birth through age 8 continuum—early on from holding their head up; rolling over; standing, crawling, and walking; to grasping cereal, picking up blocks, using a fork, tying shoelaces, and writing. A number of recent studies have focused on the relationships among the development of fine and gross motor skills in infants and young children, cognitive development, and school readiness. For example, one study found that students showing deficiencies in fine motor skills exhibited lower math and verbal scores ( Sandler et al., 1992 ), and more recent studies have also shown that fine motor skills were strongly linked to later achievement ( Grissmer et al., 2010a ; Pagani and Messier, 2012 ). Some of the same neural infrastructure in the brain that controls the learning process during motor development are also involved in the control of learning in cognitive development ( Grissmer et al., 2010a ). The evidence of the impact of motor skills on cognitive development and readiness for school calls for a shift in curricula to include activities that focus on fine motor skills, to include the arts, physical education, and play ( Grissmer et al., 2010b ).

Child Health

Health has an important influence on early learning and academic achievement. Hair and colleagues (2006) found that poor health can be as important in contributing to struggles with academic performance in first grade as language and cognitive skills, along with lack of social skills. Not only are healthy children better prepared to learn, but participation in high-quality early childhood programs leads to improved health in adulthood, setting the stage for intergenerational well-being. Data from Head Start and from the Carolina Abecedarian Project indicate that high-quality, intensive interventions can prevent, or at least delay, the onset of physical and emotional problems from adolescence into adulthood ( Campbell et al., 2014 ; Carneiro and Ginja, 2012 ). Data from a national longitudinal survey show that involvement in Head Start was associated with fewer behavior problems and serious health problems, such as 29 percent less obesity in males at 12 and 13 years of age. In addition, Head Start participants had less depression and obesity as adolescents and 31 percent less involvement in criminal activity as young adults. Similarly, long-term follow-up of adults who were enrolled in the Carolina Abecedarian Project revealed that males in their mid-30s in the project had lower rates of hypertension, obesity, and metabolic syndrome than controls. None of the males in the project had metabolic syndrome, compared with 25 percent of the control group. Further analysis of growth parameters indicated that those who were obese in their mid-30s were on that trajectory by 5 years of age, indicating the need for emphasis on healthy nutrition and regular physical activity beginning in early childhood. These studies suggest that the impact of early care and education programs on physical and emotional health is long term.

Sufficient, high-quality dietary intake is necessary for children's health, development, and learning. Support for providing healthy nutrition for children and their families, including pregnant and expectant mothers, is vital. Adequate protein, calories, and nutrients are needed for brain development and function. While the rapid brain growth and development that occurs in infants and toddlers may make children in this age group particularly vulnerable to dietary deficiencies, nutrition remains important as certain brain regions continue to develop through childhood into adolescence.

Nutrients, Cognitive Development, and Academic Performance

Deficiencies in protein, energy, and micronutrients such as iron, zinc, selenium, iodine, and omega-3 fatty acids have been linked to adverse effects on cognitive and emotional functioning ( Bryan et al., 2004 ). Research has shown that iron-deficiency anemia (IDA) is associated with lower cognitive and academic performance ( Bryan et al., 2004 ; Nyaradi et al., 2013 ; Taras, 2005 ). Children at an early school age who had IDA as an infant were found to have lower test scores than those who did not have IDA. Effects of severe IDA in infancy have been seen in adolescence. These effects include lower scores in motor functioning; written expression; arithmetic achievement; and some specific cognitive processes, such as spatial memory and selective recall ( NRC and IOM, 2000 ). However, it is not clear whether children with iron deficiency but no anemia have similar outcomes ( Taras, 2005 ). A review of daily iron supplementation in children aged 5-12 years studied in randomized and quasi-randomized controlled trials showed improvement in measures of attention and concentration, global cognitive scores, and, for children with anemia, intelligence quotient (IQ) scores ( Low et al., 2013 ).

IDA in infancy also has been associated with impaired inhibitory control and executive functioning. Altered socioemotional behavior and affect have been seen in infants with iron deficiency regardless of whether anemia is present ( Lozoff, 2011 ). One study found an association between iron supplementation in infancy and increased adaptive behavior at age 10 years, especially in the areas of affect and response to reward, which may have beneficial effects on school performance, mental health, and personal relationships ( Lozoff et al., 2014 ).

Folate and iodine also have been shown to be important for brain development and cognitive performance ( Bougma et al., 2013 ; Bryan et al., 2004 ; Nyaradi et al., 2013 ), although iodine deficiency is rare in the United States. While there is some evidence that zinc, vitamin B 12 , and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids also may be important for cognitive development, the research on these associations is inconclusive ( Bougma et al., 2013 ; Bryan et al., 2004 ; Taras, 2005 ).

Food Insecurity, Diet Quality, and Healthful Eating

Food insecurity and diet quality in children have both been linked to impaired academic performance and cognitive and socioemotional development. Food insecurity refers to circumstances in which households do not have adequate food to eat, encompassing both inadequate quantity and nutritional quality of food ( ERS, 2014 ). Food insecurity affects development not only by compromising nutrition but also by contributing to a factor in family stress ( Cook and Frank, 2008 ). In 2012, 48 million Americans were food insecure, a fivefold increase from the 1960s and a 57 percent increase from the late 1990s. One in six Americans reported being short of food at least once per year. More than half of affected households were white, and more than half lived outside cities. Indeed, hunger in the suburbs has more than doubled since 2007. Two-thirds of food-insecure households with children have at least one working adult, typically in a full-time job ( McMillan, 2014 ).

A recent review indicates that food insecurity is a “prevalent risk to the growth, health, cognitive, and behavioral potential of low-income children” ( Cook and Frank, 2008 , p. 202). Studies found that children in food-insufficient families were more likely than those in households with adequate food to have fair/poor health; iron deficiency; and behavioral, emotional, and academic problems. Infants and toddlers are at particular risk from food insecurity even at its least severe levels ( Cook and Frank, 2008 ). Cross-sectional studies of children from developing countries have shown an association among general undernutrition and stunting, IQ scores, and academic performance ( Bryan et al., 2004 ). Alaimo and colleagues (2001) found that food insecurity was linked to poorer academic and psychosocial outcomes in children ages 6 to 11 years. Similarly, Florence and colleagues (2008) observed that students with lower overall diet quality were significantly more likely to fail a literacy assessment. Subsequent research has shown that while food insecurity experienced earlier in childhood was associated with emotional problems that appeared in adolescence, cognitive and behavioral problems could be accounted for by differences in the home environments, such as family income and the household's sensitivity to children's needs ( Belsky et al., 2010 ).

Eating breakfast, which can be related to food insecurity, diet quality, and healthful eating habits, has been associated with improved cognitive function, academic performance, and school attendance ( Basch, 2011 ; Hoyland et al., 2009 ; Mahoney et al., 2005 ; Nyaradi et al., 2013 ; Rampersaud et al., 2005 ). According to two reviews of the effect of consuming breakfast in children and adolescents, the evidence suggests that children who consume breakfast—particularly those children whose nutritional status is compromised—may have improved cognitive function, test grades, and school attendance. The positive effects of school breakfast programs may be explained in part by their effect of increasing school attendance ( Hoyland et al., 2009 ; Rampersaud et al., 2005 ). The composition of the breakfast meal may also be important to cognitive performance; a breakfast meal with a low glycemic index, such as oatmeal, has been shown to improve cognitive function ( Cooper et al., 2012 ; Mahoney et al., 2005 ).

In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report documenting the relationship between healthy eating and increased life expectancy; improved quality of life; and fewer chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and inadequate bone health ( CDC, 2011 ). The report documents the high rate of iron deficiency among obese children and emphasizes the link between dental caries and unhealthy diet. Children are unlikely to follow recommendations for the number of servings of various food groups and they consume higher-than-recommended amounts of saturated fats, sodium, and foods with added sugar. Children's eating behavior and food choices are influenced not only by taste preferences but also by the home environment and parental influences, including household eating rules, family meal patterns, and parents' lifestyles. The school environment influences children's eating behavior as well. The availability of unhealthy options in schools leads to poor choices by children, whereas research has shown that efforts to reduce the availability of sugar-sweetened beverages in the schools can have a positive impact on children's choices ( AAP Committee on School Health, 2004 ). There are also rising concerns about food insecurity in association with obesity; inexpensive foods tend not to be nutritious, and contribute to increasing rates of obesity ( IOM, 2011 ; McMillan, 2014 ).

Physical Activity

A recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) study linked increasing physical activity and enhancing physical fitness to improved academic performance, and found that this can be facilitated by physical activity built into children's days through physical education, recess, and physical classroom activity ( IOM, 2013 ). Likewise, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently highlighted the crucial role of recess as a complement to physical education, suggesting that recess offers cognitive, social, emotional, and physical benefits and is a necessary component of a child's development ( AAP Council on School Health, 2013 ). However, fewer than half of youth meet the current recommendation of at least 60 minutes of vigorous- or moderate-intensity physical activity per day, and recent years have seen a significant downward trend in the offering of daily physical education in schools at all levels ( CDC, 2012 ; GAO, 2012 ). Positive support from friends and family encourages children to engage in physical activity, as do physical environments that are conducive to activity. However, the school environment plays an especially important role. The IOM report recommends that schools provide access to a minimum of 60 minutes of vigorous- or moderate-intensity physical activity per day, including an average of 30 minutes per day in physical education class for students in elementary schools ( IOM, 2013 ).

Partnerships Between Health and Education

Each of the domains of child development and early learning discussed in this chapter can be supported through interventions that involve both the health and education sectors (see also the discussion of continuity among sectors in Chapter 5 ). Specific activities include coordinating vision, hearing, developmental, and behavioral screening to facilitate early identification of children with special needs; completing daily health checks; making appropriate referrals and collaborating with the child's medical home and dental health services; ensuring that immunizations for the entire family and for the early care and education workforce are up to date; modifying and adapting services to meet the individual needs of the child; and providing support to the early care and education workforce to promote more inclusive practices for children with special needs. In addition, teaching and modeling skills in sanitation and personal hygiene will contribute to preventing illness. Furthermore, pediatric health care professionals can make an important contribution by promoting literacy. Extensive research documents the positive impact on early language and literacy development when a pediatric professional gives advice to parents about reading developmentally appropriate books with children as early as 6 months of age ( AAP Council on Early Childhood et al., 2014 ).

There is evidence that coordinated efforts between educational settings and health care services lead to improved health. Head Start, the Infant Health and Development Program, and the Carolina Abecedarian Project are examples of early care and education programs that have integrated health care services into the intervention design, leading to positive health outcomes. Schools also can partner with pediatric health care professionals in their communities to identify opportunities to enhance physical activity in the school setting ( AAP Committee on Sports Medicine and Fitness and AAP Committee on School Health, 2000 ). CDC (2011) has offered recommendations for promoting healthful eating and physical activity that include the following and, if placed in an appropriate developmental context, can be applied to care and education settings for children aged 0-8:

• Use a coordinated approach to develop, implement, and evaluate healthful eating and physical activity policies and practices.
• Establish school environments that support healthy eating and activity.
• Provide a quality school meal program and ensure that students have only appealing, healthy food and beverage choices offered outside of the school meal program.
• Implement a comprehensive physical activity program with quality physical education as the cornerstone.
• Implement health education that provides students with the knowledge, attitudes, skills, and experiences needed for healthy eating and physical activity.
• Provide students with health, mental health, and social services to address healthy eating, physical activity, and related chronic disease prevention.
• Partner with families and community members in the development and implementation of healthy eating and physical activity policies, practices, and programs.
• Provide a school employee wellness program that includes healthy eating and physical activity services for all school staff members.
• Employ qualified persons and provide them with professional development opportunities in staffing physical education; health education; nutrition services; health, mental health, and social services; and supervision of recess, cafeteria time, and out-of-school-time programs.

School-based health centers are another approach to partnering between health and education. They have been associated with improved immunization rates, better adherence to scheduled preventive examinations, and more treatment for illnesses and injuries, as well as fewer emergency room visits. For example, King and colleagues (2006) found that a school-based vaccination program significantly reduced influenza symptoms in the entire school. School-based mental health services also have been shown to be effective in addressing a wide range of emotional and behavioral issues ( Rones and Hoagwood, 2000 ). School-based health centers have been shown to reduce nonfinancial barriers to health care ( Keyl et al., 1996 ), and families also report more satisfaction with their care than in community or hospital settings ( Kaplan et al., 1999 ).

Conclusion About Health, Nutrition, and Early Learning Safe physical and built environments, health, and nutrition are essential to early learning and academic achievement. Food security and adequate nutrition are important to support cognitive development and participation in education, and food insecurity and poor nutrition can contribute to early learning difficulties. Care and education settings provide an opportunity to promote healthful eating and physical activity in learning environments. Providing appropriate health and developmental screenings and follow-up care and services also is important in supporting development and early learning.

Health and Early Learning: Implications for Adults

Healthy children supported by healthy adults are better prepared to learn. Child health begins prior to conception and extends through pregnancy and throughout childhood. Therefore, the early care and education workforce must be prepared to work across generations to provide education, support, and community linkages to ensure that children grow up poised for success. Ongoing federal support for evidence-based home visiting programs for high-risk families that begin early in pregnancy and continue through early childhood is essential. Professionals working in family childcare, early childhood education centers, preschools, and early elementary schools need to have working knowledge of the relationship between health and children's learning and development. Guidance related to nutrition, physical activity, oral health, immunizations, and preventive health care is essential across all early care and education settings. These professionals also need to be provided with supports and opportunities for close collaboration with health care services and their potential integration into or strengthened linkages with the early care and education setting.

• EFFECTS OF CHRONIC STRESS AND ADVERSITY

As detailed in Chapter 3 , one of the most important advances in developmental science in recent years has been the recognition that the brain incorporates experience into its development. Although experience is important at any age, early experiences are especially formative in the development of the brain's structure and function. Human development is the result of the continuous interaction of genetics and experience. This interplay is true not just of brain development but of other aspects of human development as well. Research in this area encourages developmental scientists as well as parents and practitioners to consider how positive early experiences and enrichment, in formal and informal ways, may have a beneficial influence on the developing brain and in turn on the growth of thinking and learning. The brain's openness to experience is, however, a double-edged sword—adverse early experiences can have potentially significant negative consequences for brain development and early learning.

As discussed in Chapter 3 , evidence indicates that experiences of stress and adversity are biologically embedded and that individual differences exist in the health and developmental consequences of stress. A substantial body of evidence now shows that adversity and stress in early life are associated with higher rates of childhood mental and physical morbidities, more frequent disturbances in developmental trajectories and educational achievement, and lifelong risks of chronic disorders that compromise health and well- being ( Boyce et al., 2012 ; Hertzman and Boyce, 2010 ; Shonkoff et al., 2009 ). Children respond to stress differently. Many exhibit withdrawal, anger and irritability, difficulty paying attention and concentrating, disturbed sleep, repeated and intrusive thoughts, and extreme distress triggered by things that remind them of their traumatic experiences. Some develop psychiatric conditions such as depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, and a variety of behavioral disorders ( NCTSN, 2005 ).

What are the circumstances that contribute to chronic adversity and stress for children? All children can experience forms of chronic stress and adversity, but exposures to stress and adversity are socioeconomically layered. Poverty, discussed in more detail below, has been the best studied and is a highly prevalent source of early chronic stress ( Blair and Raver, 2012 ; Evans and Kim, 2013 ; Jiang et al., 2014 ). Young children in the United States also suffer high levels of victimization through child abuse and exposure to domestic violence. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported for the year 2012 that of all child abuse victims, approximately 60 percent were age 8 or younger ( Children's Bureau, 2013 ). The highest rates of child abuse and neglect, including fatalities related to child abuse, were reported for children in the first year of life. Comparable biological and behavioral effects of chronic stress have been studied in children in foster care, in those who experience significant or prolonged family conflict, in those who have a depressed parent, and in those who are abused or neglected (see Thompson, 2014 , for a review).

It is noteworthy that these circumstances include not only those that most people would regard as sources of extreme stress for children (e.g., child abuse), but also those that an adult might regard as less significant because they may be less severe although persistent (e.g., parents' chronic marital conflict, poverty). This broader range of circumstances that children experience as stressful is consistent with the view that, in addition to situations that are manifestly threatening and dangerous, children are stressed by the denial or withdrawal of supportive care, especially when they are young.

Culture also is closely interrelated with stress and adversity. Culture affects the meaning that a child or a family attributes to specific types of traumatic events as well as the ways in which they respond. Because culture also influences expectations regarding the self, others, and social institutions, it can also influence how children and families experience and express distress, grieve or mourn losses, provide support to each other, seek help, and disclose personal information to others. Historical or multigenerational trauma also can influence cultural differences in responses to trauma and loss ( NCTSN Core Curriculum on Childhood Trauma Task Force, 2012 ).

Building on the discussion in Chapter 3 of the biology of chronic stress and adversity, the following sections describe more broadly some of the contributing circumstances and consequences for young children, including the stressors associated with economic adversity; social buffering of stress; and the relationships among stress, learning, and mental health.

The Stressors of Economic Adversity

Children in any economic circumstances can experience stress and adversity, but considerable research on the effects of chronic stress on children's development has focused on children living in families in poverty or with low incomes. The number of children in these conditions of economic adversity is considerable. In 2012, nearly half the children under age 6 lived in poverty or low-income families (defined as up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, 2 which remains a meagre subsistence) ( Jiang et al., 2014 ). During that same year, more than half the children living with their families in homeless shelters were under the age of 6 ( Child Trends, 2015 ).

The research is clear that poverty as a form of early chronic adversity is a risk factor to long-term physical and mental health, and that for children it can be a significant threat to their capacities to cope with stress, socialize constructively with others, and benefit from the cognitive stimulating opportunities of an early childhood classroom. Socioeconomic disparities in children's experiences of socioemotional adversity and challenging physical environments are well documented (see, e.g., Evans et al., 2012 ). Factors other than economic status itself contribute to the challenges and stresses for children living in low-income families ( Fernald et al., 2013 ). Poverty often is accompanied by the confluence of multiple sources of chronic stress, such as food insufficiency, housing instability (and sometimes homelessness), exposure to violence, environmental noise and toxins, dangerous neighborhoods, poor childcare and schools, family chaos, parents with limited capacity (e.g., resources, education, knowledge/information, time, physical or mental energy) to be supportive and nurturing, parents who are anxious or depressed, parents who are harsh or abusive caregivers, impoverished parent–child communication, and home environments lacking cognitively stimulating activities ( Evans et al., 2012 ; Fernald et al., 2013 ).

As discussed in detail in Chapter 3 , the perturbed biological processes that often accompany economic adversity include changes in the structure and function of children's brain circuitry and dysregulation of their central stress response systems. For these children, therefore, the effects of the chronic stresses associated with economic adversity are likely to contribute to academic, social, and behavioral problems. These problems affect not only early learning and the development of cognitive skills (with impacts on the development of language being best documented) but also the development of learning skills associated with self-regulation and persistence, as well as coping ability, health, and emotional well-being ( Blair and Raver, 2012 ; Evans and Kim, 2013 ).

In addition, developmental consequences related to socioeconomic status are not seen exclusively in children from severely impoverished families. Rather, evidence shows a graded effect of deprivation and adversity across the entire spectrum of socioeconomic status, with even those children from the second-highest social class showing poorer health and development compared with those from families of the very highest socioeconomic status ( Adler et al., 1994 ; Hertzman and Boyce, 2010 ). Moreover, as discussed in Chapter 3 , children are not equally affected by early adverse experiences. Genetic and epigenetic influences may have a role in whether some children are more resilient to early adversity than others ( Rutter, 2012 ).

Detrimental prenatal influences may also be important ( Farah et al., 2008 ; Hackman et al., 2010 ). Although this report focuses on children beginning at birth, child development and early learning also are affected by what a child is exposed to before birth, including influences of family disadvantage. Box 4-6 highlights major research findings on the relationships among family disadvantage, fetal health, and child development.

Family Disadvantage, Fetal Health, and Child Development. Children from different family backgrounds—affected by systemic inequities and disadvantage—start life with starkly different health endowments. As but one example, having a low-birth-weight (more...)

Social Buffering of Stress

The neuroscience of stress has yielded greater understanding of how the effects of stress may be buffered through social support. In behavioral and neurobiological studies of humans and animals, researchers have shown how individuals in adversity show diminished behavioral reactivity and better-regulated cortisol response, among other effects, in the company of people who provide them with emotional support. For children, these individuals often are attachment figures in the family or outside the home.

In health psychology, the benefits of social support for the development and maintenance of healthy practices and the control of disease pathology and healing have been studied since the 1970s (e.g., Cassel, 1976 ; Cobb, 1976 ). Social support also has been recognized as a contributor to psychological well-being for children and youth in difficult circumstances ( Thompson and Goodvin, in press) . In recent years, research on the neurobiology of the social buffering of stress has contributed to a better understanding of why social support has these benefits ( Hostinar et al., 2014 ). In human and animal studies, social companionship in the context of adversity appears to have effects on the biological regulators of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) activity, contributing to greater regulation of stress reactivity through cortical and limbic influences. Social support also appears to stimulate the down-regulation of the proinflammatory tendencies induced by chronic stress, as well as processes driven by neurohormones, including oxytocin, that have other positive benefits ( Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2010 ). Stated differently, social support not only counters the negative effects of chronic stress reactivity but also stimulates constructive influences that contribute independently to greater self-regulation and well-being ( Hostinar et al., 2014 ). This research is still at an early stage, and establishing reliable associations between brain and behavioral functioning in this area is a work in progress, but research findings are providing increasing support for these processes. In one study, for example, greater maternal support measured when children were preschoolers predicted children's larger hippocampus volume at school age ( Luby et al., 2012 ).

The potential benefits of social support as a buffer of chronic stress reactivity underscore the plasticity of developing behavioral and biological systems. Children in adversity need not suffer long-term harms arising from the effects of chronic stress exposure. In a study of families living in rural poverty, for example, toddlers' chronic exposure to domestic violence was associated with elevated cortisol reactivity. However, this effect was buffered when mothers were observed to respond sensitively to their children ( Hibel et al., 2011 ). Experimental interventions designed to change stressful circumstances and promote positive relationships have yielded similar findings. For example a program aimed at easing young children's transition to new foster care placements and promoting warm, responsive, and consistent relationships with new foster parents provided individualized sessions with child therapists, weekly playgroup sessions, and support for foster parents. This program resulted in a normalization of the children's HPA hyporesponsiveness (an effect of stress discussed in Chapter 3 ) ( Fisher et al., 2007 , 2011 ). Another example comes from an intervention based on attachment theory, which trained caregivers to better interpret and respond affectionately to infants and toddlers in foster care and similarly resulted in a normalization of HPA activity and lower cortisol reactivity ( Dozier et al., 2006 , 2008 ). There may be limits to these potential ameliorative effects, depending on the severity and duration of the exposure to adversity. Children who lived for an extended period in profoundly depriving Romanian orphanages, for example, did not show recovery of dysregulated cortisol reactivity, even after a prolonged period of supportive adoptive care ( Gunnar et al., 2001 ).

Because interventions that can help children recover from the effects of chronic adversity can be expensive and time-consuming, however, it appears sensible to try to prevent these effects from occurring. This can be accomplished by reducing exposure to influences that cause significant stress for children, and by strengthening supportive relationships that can buffer its effects. The development of warm, secure attachments between parents and children illustrates the latter approach. As discussed earlier in this chapter, attachment theorists argue that the reliable support provided by a secure attachment relationship enables infants and children to explore and learn from their experiences confidently with the assurance that a trusted adult is available to assist if difficulty ensues. In this view, secure attachments buffer stress and significantly reduce the child's need to be vigilant for threat or danger. As noted previously, attachment research documents a range of benefits associated with secure parent–child relationships in childhood, including greater language skill, academic achievement, and social competence (see Thompson, 2008 , for a review; West et al., 2013 ). The view that these accomplishments are explained, at least in part, by how secure attachments buffer stress for children is supported by studies documenting the better-regulated cortisol reactivity of young children with secure attachments in challenging situations (see Gunnar and Donzella, 2002 , for a review; Nachmias et al., 1996 ).

Viewed in this light, it appears that the contributions adults make to children's learning extend significantly beyond their reading, conversing, counting, and providing other direct forms of cognitive stimulation. An essential contribution is the safety and security they provide that not only buffers children against significant stress when this occurs, but also enables children to invest themselves in learning opportunities with confidence that an adult will assist them when needed. Such confidence not only enables children to learn more from the opportunities afforded them in the family and outside the home but also fosters their developing self-confidence, curiosity, and other learning skills that emerge in the context of secure relationships ( Thompson, 2008 ). This is a benefit of secure, warm adult–child relationships for all children, not just those in adverse circumstances. This phenomenon is perhaps analogous to that seen in studies in which rat pups with nurturant mothers show enhanced learning and memory in low-stress contexts, whereas pups with nonnurturant mothers show greater proficiency in fear conditioning ( Champagne et al., 2008 ).

One problem, however, is that children in adverse circumstances usually have parents and other caregivers who are affected by the same conditions of adversity. Thus, their parents may not be able to provide them with the support they need. This realization has led to the growth of two-generation interventions that are designed to assist children by providing support to their parents in difficult circumstances ( Chase-Lansdale and Brooks-Gunn, 2014 ).

Stress, Learning, and Mental Health

Children learn readily in contexts of social support and emotional well-being, which derive from positive relationships with those who care for and educate them in the family and outside the home. In these contexts, adults can support and encourage developing competencies, convey positive values about learning and school, and help instill curiosity and self-confidence in children. By contrast, learning and cognitive achievement are hindered when children are troubled. This is the case for children from infancy through adolescence who are living in homes with significant marital conflict, when mothers are chronically depressed, when parents are hostile and coercive, or in other circumstances of family turmoil (e.g., Bascoe et al., 2009 ; Brennan et al., 2013 ; Canadian Paediatric Society, 2004 ; Davies et al., 2008 ).

Socioemotional hindrances to learning and cognitive achievement are apparent very early, before children have begun school, and continue to be important as children move into the primary grades. In educational settings, the emotional effects of problems in educator–child relationships can undermine children's performance and their academic success ( Hamre and Pianta, 2004 ; Jeon et al., 2014 ; Pianta, 1999 ; Pianta and Stuhlman, 2004b ; Skinner and Belmont, 1993 ). As discussed in Chapter 3 , when children are in circumstances of chronic or overwhelming stress, stress hormones affect multiple brain regions, including those relevant to learning, attention, memory, and self-regulation ( McEwen, 2012 ; Ulrich-Lai and Herman, 2009 ). Over time and with continued exposure to stressful circumstances, these neurocognitive processes become altered as a result of the progressive wear and tear of stress hormones on biological systems as they adapt to this chronic stress. As a consequence, immunologic capacities become weakened (contributing to more frequent acute and chronic illness), self-regulation is impaired (contributing to poorer emotion regulation and impulse control), and cognitive and attentional capabilities are blunted ( Danese and McEwen, 2012 ; Lupien et al., 2009 ; Miller et al., 2011 ). For children, these effects can help account for problems in following instructions, paying attention, managing impulsivity, focusing thinking, and controlling emotions in social encounters—each of which can impair classroom performance and academic achievement.

Young children's vulnerability to stress and their reliance on the support of adults are two central considerations in understanding the foundations for childhood mental health ( IOM and NRC, 2009 ). This relationship among stress, early development, and mental health is relevant to understanding the influences that can threaten the socioemotional well-being of younger children—and to understanding why behavior problems can undermine learning and cognitive growth. One illustration of these effects is the high rates of preschool and prekindergarten children being expelled from their classrooms because of disruptive behavior problems—by one report at a rate more than three times the rate of children in the K-12 grades ( Gilliam, 2005 ; see also U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2014 ). In this study, the likelihood of expulsion decreased significantly when educators were provided access to early childhood mental health consultants who could assist them in managing behavior problems.

Another illustration is reports by kindergarten teachers that social, emotional, and self-regulatory problems are a common impediment to children's readiness to achieve in their classrooms ( Lewit and Baker, 1995 ; Rimm-Kaufman et al., 2000 ). Other studies have shown that children's conduct problems and internalizing (anxious, depressed) behavior in the classroom can undermine the development of constructive educator–child relationships and foreshadow later social and academic difficulties ( Berry and O'Connor, 2010 ; Koles et al., 2009 ; Ladd and Burgess, 2001 ).

Consistent with the research concerning the biological and behavioral effects of chronic stress, there is increasing evidence that even very young children show clear evidence of traumatization and posttraumatic stress, anxious and depressive symptomatology, behavioral and conduct problems, and other serious psychological problems ( Egger and Angold, 2006 ; Lieberman et al., 2011 ; Luby, 2006 ; Zeanah, 2009 ). Sometimes these symptom patterns overlap, such as in the comorbidity in which depressive symptomatology appears along with oppositional behavior in preschoolers ( Egger and Angold, 2006 ). The origins of these problems are multifaceted, but certainly include interaction of environmental stresses with genetic factors that heighten or reduce children's vulnerability to these stresses. Often these environmental stresses undermine the social support that would otherwise buffer the effects of stress on children. Diagnosing these disorders in young children is a challenge because the behaviors associated with early mental health problems in young children can be different from those observed in adults and adolescents ( Egger and Emde, 2011 ). But progress has been made in developing reliable diagnostic criteria for preschoolers (e.g., Egger and Angold, 2006 ; Keenan et al., 1997 ; Lavigne et al., 2009 ) and even infants and toddlers ( Zero to Three, 2005 ). This work provides a foundation for further study of the developmental origins of early mental health challenges and therapeutic interventions that might help these children.

Connecting the Socioemotional Health of Children and Adults

The preceding discussion makes clear that children's socioemotional health is linked to the socioemotional well-being of the adults in their lives. Consistent with the research on the social buffering of stress discussed earlier, when parents and other caregivers are managing well, they can help children cope more competently with the ordinary stresses that inevitably occur. When caregivers are stressed, by contrast, they cannot provide this buffering and are instead more often a source of stress for children. When parents are depressed, for example, they can be unpredictably sad, hostile, critical, and/or disengaged ( NRC and IOM, 2009 ). This constellation of behaviors constitutes a difficult combination of threat and withdrawal of support for children. Young children with a depressed mother are more likely, therefore, to exhibit heightened stress reactivity to moderate challenges; to have an insecure attachment to the parent; to show lower levels of cognitive performance and, later, poorer academic achievement; and to be at greater risk of becoming depressed themselves.

The adult's emotional well-being is important in the classroom as well. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study, Jeon and colleagues (2014) measured the depressive symptomatology of 761 home- and center-based care providers, as well as overall observed classroom quality, and obtained independent measures of the behavior problems of the 3-year-olds in their classrooms. They found that educator depression was linked to higher levels of behavior problems in children, attributable to the poorer quality of the classroom environment. Notably, this study was conducted with a sample of families in economic stress, with the educators often sharing the same financial difficulties. Nevertheless, the association of educator depression with child behavior problems remained even when family influences, including maternal depression and family poverty status, were controlled for. Similar associations of educator well-being with the quality of the classroom environment and children's learning have been found in studies of children in the early primary grades (e.g., Pianta, 1999 ; Pianta and Stuhlman, 2004b ).

Conclusions About Chronic Stress and Adversity Chronic stress and adversity constitute fundamental risks to learning and academic success as well as to emotional well-being for many young children. The biological and behavioral effects of stress and adversity can disrupt brain circuitry and stress response systems, affect fundamental cognitive skills, undermine focused thinking and attention, diminish self-regulation, and imperil mental and physical health. Trauma, adversity, and chronic stress can arise from many sources, such as poverty, family conflict, parental depression, abuse, neglect, or exposure to violence in the community. Supportive and stable relationships with adults can help develop children's adaptive capacities and provide them with a significant stress buffer. It is important for adults who work with children to recognize and appreciate the effects of adversity and to have the capacity to employ strategies for preventing or mitigating them, as well as for promoting cognitive, social, and emotional strengths for coping with adverse and stressful experiences. Given the importance of stable and responsive relationships that provide consistent and nurturing interactions, the well-being of the adults who care for young children contributes to their healthy development and early learning. The stresses of economic disadvantage are manifested not only in differences in children's early experiences in the family and the community but also in the quality and stability of the out-of-home care and education families can access and afford and the quality of the schools children later attend. Socioeconomic differences in the quality of early learning opportunities place large numbers of children at a learning disadvantage and undermine their potential for academic success. These differences begin early and have a cumulative effect over time. Strengthening early learning and developing competencies requires serious and sustained attention to these socioeconomic disparities in opportunity.

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An ongoing study and forthcoming report of the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council focuses on research, practice, and policy for young dual language learners. More information about this study can be found at www ​.iom.edu/English-DualLanguageLearners .

The 2012 federal poverty threshold was $23,364 for a family of four with two children, $18,480 for a family of three with one child, $15,825 for a family of two with one child.

• Cite this Page Committee on the Science of Children Birth to Age 8: Deepening and Broadening the Foundation for Success; Board on Children, Youth, and Families; Institute of Medicine; National Research Council; Allen LR, Kelly BB, editors. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2015 Jul 23. 4, Child Development and Early Learning.
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Center for Teaching

Assessing student learning.

Forms and Purposes of Student Assessment

Assessment is more than grading, assessment plans, methods of student assessment, generative and reflective assessment, teaching guides related to student assessment, references and additional resources.

Student assessment is, arguably, the centerpiece of the teaching and learning process and therefore the subject of much discussion in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Without some method of obtaining and analyzing evidence of student learning, we can never know whether our teaching is making a difference. That is, teaching requires some process through which we can come to know whether students are developing the desired knowledge and skills, and therefore whether our instruction is effective. Learning assessment is like a magnifying glass we hold up to students’ learning to discern whether the teaching and learning process is functioning well or is in need of change.

To provide an overview of learning assessment, this teaching guide has several goals, 1) to define student learning assessment and why it is important, 2) to discuss several approaches that may help to guide and refine student assessment, 3) to address various methods of student assessment, including the test and the essay, and 4) to offer several resources for further research. In addition, you may find helfpul this five-part video series on assessment that was part of the Center for Teaching’s Online Course Design Institute.

What is student assessment and why is it Important?

In their handbook for course-based review and assessment, Martha L. A. Stassen et al. define assessment as “the systematic collection and analysis of information to improve student learning” (2001, p. 5). An intentional and thorough assessment of student learning is vital because it provides useful feedback to both instructors and students about the extent to which students are successfully meeting learning objectives. In their book Understanding by Design , Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe offer a framework for classroom instruction — “Backward Design”— that emphasizes the critical role of assessment. For Wiggins and McTighe, assessment enables instructors to determine the metrics of measurement for student understanding of and proficiency in course goals. Assessment provides the evidence needed to document and validate that meaningful learning has occurred (2005, p. 18). Their approach “encourages teachers and curriculum planners to first ‘think like an assessor’ before designing specific units and lessons, and thus to consider up front how they will determine if students have attained the desired understandings” (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005, p. 18). [1]

Not only does effective assessment provide us with valuable information to support student growth, but it also enables critically reflective teaching. Stephen Brookfield, in Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, argues that critical reflection on one’s teaching is an essential part of developing as an educator and enhancing the learning experience of students (1995). Critical reflection on one’s teaching has a multitude of benefits for instructors, including the intentional and meaningful development of one’s teaching philosophy and practices. According to Brookfield, referencing higher education faculty, “A critically reflective teacher is much better placed to communicate to colleagues and students (as well as to herself) the rationale behind her practice. She works from a position of informed commitment” (Brookfield, 1995, p. 17). One important lens through which we may reflect on our teaching is our student evaluations and student learning assessments. This reflection allows educators to determine where their teaching has been effective in meeting learning goals and where it has not, allowing for improvements. Student assessment, then, both develop the rationale for pedagogical choices, and enables teachers to measure the effectiveness of their teaching.

The scholarship of teaching and learning discusses two general forms of assessment. The first, summative assessment , is one that is implemented at the end of the course of study, for example via comprehensive final exams or papers. Its primary purpose is to produce an evaluation that “sums up” student learning. Summative assessment is comprehensive in nature and is fundamentally concerned with learning outcomes. While summative assessment is often useful for communicating final evaluations of student achievement, it does so without providing opportunities for students to reflect on their progress, alter their learning, and demonstrate growth or improvement; nor does it allow instructors to modify their teaching strategies before student learning in a course has concluded (Maki, 2002).

The second form, formative assessment , involves the evaluation of student learning at intermediate points before any summative form. Its fundamental purpose is to help students during the learning process by enabling them to reflect on their challenges and growth so they may improve. By analyzing students’ performance through formative assessment and sharing the results with them, instructors help students to “understand their strengths and weaknesses and to reflect on how they need to improve over the course of their remaining studies” (Maki, 2002, p. 11). Pat Hutchings refers to as “assessment behind outcomes”: “the promise of assessment—mandated or otherwise—is improved student learning, and improvement requires attention not only to final results but also to how results occur. Assessment behind outcomes means looking more carefully at the process and conditions that lead to the learning we care about…” (Hutchings, 1992, p. 6, original emphasis). Formative assessment includes all manner of coursework with feedback, discussions between instructors and students, and end-of-unit examinations that provide an opportunity for students to identify important areas for necessary growth and development for themselves (Brown and Knight, 1994).

It is important to recognize that both summative and formative assessment indicate the purpose of assessment, not the method . Different methods of assessment (discussed below) can either be summative or formative depending on when and how the instructor implements them. Sally Brown and Peter Knight in Assessing Learners in Higher Education caution against a conflation of the method (e.g., an essay) with the goal (formative or summative): “Often the mistake is made of assuming that it is the method which is summative or formative, and not the purpose. This, we suggest, is a serious mistake because it turns the assessor’s attention away from the crucial issue of feedback” (1994, p. 17). If an instructor believes that a particular method is formative, but he or she does not take the requisite time or effort to provide extensive feedback to students, the assessment effectively functions as a summative assessment despite the instructor’s intentions (Brown and Knight, 1994). Indeed, feedback and discussion are critical factors that distinguish between formative and summative assessment; formative assessment is only as good as the feedback that accompanies it.

It is not uncommon to conflate assessment with grading, but this would be a mistake. Student assessment is more than just grading. Assessment links student performance to specific learning objectives in order to provide useful information to students and instructors about learning and teaching, respectively. Grading, on the other hand, according to Stassen et al. (2001) merely involves affixing a number or letter to an assignment, giving students only the most minimal indication of their performance relative to a set of criteria or to their peers: “Because grades don’t tell you about student performance on individual (or specific) learning goals or outcomes, they provide little information on the overall success of your course in helping students to attain the specific and distinct learning objectives of interest” (Stassen et al., 2001, p. 6). Grades are only the broadest of indicators of achievement or status, and as such do not provide very meaningful information about students’ learning of knowledge or skills, how they have developed, and what may yet improve. Unfortunately, despite the limited information grades provide students about their learning, grades do provide students with significant indicators of their status – their academic rank, their credits towards graduation, their post-graduation opportunities, their eligibility for grants and aid, etc. – which can distract students from the primary goal of assessment: learning. Indeed, shifting the focus of assessment away from grades and towards more meaningful understandings of intellectual growth can encourage students (as well as instructors and institutions) to attend to the primary goal of education.

Barbara Walvoord (2010) argues that assessment is more likely to be successful if there is a clear plan, whether one is assessing learning in a course or in an entire curriculum (see also Gelmon, Holland, and Spring, 2018). Without some intentional and careful plan, assessment can fall prey to unclear goals, vague criteria, limited communication of criteria or feedback, invalid or unreliable assessments, unfairness in student evaluations, or insufficient or even unmeasured learning. There are several steps in this planning process.

• Defining learning goals. An assessment plan usually begins with a clearly articulated set of learning goals.
• Defining assessment methods. Once goals are clear, an instructor must decide on what evidence – assignment(s) – will best reveal whether students are meeting the goals. We discuss several common methods below, but these need not be limited by anything but the learning goals and the teaching context.
• Developing the assessment. The next step would be to formulate clear formats, prompts, and performance criteria that ensure students can prepare effectively and provide valid, reliable evidence of their learning.
• Integrating assessment with other course elements. Then the remainder of the course design process can be completed. In both integrated (Fink 2013) and backward course design models (Wiggins & McTighe 2005), the primary assessment methods, once chosen, become the basis for other smaller reading and skill-building assignments as well as daily learning experiences such as lectures, discussions, and other activities that will prepare students for their best effort in the assessments.
• Communicate about the assessment. Once the course has begun, it is possible and necessary to communicate the assignment and its performance criteria to students. This communication may take many and preferably multiple forms to ensure student clarity and preparation, including assignment overviews in the syllabus, handouts with prompts and assessment criteria, rubrics with learning goals, model assignments (e.g., papers), in-class discussions, and collaborative decision-making about prompts or criteria, among others.
• Administer the assessment. Instructors then can implement the assessment at the appropriate time, collecting evidence of student learning – e.g., receiving papers or administering tests.
• Analyze the results. Analysis of the results can take various forms – from reading essays to computer-assisted test scoring – but always involves comparing student work to the performance criteria and the relevant scholarly research from the field(s).
• Communicate the results. Instructors then compose an assessment complete with areas of strength and improvement, and communicate it to students along with grades (if the assignment is graded), hopefully within a reasonable time frame. This also is the time to determine whether the assessment was valid and reliable, and if not, how to communicate this to students and adjust feedback and grades fairly. For instance, were the test or essay questions confusing, yielding invalid and unreliable assessments of student knowledge.
• Reflect and revise. Once the assessment is complete, instructors and students can develop learning plans for the remainder of the course so as to ensure improvements, and the assignment may be changed for future courses, as necessary.

Let’s see how this might work in practice through an example. An instructor in a Political Science course on American Environmental Policy may have a learning goal (among others) of students understanding the historical precursors of various environmental policies and how these both enabled and constrained the resulting legislation and its impacts on environmental conservation and health. The instructor therefore decides that the course will be organized around a series of short papers that will combine to make a thorough policy report, one that will also be the subject of student presentations and discussions in the last third of the course. Each student will write about an American environmental policy of their choice, with a first paper addressing its historical precursors, a second focused on the process of policy formation, and a third analyzing the extent of its impacts on environmental conservation or health. This will help students to meet the content knowledge goals of the course, in addition to its goals of improving students’ research, writing, and oral presentation skills. The instructor then develops the prompts, guidelines, and performance criteria that will be used to assess student skills, in addition to other course elements to best prepare them for this work – e.g., scaffolded units with quizzes, readings, lectures, debates, and other activities. Once the course has begun, the instructor communicates with the students about the learning goals, the assignments, and the criteria used to assess them, giving them the necessary context (goals, assessment plan) in the syllabus, handouts on the policy papers, rubrics with assessment criteria, model papers (if possible), and discussions with them as they need to prepare. The instructor then collects the papers at the appropriate due dates, assesses their conceptual and writing quality against the criteria and field’s scholarship, and then provides written feedback and grades in a manner that is reasonably prompt and sufficiently thorough for students to make improvements. Then the instructor can make determinations about whether the assessment method was effective and what changes might be necessary.

Assessment can vary widely from informal checks on understanding, to quizzes, to blogs, to essays, and to elaborate performance tasks such as written or audiovisual projects (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). Below are a few common methods of assessment identified by Brown and Knight (1994) that are important to consider.

According to Euan S. Henderson, essays make two important contributions to learning and assessment: the development of skills and the cultivation of a learning style (1980). The American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) also has found that intensive writing is a “high impact” teaching practice likely to help students in their engagement, learning, and academic attainment (Kuh 2008).

Things to Keep in Mind about Essays

• Essays are a common form of writing assignment in courses and can be either a summative or formative form of assessment depending on how the instructor utilizes them.
• Essays encompass a wide array of narrative forms and lengths, from short descriptive essays to long analytical or creative ones. Shorter essays are often best suited to assess student’s understanding of threshold concepts and discrete analytical or writing skills, while longer essays afford assessments of higher order concepts and more complex learning goals, such as rigorous analysis, synthetic writing, problem solving, or creative tasks.
• A common challenge of the essay is that students can use them simply to regurgitate rather than analyze and synthesize information to make arguments. Students need performance criteria and prompts that urge them to go beyond mere memorization and comprehension, but encourage the highest levels of learning on Bloom’s Taxonomy . This may open the possibility for essay assignments that go beyond the common summary or descriptive essay on a given topic, but demand, for example, narrative or persuasive essays or more creative projects.
• Instructors commonly assume that students know how to write essays and can encounter disappointment or frustration when they discover that this is sometimes not the case. For this reason, it is important for instructors to make their expectations clear and be prepared to assist, or provide students to resources that will enhance their writing skills. Faculty may also encourage students to attend writing workshops at university writing centers, such as Vanderbilt University’s Writing Studio .

Exams and time-constrained, individual assessment

Examinations have traditionally been a gold standard of assessment, particularly in post-secondary education. Many educators prefer them because they can be highly effective, they can be standardized, they are easily integrated into disciplines with certification standards, and they are efficient to implement since they can allow for less labor-intensive feedback and grading. They can involve multiple forms of questions, be of varying lengths, and can be used to assess multiple levels of student learning. Like essays they can be summative or formative forms of assessment.

Things to Keep in Mind about Exams

• Exams typically focus on the assessment of students’ knowledge of facts, figures, and other discrete information crucial to a course. While they can involve questioning that demands students to engage in higher order demonstrations of comprehension, problem solving, analysis, synthesis, critique, and even creativity, such exams often require more time to prepare and validate.
• Exam questions can be multiple choice, true/false, or other discrete answer formats, or they can be essay or problem-solving. For more on how to write good multiple choice questions, see this guide .
• Exams can make significant demands on students’ factual knowledge and therefore can have the side-effect of encouraging cramming and surface learning. Further, when exams are offered infrequently, or when they have high stakes by virtue of their heavy weighting in course grade schemes or in student goals, they may accompany violations of academic integrity.
• In the process of designing an exam, instructors should consider the following questions. What are the learning objectives that the exam seeks to evaluate? Have students been adequately prepared to meet exam expectations? What are the skills and abilities that students need to do well on the exam? How will this exam be utilized to enhance the student learning process?

Self-Assessment

The goal of implementing self-assessment in a course is to enable students to develop their own judgment and the capacities for critical meta-cognition – to learn how to learn. In self-assessment students are expected to assess both the processes and products of their learning. While the assessment of the product is often the task of the instructor, implementing student self-assessment in the classroom ensures students evaluate their performance and the process of learning that led to it. Self-assessment thus provides a sense of student ownership of their learning and can lead to greater investment and engagement. It also enables students to develop transferable skills in other areas of learning that involve group projects and teamwork, critical thinking and problem-solving, as well as leadership roles in the teaching and learning process with their peers.

Things to Keep in Mind about Self-Assessment

• Self-assessment is not self-grading. According to Brown and Knight, “Self-assessment involves the use of evaluative processes in which judgement is involved, where self-grading is the marking of one’s own work against a set of criteria and potential outcomes provided by a third person, usually the [instructor]” (1994, p. 52). Self-assessment can involve self-grading, but instructors of record retain the final authority to determine and assign grades.
• To accurately and thoroughly self-assess, students require clear learning goals for the assignment in question, as well as rubrics that clarify different performance criteria and levels of achievement for each. These rubrics may be instructor-designed, or they may be fashioned through a collaborative dialogue with students. Rubrics need not include any grade assignation, but merely descriptive academic standards for different criteria.
• Students may not have the expertise to assess themselves thoroughly, so it is helpful to build students’ capacities for self-evaluation, and it is important that they always be supplemented with faculty assessments.
• Students may initially resist instructor attempts to involve themselves in the assessment process. This is usually due to insecurities or lack of confidence in their ability to objectively evaluate their own work, or possibly because of habituation to more passive roles in the learning process. Brown and Knight note, however, that when students are asked to evaluate their work, frequently student-determined outcomes are very similar to those of instructors, particularly when the criteria and expectations have been made explicit in advance (1994).
• Methods of self-assessment vary widely and can be as unique as the instructor or the course. Common forms of self-assessment involve written or oral reflection on a student’s own work, including portfolio, logs, instructor-student interviews, learner diaries and dialog journals, post-test reflections, and the like.

Peer Assessment

Peer assessment is a type of collaborative learning technique where students evaluate the work of their peers and, in return, have their own work evaluated as well. This dimension of assessment is significantly grounded in theoretical approaches to active learning and adult learning . Like self-assessment, peer assessment gives learners ownership of learning and focuses on the process of learning as students are able to “share with one another the experiences that they have undertaken” (Brown and Knight, 1994, p. 52).  However, it also provides students with other models of performance (e.g., different styles or narrative forms of writing), as well as the opportunity to teach, which can enable greater preparation, reflection, and meta-cognitive organization.

Things to Keep in Mind about Peer Assessment

• Similar to self-assessment, students benefit from clear and specific learning goals and rubrics. Again, these may be instructor-defined or determined through collaborative dialogue.
• Also similar to self-assessment, it is important to not conflate peer assessment and peer grading, since grading authority is retained by the instructor of record.
• While student peer assessments are most often fair and accurate, they sometimes can be subject to bias. In competitive educational contexts, for example when students are graded normatively (“on a curve”), students can be biased or potentially game their peer assessments, giving their fellow students unmerited low evaluations. Conversely, in more cooperative teaching environments or in cases when they are friends with their peers, students may provide overly favorable evaluations. Also, other biases associated with identity (e.g., race, gender, or class) and personality differences can shape student assessments in unfair ways. Therefore, it is important for instructors to encourage fairness, to establish processes based on clear evidence and identifiable criteria, and to provide instructor assessments as accompaniments or correctives to peer evaluations.
• Students may not have the disciplinary expertise or assessment experience of the instructor, and therefore can issue unsophisticated judgments of their peers. Therefore, to avoid unfairness, inaccuracy, and limited comments, formative peer assessments may need to be supplemented with instructor feedback.

As Brown and Knight assert, utilizing multiple methods of assessment, including more than one assessor when possible, improves the reliability of the assessment data. It also ensures that students with diverse aptitudes and abilities can be assessed accurately and have equal opportunities to excel. However, a primary challenge to the multiple methods approach is how to weigh the scores produced by multiple methods of assessment. When particular methods produce higher range of marks than others, instructors can potentially misinterpret and mis-evaluate student learning. Ultimately, they caution that, when multiple methods produce different messages about the same student, instructors should be mindful that the methods are likely assessing different forms of achievement (Brown and Knight, 1994).

These are only a few of the many forms of assessment that one might use to evaluate and enhance student learning (see also ideas present in Brown and Knight, 1994). To this list of assessment forms and methods we may add many more that encourage students to produce anything from research papers to films, theatrical productions to travel logs, op-eds to photo essays, manifestos to short stories. The limits of what may be assigned as a form of assessment is as varied as the subjects and skills we seek to empower in our students. Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching has an ever-expanding array of guides on creative models of assessment that are present below, so please visit them to learn more about other assessment innovations and subjects.

Whatever plan and method you use, assessment often begins with an intentional clarification of the values that drive it. While many in higher education may argue that values do not have a role in assessment, we contend that values (for example, rigor) always motivate and shape even the most objective of learning assessments. Therefore, as in other aspects of assessment planning, it is helpful to be intentional and critically reflective about what values animate your teaching and the learning assessments it requires. There are many values that may direct learning assessment, but common ones include rigor, generativity, practicability, co-creativity, and full participation (Bandy et al., 2018). What do these characteristics mean in practice?

Rigor. In the context of learning assessment, rigor means aligning our methods with the goals we have for students, principles of validity and reliability, ethics of fairness and doing no harm, critical examinations of the meaning we make from the results, and good faith efforts to improve teaching and learning. In short, rigor suggests understanding learning assessment as we would any other form of intentional, thoroughgoing, critical, and ethical inquiry.

Generativity. Learning assessments may be most effective when they create conditions for the emergence of new knowledge and practice, including student learning and skill development, as well as instructor pedagogy and teaching methods. Generativity opens up rather than closes down possibilities for discovery, reflection, growth, and transformation.

Practicability. Practicability recommends that learning assessment be grounded in the realities of the world as it is, fitting within the boundaries of both instructor’s and students’ time and labor. While this may, at times, advise a method of learning assessment that seems to conflict with the other values, we believe that assessment fails to be rigorous, generative, participatory, or co-creative if it is not feasible and manageable for instructors and students.

Full Participation. Assessments should be equally accessible to, and encouraging of, learning for all students, empowering all to thrive regardless of identity or background. This requires multiple and varied methods of assessment that are inclusive of diverse identities – racial, ethnic, national, linguistic, gendered, sexual, class, etcetera – and their varied perspectives, skills, and cultures of learning.

Co-creation. As alluded to above regarding self- and peer-assessment, co-creative approaches empower students to become subjects of, not just objects of, learning assessment. That is, learning assessments may be more effective and generative when assessment is done with, not just for or to, students. This is consistent with feminist, social, and community engagement pedagogies, in which values of co-creation encourage us to critically interrogate and break down hierarchies between knowledge producers (traditionally, instructors) and consumers (traditionally, students) (e.g., Saltmarsh, Hartley, & Clayton, 2009, p. 10; Weimer, 2013). In co-creative approaches, students’ involvement enhances the meaningfulness, engagement, motivation, and meta-cognitive reflection of assessments, yielding greater learning (Bass & Elmendorf, 2019). The principle of students being co-creators of their own education is what motivates the course design and professional development work Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching has organized around the Students as Producers theme.

Below is a list of other CFT teaching guides that supplement this one and may be of assistance as you consider all of the factors that shape your assessment plan.

• Active Learning
• An Introduction to Lecturing
• Beyond the Essay: Making Student Thinking Visible in the Humanities
• Bloom’s Taxonomy
• Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)
• Classroom Response Systems
• How People Learn
• Service-Learning and Community Engagement
• Syllabus Construction
• Teaching with Blogs
• Test-Enhanced Learning
• Assessing Student Learning (a five-part video series for the CFT’s Online Course Design Institute)

Angelo, Thomas A., and K. Patricia Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers . 2 nd edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993. Print.

Bandy, Joe, Mary Price, Patti Clayton, Julia Metzker, Georgia Nigro, Sarah Stanlick, Stephani Etheridge Woodson, Anna Bartel, & Sylvia Gale. Democratically engaged assessment: Reimagining the purposes and practices of assessment in community engagement . Davis, CA: Imagining America, 2018. Web.

Bass, Randy and Heidi Elmendorf. 2019. “ Designing for Difficulty: Social Pedagogies as a Framework for Course Design .” Social Pedagogies: Teagle Foundation White Paper. Georgetown University, 2019. Web.

Brookfield, Stephen D. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. Print

Brown, Sally, and Peter Knight. Assessing Learners in Higher Education . 1 edition. London ;Philadelphia: Routledge, 1998. Print.

Cameron, Jeanne et al. “Assessment as Critical Praxis: A Community College Experience.” Teaching Sociology 30.4 (2002): 414–429. JSTOR . Web.

Fink, L. Dee. Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. Second Edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013. Print.

Gibbs, Graham and Claire Simpson. “Conditions under which Assessment Supports Student Learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 1 (2004): 3-31. Print.

Henderson, Euan S. “The Essay in Continuous Assessment.” Studies in Higher Education 5.2 (1980): 197–203. Taylor and Francis+NEJM . Web.

Gelmon, Sherril B., Barbara Holland, and Amy Spring. Assessing Service-Learning and Civic Engagement: Principles and Techniques. Second Edition . Stylus, 2018. Print.

Kuh, George. High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter , American Association of Colleges & Universities, 2008. Web.

Maki, Peggy L. “Developing an Assessment Plan to Learn about Student Learning.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.1 (2002): 8–13. ScienceDirect . Web. The Journal of Academic Librarianship. Print.

Sharkey, Stephen, and William S. Johnson. Assessing Undergraduate Learning in Sociology . ASA Teaching Resource Center, 1992. Print.

Walvoord, Barbara. Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education. Second Edition . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Print.

Weimer, Maryellen. Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice. Second Edition . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013. Print.

Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding By Design . 2nd Expanded edition. Alexandria,

VA: Assn. for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2005. Print.

[1] For more on Wiggins and McTighe’s “Backward Design” model, see our teaching guide here .

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• Reflecting & Assessing
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The Beginner's Guide to Writing an Essay | Steps & Examples

An academic essay is a focused piece of writing that develops an idea or argument using evidence, analysis, and interpretation.

There are many types of essays you might write as a student. The content and length of an essay depends on your level, subject of study, and course requirements. However, most essays at university level are argumentative — they aim to persuade the reader of a particular position or perspective on a topic.

The essay writing process consists of three main stages:

• Preparation: Decide on your topic, do your research, and create an essay outline.
• Writing : Set out your argument in the introduction, develop it with evidence in the main body, and wrap it up with a conclusion.
• Revision:  Check your essay on the content, organization, grammar, spelling, and formatting of your essay.

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Table of contents

Essay writing process, preparation for writing an essay, writing the introduction, writing the main body, writing the conclusion, essay checklist, lecture slides, frequently asked questions about writing an essay.

The writing process of preparation, writing, and revisions applies to every essay or paper, but the time and effort spent on each stage depends on the type of essay .

For example, if you’ve been assigned a five-paragraph expository essay for a high school class, you’ll probably spend the most time on the writing stage; for a college-level argumentative essay , on the other hand, you’ll need to spend more time researching your topic and developing an original argument before you start writing.

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Before you start writing, you should make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to say and how you’re going to say it. There are a few key steps you can follow to make sure you’re prepared:

• Understand your assignment: What is the goal of this essay? What is the length and deadline of the assignment? Is there anything you need to clarify with your teacher or professor?
• Define a topic: If you’re allowed to choose your own topic , try to pick something that you already know a bit about and that will hold your interest.
• Do your research: Read  primary and secondary sources and take notes to help you work out your position and angle on the topic. You’ll use these as evidence for your points.
• Come up with a thesis:  The thesis is the central point or argument that you want to make. A clear thesis is essential for a focused essay—you should keep referring back to it as you write.
• Create an outline: Map out the rough structure of your essay in an outline . This makes it easier to start writing and keeps you on track as you go.

Once you’ve got a clear idea of what you want to discuss, in what order, and what evidence you’ll use, you’re ready to start writing.

The introduction sets the tone for your essay. It should grab the reader’s interest and inform them of what to expect. The introduction generally comprises 10–20% of the text.

1. Hook your reader

The first sentence of the introduction should pique your reader’s interest and curiosity. This sentence is sometimes called the hook. It might be an intriguing question, a surprising fact, or a bold statement emphasizing the relevance of the topic.

Let’s say we’re writing an essay about the development of Braille (the raised-dot reading and writing system used by visually impaired people). Our hook can make a strong statement about the topic:

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.

2. Provide background on your topic

Next, it’s important to give context that will help your reader understand your argument. This might involve providing background information, giving an overview of important academic work or debates on the topic, and explaining difficult terms. Don’t provide too much detail in the introduction—you can elaborate in the body of your essay.

3. Present the thesis statement

Next, you should formulate your thesis statement— the central argument you’re going to make. The thesis statement provides focus and signals your position on the topic. It is usually one or two sentences long. The thesis statement for our essay on Braille could look like this:

As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness.

4. Map the structure

In longer essays, you can end the introduction by briefly describing what will be covered in each part of the essay. This guides the reader through your structure and gives a preview of how your argument will develop.

The invention of Braille marked a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by blind and visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

Write your essay introduction

The body of your essay is where you make arguments supporting your thesis, provide evidence, and develop your ideas. Its purpose is to present, interpret, and analyze the information and sources you have gathered to support your argument.

Length of the body text

The length of the body depends on the type of essay. On average, the body comprises 60–80% of your essay. For a high school essay, this could be just three paragraphs, but for a graduate school essay of 6,000 words, the body could take up 8–10 pages.

Paragraph structure

To give your essay a clear structure , it is important to organize it into paragraphs . Each paragraph should be centered around one main point or idea.

That idea is introduced in a  topic sentence . The topic sentence should generally lead on from the previous paragraph and introduce the point to be made in this paragraph. Transition words can be used to create clear connections between sentences.

After the topic sentence, present evidence such as data, examples, or quotes from relevant sources. Be sure to interpret and explain the evidence, and show how it helps develop your overall argument.

Lack of access to reading and writing put blind people at a serious disadvantage in nineteenth-century society. Text was one of the primary methods through which people engaged with culture, communicated with others, and accessed information; without a well-developed reading system that did not rely on sight, blind people were excluded from social participation (Weygand, 2009). While disabled people in general suffered from discrimination, blindness was widely viewed as the worst disability, and it was commonly believed that blind people were incapable of pursuing a profession or improving themselves through culture (Weygand, 2009). This demonstrates the importance of reading and writing to social status at the time: without access to text, it was considered impossible to fully participate in society. Blind people were excluded from the sighted world, but also entirely dependent on sighted people for information and education.

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The conclusion is the final paragraph of an essay. It should generally take up no more than 10–15% of the text . A strong essay conclusion :

• Returns to your thesis
• Ties together your main points
• Shows why your argument matters

A great conclusion should finish with a memorable or impactful sentence that leaves the reader with a strong final impression.

What not to include in a conclusion

To make your essay’s conclusion as strong as possible, there are a few things you should avoid. The most common mistakes are:

• Including new arguments or evidence
• Undermining your arguments (e.g. “This is just one approach of many”)
• Using concluding phrases like “To sum up…” or “In conclusion…”

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

Write your essay conclusion

Checklist: Essay

My essay follows the requirements of the assignment (topic and length ).

My introduction sparks the reader’s interest and provides any necessary background information on the topic.

My introduction contains a thesis statement that states the focus and position of the essay.

I use paragraphs to structure the essay.

I use topic sentences to introduce each paragraph.

Each paragraph has a single focus and a clear connection to the thesis statement.

I make clear transitions between paragraphs and ideas.

My conclusion doesn’t just repeat my points, but draws connections between arguments.

I don’t introduce new arguments or evidence in the conclusion.

I have given an in-text citation for every quote or piece of information I got from another source.

I have included a reference page at the end of my essay, listing full details of all my sources.

My citations and references are correctly formatted according to the required citation style .

My essay has an interesting and informative title.

I have followed all formatting guidelines (e.g. font, page numbers, line spacing).

Your essay meets all the most important requirements. Our editors can give it a final check to help you submit with confidence.

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An essay is a focused piece of writing that explains, argues, describes, or narrates.

In high school, you may have to write many different types of essays to develop your writing skills.

Academic essays at college level are usually argumentative : you develop a clear thesis about your topic and make a case for your position using evidence, analysis and interpretation.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

• An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
• Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
• A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

A topic sentence is a sentence that expresses the main point of a paragraph . Everything else in the paragraph should relate to the topic sentence.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

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3 Learners’ Dictionaries: History and Development; Current Issues

Reinhard Heuberger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Innsbruck. He was the co-director of the government-funded project SPEED (2006–10) and now co-directs its follow-up project EDD Online, both concerned with the digitization and investigation of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary. His research focuses on lexicography, ecolinguistics, and English dialectology.

• Published: 07 March 2016
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The main characteristics of learners’ dictionaries are identified and described. The history and development of this genre of dictionary is summarized and analysed. Current issues confronting this kind of dictionary are identified. More than 70 years have passed since the publication of A. S. Hornby’s Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (1942), reprinted a few years later by Oxford University Press as A Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (1948). Hornby firmly established a genre of dictionary which has been at the forefront of lexicographical innovation during the past few decades. And the evolution of learners’ dictionaries has certainly not come to its end. Electronic media like the internet have created new opportunities but also challenges for dictionary makers and dictionary users. This chapter aims to sketch the remarkable history and development of monolingual learners’ dictionaries (MLDs), focusing on their salient features, and on current issues and future trends in the field.

3.1 Introduction

More than seventy years have passed since the publication of A. S. Hornby’s Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (1942) , which was reprinted a few years later by Oxford University Press as A Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (1948) . Hornby’s lexicographic milestone firmly established a distinct genre of dictionary which has been at the forefront of lexicographical innovation during the past few decades. And the evolution of learners’ dictionaries has certainly not come to its end. Electronic media and the internet have created new opportunities but also new challenges for both dictionary makers and dictionary users. This chapter aims to sketch the remarkable history and development of monolingual learners’ dictionaries (MLDs), focusing on their salient features, and on current issues and future trends in the field.

Foreign learners’ demands on a dictionary differ fundamentally from those of native speakers (cf. Herbst 1990 : 1379), thus MLDs show a number of peculiarities (cf. Section 3.3 ). Among their most striking features is the use of a restricted and simplified language for the definitions. In contrast to dictionaries aimed at native speakers, MLDs provide detailed guidance on grammar and usage, for example syntactic patterns and usage notes. 1 Only learners’ dictionaries include a vast number of example sentences and collocations, which also increases their usefulness for encoding, that is, for language production. On the other hand, historical and etymological data are often excluded, as they are not regarded as very helpful for learners (cf. Strevens 1987 : 77).

From a didactic point of view, the utility of MLDs for intermediate and advanced learners is undisputed. Only monolingual dictionaries have the extra merit of introducing the user to the lexical system of the foreign language (cf. Béjoint and Moulin 1987 : 104), thus promoting a more rapid expansion of both the active and passive vocabulary. Several studies have shown that advanced learners using monolingual dictionaries indeed obtain better results (cf. Rundell 1999 : 41). Much to the chagrin of educators, however, learners often prefer bilingual dictionaries because they find them easier to use. So-called ‘bilingualized’ dictionaries, that is, monolingual dictionaries with translations for each entry and sub-entry, combine the central elements of monolingual and bilingual reference works and are thus suited to reconciling the conflicting demands of language learners and teachers; they will be discussed briefly in Section 3.4.1 .

Foreign learners of English have a tremendous choice of dictionaries tailored to their needs, in both print and electronic form (cf. Section 3.4.2 ). The lucrative EFL (English as a Foreign Language) market is currently dominated by six major publishers, five of which are British: Oxford University Press, Pearson Longman, Collins Cobuild, Cambridge University Press, Macmillan ELT, as well as the American publishing house Merriam-Webster, whose first MLD entered the market only recently in 2008. The following section gives a short overview of the development of the English learners’ dictionary, focusing on the history of the print editions.

3.2 A Brief History of English Learners’ Dictionaries

The genesis of the learners’ dictionary 2 lies in the endeavours of three teachers of English as a foreign language, one of whom worked in India (Michael West) and two in Japan (H. E. Palmer and A. S. Hornby) (cf. Jackson 2002 : 129). Each of them was involved in research projects dedicated to the teaching of English. West became a major contributor to the ‘vocabulary control’ movement, which was concerned with establishing systematic criteria to select the most useful words for language learning. Together with James Endicott, he compiled The New Method English Dictionary ( NMED , 1935), sometimes labelled the first monolingual learners’ dictionary ( Cowie 1999 : 33). NMED contained only about 24,000 headwords defined using a limited vocabulary of 1,490 words, which made it suitable for intermediate rather than advanced learners. It was intended primarily to meet the decoding needs of its users, whereas its usefulness for encoding was limited by the absence of syntactic guidance, the insufficient treatment of inflection, and an idiosyncratic pronunciation scheme ( Cowie 2009b : 393).

Palmer investigated the grammatical patterning of words, in particular verb patterns. In 1938, he published his small but innovative dictionary A Grammar of English Words . The dictionary won praise for its subtle verb-pattern scheme, arranging the patterns into numbered groupings (‘divisions’) of related types. The usefulness of Palmer’s dictionary was, however, limited by the fact that it focused on simple sentence patterns, whereas complex types involving subordinate clauses were not included ( Cowie 1999 : 28).

Hornby’s work focused on collocations and idioms, research that culminated in the publication of the first general-purpose advanced-level learners’ dictionary, the aforementioned Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary ( Hornby et al. 1942 ). After World War II, Oxford University Press became interested in Hornby’s dictionary and republished it in 1948 as A Learner’s Dictionary of Current English , changed in 1952 to The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English ( ALD1 ). The original use of the terms ‘idiomatic’ and ‘syntactic’ emphasized Hornby’s commitment to the productive (i.e. encoding) function of the dictionary (cf. Cowie 2009b : 398). At the same time, Hornby succeeded in meeting learners’ receptive needs, adapting the vocabulary of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed. 1934) as the basis for the headwords. ALD1 ’s treatment of word-combinations set the path for subsequent phraseological dictionaries, and its use of IPA symbols (to indicate RP pronunciations) became the model of choice in EFL lexicography.

Hornby’s dictionary remained the unrivalled authority in the following three decades. In 1963 the second edition ( ALD2 ) was published, marking a shift of emphasis towards a broader coverage of scientific and technical terms, as well as a significantly greater number of examples, whereas verb-pattern schemes and the treatment of idioms and collocations remained unaltered ( Cowie 2009b : 403). The third edition, then called Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary ( OALD3 , 1974), was strongly influenced by the grammatical research conducted by the Survey of English Usage (University College London), especially by its Grammar of Contemporary English ( Quirk et al. 1972 ). For instance, OALD3 ’s subdivision of verb patterns was rearranged according to the organization in the Grammar , and increased by a factor of almost three. However, the arbitrary letter–number codes used (e.g. [VP 6C]) failed to reflect the syntactic structure of a given pattern, making reform of this feature necessary ( Cowie 2009b : 409).

The year 1978 saw the publication of the first real competitor to Hornby’s dictionary, Paul Proctor’s Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English ( LDOCE1 ). LDOCE1 had a great impact on EFL lexicography and provided various innovative features. It also drew on the grammatical resources made available by the Survey of English Usage and gave new impetus to West’s controlled defining vocabulary. The editors of LDOCE1 claimed that all definitions were compiled by means of a limited vocabulary of about 2,000 words, although the actual number of words and senses used was significantly higher, mainly due to polysemous defining terms and derivations that were additionally used. What made the dictionary perhaps most remarkable for its time was its highly systematic organization of grammatical categories and codes ( Fontenelle 2009 : 414). However, mastering the intricacies of Longman’s coding scheme was often found by learners to be a daunting task, and subsequent editions of LDOCE adopted a simpler approach with fewer codes (cf. Fontenelle 2009 : 417). LDOCE1 also deserves credit for being the first large-scale computerized dictionary of English, having been used in many natural language processing applications.

The third big player on the EFL market, John Sinclair’s Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary ( Cobuild1 ), was first published in 1987. Although it initially received a lot of criticism, it was later widely imitated, especially as regards the use of corpus evidence ( Moon 2009 : 436). Cobuild1 can thus justly be regarded as the first corpus-based dictionary of English, applying an approach that is standard practice in present-day (EFL) lexicography. The corpus became the sole basis for the selection of the example sentences in Cobuild1 , which was emphasized by the eye-catching slogan on the front page: ‘Helping learners with real English.’ Sinclair addressed this issue in the preface to the dictionary, arguing that ‘[invented examples] give no reliable guide to composition in English and would be very misleading if applied to that task’ (1987b: xv). This was a rather extreme position, not shared by many other lexicographers (cf. Bergh et al. 1998 : 42). Cobuild1 ’s innovative use of full sentence definitions made the explanations easier to read and understand, but was criticized for being long-winded and repetitious ( Herbst 1990 : 1382). The dictionary was also distinguished by its physical appearance. A slim marginal column to the right of the dictionary text (the ‘extra-column’) contained grammatical labels, synonyms, antonyms, as well as superordinates of senses and phrases, thus reducing non-discursive matter in the main text (cf. Moon 2009 : 453).

The same year, 1987, also saw the publication of LDOCE2 , and OALD4 was published two years later in 1989. Both editions introduced a few changes but largely maintained their individual approaches ( Moon 2009 : 453). The year 1995 turned out to be one of the most prolific years for EFL lexicography. Within a period of six months, four MLDs appeared on the market: three new editions, OALD5, LDOCE3 , and Cobuild2 , as well as an entirely new publication, the Cambridge International Dictionary of English ( CIDE1 ). In the tradition of Cobuild1 , all four dictionaries were corpus-based, a selling factor that was strongly emphasized in the blurbs. LDOCE3 and Cobuild2 were the first dictionaries to indicate frequency information, that is, data on the quantitative distribution of lexical items within a given corpus. The Longman lexicographers marked the 3,000 most common words of written and spoken English, while Cobuild2 originally covered a remarkably high frequency range of the 14,700 most common words. 3 Another focus of the 1995 generation of MLDs was on improving the accessibility of the microstructure. To facilitate the finding of the individual senses of polysemous entries, Longman and Cambridge were the first to provide index terms or phrases, referred to as ‘signposts’ ( LDOCE3 ) and ‘guide words’ ( CIDE1 ). Remarkably, LDOCE3 almost entirely desisted from using codes for its syntactic patterns, instead spelling out this information in full, a method common in bilingual dictionaries (cf. Herbst 1996 : 329). For example, a pattern of the verb ‘find’ was marked as ‘find sb doing sth’ rather than (T + obj + v-ing) or (V n -ing), which were the corresponding codes in CIDE1 and Cobuild2 . The most obvious advantage of this policy was that users hardly needed to remember syntactic codes, and many learners greatly appreciated Longman’s approach, which was maintained in later editions. As the title of CIDE1 suggests, Cambridge put special emphasis on international varieties of English, covering ‘British, American, Australian and other usages, pronunciations, spellings and grammatical patterns’ (1995: viii).

In retrospect, one might argue that by 1995 the English learners’ dictionary had witnessed its most profound innovations. Needless to say, subsequent print editions would keep introducing subtle changes, for example a more thorough treatment of collocations and neologisms, a refined layout (e.g. the use of colours), an overall increase of headwords, accompanying CD-ROMs, etc.—but the key features of state-of-the-art learners’ dictionaries were essentially established by 1995. 4 This does not, of course, mean that the publication of new dictionaries came to a halt. In 2002, a fifth competitor entered the market, the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners ( MEDAL1 ). Bogaards has rightly stated that MEDAL1 wisely adopted the features that had proven successful in past editions of learners’ dictionaries ( Bogaards 2010 : 21): clear guide word menus for the sake of accessibility, frequency information (on the 7,500 most common words), and a refined defining vocabulary of 2,500 terms. The second edition of MEDAL appeared in 2007.

It was only in 2008 that the first American learners’ dictionary was published, Merriam-Webster’s Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary ( MWALED1 ). Unsurprisingly, there was a special focus on American English vocabulary and usage (cf. preface). MWALED1 provided a significantly greater number of example sentences than its British competitors (around 160,000 according to Merriam Webster), but otherwise did not add any new elements to this type of dictionary (cf. Bogaards 2010 : 25). This lack of innovation has recently led Bogaards to speculate whether the evolution of MLDs has come to its end (2010: 25). My answer to that question is a firm ‘no’, with the important addition that there is arguably more scope for improvement within the electronic medium (cf. Section 3.4.2 ).

The standard of today’s monolingual English learners’ dictionaries is certainly admirably high, and learners can choose among the following current editions: OALD8 (2010), LDOCE6 (2014), Cobuild8 (2014), CALD4 (2013), 5   MEDAL2 (2007), and MWALED1 (2008). The following section will focus on the salient features of MLDs, at the same time trying to establish the criteria for successful learners’ dictionaries.

3.3 Salient Features of Learners’ Dictionaries

The parameters of a ‘perfect’ learners’ dictionary have been widely discussed (cf. Herbst 1996 ) and are not undisputed, be it the question of authentic example sentences vs. invented ones, the coverage of grammatical topics, or the selection of the defining vocabulary. This section investigates the key features of monolingual English learners’ dictionaries, also tackling a few debated issues and areas in which there is still scope for development.

3.3.1 Defining Vocabularies

In deference to the learners’ reduced lexical proficiency, limited defining vocabularies of usually no more than 3,500 words are the basis for the compilation of the definitions in MLDs. This feature, first introduced in LDOCE1 in 1978, is an integral part of the success of the English learners’ dictionary. But while the advantages of defining vocabularies are evident, their disadvantages are sometimes overlooked. A defining vocabulary policy places a number of constraints on the lexicographers, not unusually resulting in ‘clumsy and unnaturally circumlocutory’ definitions ( Carter 1994 : 127). In many cases, it takes more space to define a headword using simple terms than using more complex and succinct language. Despite these drawbacks, the usefulness of a defining vocabulary is indisputable for most scholars. As Landau has stated, ‘there is no doubt that a controlled vocabulary makes for a duller text, and there is probably some merit to the charge of awkwardness, but the foreign learner may be better served by sacrificing all else to basic understandability of sense’ ( Landau 1984 : 343). 6

Defining vocabularies require a certain degree of complexity that allows lexicographers to compile precise definitions and yet be simple enough to be understood by the user. The most frequent terms of a language are likely candidates for this purpose, as learners can be expected to be familiar with them. Unfortunately, frequency usually goes hand in hand with polysemy and ambiguity (cf. Hartmann 1989 : 184), which makes the selection of these terms even more problematic. All current MLDs occasionally depend on words from outside the defining vocabulary to improve the accuracy of the definitions. This is tolerable as long as these terms are marked or explained immediately. Oxford has taken an innovative approach in OALD8 , keeping the definition phrases simple and additionally providing technical terms (usually in brackets). This ensures that the definitions are easily comprehensible while the learners’ vocabulary range is increased:

3.3.2 Definitions

Definitions are, due to their importance, one of the most debated areas in MLDs, and perhaps the one most in need of improvement. The compilation of appropriate definitions is challenging for a number of reasons. There is, for example, the choice of the most suitable method of defining. Some headwords are best described analytically, whereas others are better defined by means of typifying or rule-based definitions (cf. Heuberger 2000 : 15ff). In addition, the lexicographer needs to pay attention to a number of well-established principles of defining, for example the avoidance of circularity and the need for objectivity.

Interestingly, there are a number of lexicographic shortcomings that seem to affect dictionaries for learners more than those for native speakers. Dictionaries for the latter target audience generally present a more apposite description of the headwords, partly due to the greater length of their entries. In Heuberger (2000: 19ff) , definitions of selected lexical fields in MLDs are analysed systematically, revealing five recurring shortcomings: irrelevance, ideology, inaccuracy, insufficiency, and incoherence. These points will be discussed briefly in the following.

Printed learners’ dictionaries suffer from space limitations, so definitions need to be short. A definition can only provide few semantic features of a headword, which are meant to enable the learner to identify the lexeme and distinguish it from related ones. Learners’ dictionaries tend to waste space by giving irrelevant and redundant information, as the following example illustrates:

The information that salmon are fished for with a rod is not distinctive as this is true of a great variety of fish. It is certainly not a feature characteristic of salmon, nor does it contribute to a better understanding of the meaning of the term.

While many users continue to endorse the notion of dictionaries as objective authorities on language issues, linguists have identified ideology in dictionaries in some detail (e.g. Kachru and Kahane 1995 ). Landau (1984: 303) 7 has argued that ‘dictionary definitions represent the views and prejudices of the established, well-educated, upper classes, generally speaking’. Anthropocentrism—the focus on nature’s utility or harmfulness for humans—is just one example of such bias:

By calling vultures ‘ugly’, the Longman Interactive English Dictionary 8 (1996) is very subjective and suggests a purely human-centred conception of beauty. The greater amount of anthropocentrism in learners’ dictionaries compared to native speaker dictionaries is presumably correlated to their principle of offering ‘simple’ explanations, as information on utility or harmfulness is usually easily comprehensible in terms of lexis and complexity (cf. Heuberger 2003 ).

A comparison of selected definitions in dictionaries for learners and native speakers is also likely to show that the former are often less accurate. Again, it seems that the lexicographers’ efforts to provide simple explanations sometimes results in their being simplistic—concerns about accuracy certainly being less of an issue in MLDs:

Nights in deserts can be quite cold, which renders the term ‘always’ inappropriate, and there are several types other than sand deserts. Even though incorrect facts like these are unlikely to prevent learners from understanding the definitions, such false ideas are perpetuated by continuing to include them in dictionaries. Therefore, compilers of learners’ dictionaries should pay more attention to accuracy.

A smaller number of definitions in MLDs do not provide sufficient facts for the user to clearly identify the headword defined. The following example arguably allows for false interpretations on the part of the user:

CIDE1 ’s definition is supposed to illustrate the term pig , but it also applies to calves, bullocks, and even fowl. It is, admittedly, impossible to define all headwords unmistakably, but the referents usually have unique features which, if emphasized, make a clear identification possible.

Svensén (1993: 125) has pointed out that a coherent defining style is more than just an aesthetic factor: it is ‘the only way to be consistent in the choice of the genus proximum, to choose the correct distinctive features, and to avoid redundancy, contradiction, etc.’. Learners’ dictionaries sometimes read as if related lexemes have been defined independently of each other—often with the consequences predicted by Svensén:

MWALED1 ’s definitions for ‘gnat’ and ‘mosquito’ suggest that the two headwords have not been analysed and defined together; neither are they worded in a uniform manner (‘bites people’ vs. ‘bites the skin of people’), nor do they share the same genus term (‘fly’ vs. ‘insect’).

In summary, definitions are among the information categories with the greatest scope for improvement. A significant number of definitions both fail to help the learner and to please the critic. Most of the shortcomings criticized could be overcome by adhering to a clearer defining policy, using componential analyses to identify distinctive features, and defining related terms together.

3.3.3 Illustrations

Pictorial illustrations, which are a standard feature in learners’ dictionaries nowadays, are mainly used to support definitions in explaining meaning. Apart from this primary function, illustrations are used to group and disambiguate words of a lexical field (e.g. tools), depict the parts and components of referents and contrast the various senses of polysemous and homonymous terms. Finally, (full-colour) illustrations are an important sales argument, as they make the dictionary more appealing to the eye.

Like definitions, illustrations may succeed in depicting a headword well or may fail to do so. The selection of the features to be included is similar to the choice of semantic features to be provided by a definition. The two images in Figure 3.1 show some weaknesses typical of this information category in MLDs. Longman’s illustration for the verb ‘shoot down’ is arguably ambiguous and would benefit from additional features, for example a shooting enemy jet fighter, to disambiguate it from the more general concept of exploding. Similarly, the picture of a turtle fails to make clear whether this reptile is a land or a sea animal, as the turtle’s natural habitat, water, is not portrayed.

A comparison of the current MLDs shows that the publishers have often chosen different terms to illustrate. Pictures should generally be employed more systematically for terms that are likely to cause confusion for the learner (e.g. due to their complexity or ambiguity), and the aesthetic value of illustrations ought not to surpass their lexicographic relevance. Longman already demonstrated in LDOCE3 that there is apparently no word class or type of word that cannot be illustrated effectively (cf. the innovative pictures dedicated to sounds and prepositions). Greater emphasis should be placed on thematic illustrations, 9 which can show relationships that are difficult to describe verbally.

Ambiguity of illustrations in LDOCE3 (‘shoot down’) and LDOCE5 (‘turtle’)

3.3.4 Examples

Example sentences fulfil several important functions in learners’ dictionaries, for both receptive and productive purposes; they help to clarify meanings (and thus support definitions) and serve as syntactic models to be followed by dictionary users. They are also a vehicle to indicate collocations, and—as a side effect—serve to counteract ‘the dry effect of an entire book of abstract analyses of words as words’ ( Kipfer 1984 : 78).

The selection of example sentences is arguably one of the most controversial questions in EFL lexicography. There are basically three approaches to this issue. A. S. Hornby, the pioneer of the modern learners’ dictionary, spoke out in favour of invented examples, mainly because they can include lexical and grammatical detail designed to help language learners (quoted in Cowie 1999 : 134). As mentioned earlier, John Sinclair was among the sharpest critics of this position, arguing in the preface to Cobuild1 that only authentic examples can show how a word is actually used, whereas invented examples ‘have no independent authority or reason for their existence …; usage cannot be invented, it can only be recorded’ ( Sinclair 1987b : xv). The third approach, taken by all current MLDs, is actually a combination of the first two policies; the lexicographers rely on authentic example sentences, but usually edit them to remove difficult terms from the original corpus material and adapt them to reflect typical structures and collocations. This approach combines the best elements of Hornby’s and Sinclair’s positions and seems to be the most promising from the viewpoint of the learner. 10

Even though example sentences have an important semantic function in MLDs, dictionary makers have traditionally decided against applying defining vocabularies to this information category. The decision whether less frequent terms should remain within example sentences is largely based on lexicographers’ intuition. It is not unusual for unsuitable terms to slip through. The following examples taken from three recent editions of learners’ dictionaries illustrate this point:

Learners’ knowledge of terms like ‘diminutive’, ‘sleek’, or ‘puttering’ ought not to be taken for granted. In including example sentences, the frequency of the terms they use should be considered, a task which again needs to be corpus-based. In keeping with Bogaards, at least those examples that are intended to support the definitions (rather than to illustrate syntactic patterns) should be kept correspondingly simple ( Bogaards 1996 : 298). Besides, it has been argued that lexicographers should pay greater attention to the encoding function of examples, especially with regard to less frequent terms ( Xu 2008 : 410).

3.3.5 Grammar

The treatment of grammatical information is another area where dictionaries for learners and native speakers differ significantly. Unlike native speaker dictionaries, MLDs not only indicate the part of speech of a headword, but they also give detailed information on syntactic patterns and irregular inflections. In particular, learners’ dictionaries focus on the syntactic behaviour of verbs, ‘since verb syntax is essentially the syntax of the clause’ ( Jackson 1994 : 180). Unfortunately, learners often fail to make full use of this information category, mainly because they only reluctantly read the prefatory matter and are not prepared to study the coding systems adequately.

Grammatical information is difficult to provide in a learners’ dictionary, for at least three reasons (cf. Stark 1990 : 22). First, there is the problem of arranging the data, as grammatical information does not lend itself to an alphabetical ordering in the dictionary. 11 Second, lexicographers are supposed to avoid redundancy by not repeating the information generally found in grammar books, 12 and third—and perhaps most importantly—the grammar codes need to be clear and effective. Ideally, the codes should have a mnemonic value which enables the learner to interpret and remember them more easily.

Excerpts from (respectively) Cobuild6 and LDOCE5 illustrating the use of pattern codes

Coding systems are among the features where the dictionaries on the market are most distinct, and arguably one in which the greatest improvements have been made in the past few decades. As already mentioned, former editions of learners’ dictionaries often included grammar codes that were not suggestive of the syntactic pattern itself. The occasional dictionary user in particular was likely to forget those inscrutable notations after not having consulted the reference work for some time. Many of today’s learners’ dictionaries spell out grammatical information in full and are thus much more comprehensible and user-friendly in this respect.

The current generation of MLDs continues to cater to the diverse grammatical needs of its users, though the differences between the individual reference works have become noticeably smaller. Learners who require detailed and explicit grammatical information have traditionally been well-served with a Cobuild dictionary. Interestingly, the complexity and range of Cobuild6 (2008) has been greatly reduced compared to Cobuild2 (1995). Of the seventy-four(!) grammatical patterns included in the second edition, only thirty-six have remained in Cobuild6 . For that edition, Collins also decided to remove its long-established extra column, which was used to indicate grammatical information in previous editions. 13 Longman, on the other hand, has long focused on the development of an easy-to-understand coding system, spelling out syntactic patterns in full since its 1995 edition. The excerpts in Figure 3.2 taken from recent Cobuild and Longman dictionaries illustrate these different approaches with regard to pattern codes.

Longman’s policy of spelling out pattern codes has been adopted by its competitors OALD8 and MEDAL2 , whereas CALD4 and MWALED1 continue to include them. Clearly, both approaches have their justification, and the choice of the most suitable dictionary with regard to grammar depends on learners’ individual needs and preferences.

3.3.6 Usage Information

Example sentences and grammar codes are designed to indicate ‘how a word can be used, but not how it can’t’ ( Whitcut 1985 : 77). This is one of the main functions of so-called usage notes, first included in LDOCE1 . Primarily intended for encoding, they provide additional grammatical information, highlight subtle differences in meaning, or focus on pragmatic aspects. 14 All MLDs currently on the market provide helpful and accurate guidance within this information category. The usefulness of this feature is mainly limited by the fact that the notes occur rather irregularly and sporadically. A given set of words is usually only discussed in one of the dictionaries available.

Usage information is also indicated by means of labels. They are employed to give information on such factors as currency and temporality (‘obsolete’), frequency of use (‘rare’), regional variation (‘Australian’), technical or specialized terminology (‘astronomy’), restricted or socially unacceptable usage (‘taboo’), style (‘informal’), and status (‘non-standard’) (cf. Landau 2001 : 217–18). The criticism voiced in connection with usage notes also applies to labels: their main weakness is that they are often employed rather inconsistently, that is, not for all headwords to which they are pertinent.

3.3.7 Collocations

Collocations constitute a major challenge for the language learner as they are often unpredictable. They also present difficulties for the dictionary maker, as they entail a number of methodological problems. 15 Apart from choosing suitable candidates, lexicographers have to decide how and where to indicate collocations. In principle, they can be entered under the collocational base (i.e. the semantically more autonomous word) or the collocator (the semantically more dependent element). Space restrictions in print dictionaries usually prevent lexicographers from providing collocations within the entries of both their components. In addition, a suitable vehicle needs to be chosen; collocations are sometimes listed separately within an entry, but more often they are incorporated into examples and definitions or discussed within usage notes. Dictionary users often cannot be sure where to find collocations; a universal format, be it with regard to placement or typography, has yet to be realized.

Every learners’ dictionary has its individual approach to this problematic area. Cobuild6 and LDOCE5 , for example, give collocations separate status in the microstructure, listing (and, if necessary, explaining) them in a self-contained box (Figure 3.3 ). Thus, users can locate the data immediately without looking through the entire entry. This also allows for shorter and clearer definitions and examples, as lexicographers do not need to integrate the collocational information there. It should be pointed out, however, that only headwords with a broad collocational range are equipped with this feature.

Collocation boxes in Cobuild6 (‘key’) and LDOCE5 (‘harm’)

3.3.8 Pronunciation

All current MLDs provide phonetic transcriptions by means of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a tradition which dates back to ALD1 . Native-speaker dictionaries sometimes rely on their individual notation systems which are based on respelling, compelling users to learn every system anew if they consult dictionaries by different publishers. The claim that the IPA is too difficult for the average user (cf. Kipfer 1984 : 120) is hardly justified, and most foreign learners of English become familiar with it in the course of their language studies anyway. With regard to phonetic transcription systems, the current MLDs hardly differ from each other. All dictionaries except for MEDAL2 indicate American English alternative pronunciations, and MWALED1 , of course, focuses on this variety.

3.3.9 Accessibility

A well-designed access structure is arguably a prerequisite for the effective use of any reference work. Current MLDs are intended for both decoding and encoding, which poses conflicting demands on lexicographers: ‘Whereas for receptive purposes the learner should be guided from unknown elements to familiar ones, for productive goals he should be able to start from familiar words in order to find words which are new to him’ ( Bogaards 1996 : 280). Dictionaries intended for encoding should ideally be arranged semantically rather than alphabetically, since an alphabetical ordering blurs the meaning relation between headwords. 16 However, MLDs are organized alphabetically, meaning that dictionary makers need to provide tools that compensate for this policy. For instance, cross-references are supposed to enable the learner to find unknown words starting from familiar ones. Example sentences, collocations, illustrations, and a few other information categories indirectly fulfil this purpose as well. However, language production with only a monolingual dictionary at hand remains a time-consuming and laborious procedure, and the translation of complex texts without the use of bilingual dictionaries remains illusory.

A more thorough discussion of the access structure of learners’ dictionaries is beyond the scope of this paper. Merely one feature designed to facilitate the location of senses of polysemous terms will be mentioned here in brief. The introduction of ‘signposts’ and ‘guide words’ (before each meaning) in the 1995 generation of learners’ dictionaries (i.e. LDOCE3 and CIDE1 ) has proven to be a seminal innovation that may facilitate considerably the retrieval of word senses. 17   MEDAL1 ’s use of ‘menu words’ (at the top of the entry) has a very similar function. Unfortunately, only the aforementioned three publishers currently rely on this feature. The examples in Figure 3.4 are taken from CALD3 and MEDAL2 .

‘Signposts’ in CALD3 (‘absorb’) and ‘menu words’ in MEDAL2 (‘gentle’)

3.3.10 Front and Back Matter

User research has shown that the front matter of MLDs is hardly ever read ( Herbst 1996 : 339), mainly because it is either perceived as too long or not attractive enough in terms of layout and style. Besides, as Kirkpatrick (1989: 754) has suggested, ‘it is widely believed that one dictionary is much like another’. As a result, many learners remain ignorant of some (innovative) features of their dictionaries and are likely not to use them to their full potential. The current generation of learners’ dictionaries provides ‘visual keys’ to their reference works, that is, annotated sample pages of the dictionary in combination with verbal descriptions. This keeps the guides shorter than traditional discursive descriptions and at the same time makes them more appealing to the eye.

Similarly, many learners are unaware of the extra information their dictionaries contain in the back matter (cf. Jackson 1994 : 38). Publishers continue to provide this section in their current learners’ dictionaries, although there seems to be little consensus on what features to include. Arguably, a list of irregular verbs is a useful appendix in any MLD. Similarly, learners ought to be informed about which words they need to know when using their dictionary (i.e. a defining vocabulary list). A concise treatise on essay writing as well as formal and informal letters (including emails) is another helpful contribution in making the reference books more suitable for productive purposes. Finally, there are a number of ‘traditional’ appendices which may not be consulted very often but which should prove helpful on some occasions: lists of geographical names, prefixes and suffixes, numbers, weights, and guidance on punctuation.

3.4 Special Types of Learners’ Dictionaries

3.4.1 bilingualized learners’ dictionaries.

The bilingualized English learners’ dictionary (BLD) is a comparatively recent development which aims to combine the central or ‘best’ elements of monolingual and bilingual reference works (cf. Béjoint 1994 : 73). Such dictionaries usually have an entry structure very similar to MLDs (i.e. definitions and examples compiled in English), but additionally provide a translation for every sense into the learner’s native language. This means, of course, that bilingualized learners’ dictionaries need to be compiled for every given foreign language, which is one of the reasons why only a few BLDs have been published to date. 18

Laufer and Hadar (1997: 192ff) have pointed out that these hybrid dictionaries have proven effective in several studies, although the results vary with the skills of the user group. In particular, less advanced learners have achieved better results with bilingualized reference works than with monolingual or bilingual ones. But advanced learners are also likely to profit from the translations, as they reassure and reinforce the learner’s decision about the meaning and use of a given lexeme ( Laufer and Hadar 1997 : 195). The only problem with BLDs from a didactic point of view is that their users tend to skip the monolingual parts, often going straight to the translations and thus missing exposure to the L2 ( Pujol et al. 2006 : 203f). 19

The electronic medium lends itself particularly well to the realization of BLDs, not only because translations increase the size of print dictionaries. Printed BLDs are often structured on the basis of one L2 language, for example English. 20 This means that translations, which are provided for each sense, cannot be taken as a starting point, making these dictionaries more useful for decoding than encoding. However, users of computerized reference works can search for both the English term and its native language equivalent and are thus able to start from either language. This is an enormous advantage, and a well-compiled bilingualized EFL dictionary in electronic form can therefore combine the best features of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries without sacrificing any of their individual strengths.

3.4.2 Electronic Learners’ Dictionaries

The basic outline of the salient features of MLDs presented in Section 3.3 applies to both printed and electronic reference works. Even the most recent versions of electronic learners’ dictionaries are essentially conversions of existing print dictionaries, meaning that their main differences do not concern the entry texts but rather additional features enabled by technology (cf. de Schryver 2003 : 146). All six big publishers of MLDs offer free online versions of their current reference works, 21 sometimes restricted in function (e.g. CobuildO ). Electronic versions of learners’ dictionaries are also available on optical data carriers (CD-ROMs or DVDs) that are often sold in combination with the corresponding print dictionaries. They can usually be installed on local hard disks, which minimizes access times. The recently published Cobuild7 is the first MLD to come with a mobile app for the iPhone, Android, and mobile web browsers. In Asia especially, handheld mobile devices are also very popular (cf. Nesi 2009 : 460ff).

Electronic MLDs have several significant advantages, the most important of which are briefly discussed here. To begin with, limitations of space are much less of an issue than in print dictionaries. As already pointed out, however, this potential has up to now hardly ever been used for the entry text itself. Instead, electronic learners’ dictionaries provide extra features such as (visual) thesauruses, 22 exercises, vocabulary builders, language games, etc. Among the greatest benefits of the electronic medium is the provision of what has often been termed ‘multimedia features’. The integration of audio (and sometimes video) material allows for a more natural and vivid description of the language than a book could ever achieve. In particular, recorded pronunciations by native speakers are a highly useful feature that modern MLDs often provide for both British and American English.

Another major advantage of electronic dictionaries (mainly on optical storage devices) is that they can include self-contained corpora. The potential usefulness of such corpora for receptive and even more so for productive purposes ought not to be underestimated. Even for less frequent terms, learners are usually provided with a sizeable number of examples that can serve as syntactic models for correct usage or as the basis for lexical analyses. Besides, these corpora are believed to play an important role in learning, as they may foster learners’ interest in the language and its structures.

Thanks to sophisticated retrieval systems, access times may be reduced 23 significantly in the case of electronic MLDs. The search process is also facilitated and refined by features such as Boolean operators, wildcard searches, hypertext searches (instant cross-references), filter searches, etc. Finally, the user-friendliness of electronic learners’ dictionaries is often improved by allowing for various customizations (e.g. with regard to typeface, layout, etc.) and by their large-scale linkability with other software (e.g. word processing tools). A more detailed investigation of electronic MLDs is beyond the scope of this paper. For a more thorough discussion of electronic (learners’) dictionaries, see, for example, Nesi (2009) and de Schryver (2003) .

3.5 Conclusion and Outlook

The history of the English learners’ dictionary is indeed a success story. More than seventy years after the publication of Hornby’s ISED , the genre is alive and kicking, with new publications appearing regularly and sales running into tens of millions. In addition, EFL lexicography has contributed fruitfully to dictionary making in general, as many important innovations of recent decades have emerged from this corner of the field. Despite this praise, EFL lexicography cannot afford to rest on its laurels and is likely to witness some profound changes within the foreseeable future. Many of these changes and innovations will be driven by technological developments, for example the growing popularity of smartphones. Although printed learners’ dictionaries will—despite all former prophecies of doom—continue to be published in the years and decades to come, the scope for development is arguably greater as regards the electronic medium. Learners are more and more used to obtaining their information online or through mobile devices, preferably free of charge. The majority of EFL publishers already make their current learners’ dictionaries available for free, and this business model (financed by advertisements) is likely to keep flourishing.

Rundell (2010) predicts that another major change might concern the well- established format of the MLD, which needs to adapt more flexibly to the needs and demands of its target audience:

The one-size-fits-all model was a boon for publishers: the same ALD could be sold all over the world to students whose needs, capabilities and cultural backgrounds were in reality quite diverse. But this approach is out of step with the Zeitgeist and is starting to break down. The demand among consumers generally is for products that match their individual needs more precisely—an expectation that is already transforming businesses like television and popular music. In dictionary terms, this implies both customization and personalization. ( Rundell 2010 : 171f)

These plausible demands for adaptation can certainly be realized more efficiently within the electronic medium, where individual access to dedicated corpora, collocation banks, L2 translation systems, etc. is technically feasible. ‘Personalization’ also implies that the dictionary should ideally match the user’s changing needs, for example by calibrating the level of L1 support ( Rundell 2010 : 172).

A large-scale electronic learners’ dictionary in its own right, originally conceived for the electronic environment and continuously kept up-to-date, is yet to be published. The same is true of visionary features such as supplementary multimedia corpora for learners, combining searchable text, audio, and video material cross-referenced with each other (cf. de Schryver 2003 : 169). Currently, such ideas are still the dreams of lexicographers, although not completely illusory ones. They illustrate that the potential of MLDs is yet to be exhausted, and make us curious about what lies ahead. These desiderata as well as the critical comments voiced in Section 3.3 should not blur the fact that the standard of state-of-the-art monolingual dictionaries for foreign learners of English is already enviably high, arguably unrivalled by any other language. It is safe to predict that EFL lexicography will maintain its supremacy and continue to be innovative in the years and decades to come.

Some dictionaries for native speakers nowadays have usage notes as well, e.g. the current edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed., 2011).

The most thorough treatment of the development of MLDs (up to the turn of the millennium) is Cowie (1999) .

Kilgarriff (1997a: 150) has argued that Cobuild2 ’s information on less frequent terms was not very reliable. Concerns about the reliability of the data are likely to have prompted Collins to limit its frequency indications to the 3,000 most common terms from the 2003 edition of Cobuild onwards.

This impression is confirmed by Yamada (2010 : 150), who has pointed out that the 1995 generation of MLDs marked the beginning of a convergence within EFL lexicography.

Cambridge changed the title of CIDE to Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary ( CALD ) from the second edition onwards.

This section is not retained in Landau (2001) .

LIED1 is an electronic learners’ dictionary on CD-ROM, based on the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (1993, ed. Della Summers).

OALD8 and CALD3 can serve as examples in this respect; all illustrations portray groups of semantically related lexemes or the parts and components of terms.

Even Collins has departed from Sinclair’s original approach, as stated in Cobuild6 (2008: xi): ‘Examples themselves remain close to the corpus, with minor changes made so that they are more successful as dictionary examples’.

Cf. Collins’ attempt to indicate grammar within the so-called extra column in earlier editions of Cobuild .

This point is a debatable one; it has even been suggested that learners should be provided with all the grammatical guidance they need without being referred to grammars at all (cf. Jackson 1985 : 53)

Studies have shown that learners hardly used the extra column as a source of grammatical information ( Bogaards and van der Kloot 2001 : 118).

For a recent discussion of pragmatic information in learners’ dictionaries, see Yang (2007) .

Walker (2009: 298) has noted in this context that lexicographers’ awareness regarding the nature of collocations ought to be raised: ‘In fact, it can be argued that some of [the] limitations may result from a lack of clarity concerning what exactly constitutes a collocation, and a lack of understanding of the linguistic features and processes which influence the process by which collocations are formed’.

Compare the arrangement in the Longman Language Activator (LLA2) , a dictionary designed especially for production.

Nesi and Tan (2011: 90) have recently evaluated this feature largely positively.

While MLDs can be sold worldwide, there is obviously only a restricted market for bilingualized learners’ dictionaries. They are, for example, very popular with Chinese-speaking EFL learners ( Chen 2011 : 161), whereas other languages like German still await the publication of the first BLD.

‘Deferred’ bilingualized dictionaries try to counteract these habits by not presenting the translation immediately (cf. Pujol et al. 2006 ).

A space-consuming alternative is to organize the hybrid dictionary the way some bilingual ones are structured, with half of the reference work dedicated to each of the two languages in question.

These online dictionaries (including their URLs) are all listed within the references.

Cf. CALDO .

However, the short time needed to retrieve information may prove detrimental to its retention (cf. Dziemianko 2010 : 258).

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Essay on Viksit Bharat: A Path to India’s Development

• Updated on  
• Apr 5, 2024

Essay on Viksit Bharat: The Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, has an ambition for India; that is to make India a ‘Developed Country’. The Leader has stated that every action of an Indian civilian should be done to make India a developed country; that is, Viksit Bharat.

The formal launch of the Viksit Bharat Mission was a major milestone in India’s development. It is an opportunity for India to show its true potential and become a developed country by 2047, which will complete the 100 years of India’s independence. With the rapid development in major sectors of the economy , experts have predicted that this mission will be accomplished within its time limit. 

This Blog Includes:

Viksit bharat history, viksit bharat key objectives, developments so far.

Quick Read: Essay on Digital India

On 11 December 2023, the Indian Prime Minister launched the Viksit Bharat @2047 scheme via a video conferencing platform. In this video conference, he declared the formal launch of this scheme along with its four pillars: Yuva (Youth), Garib (Poor), Mahila (Women) and Kisan (Framers).

Viksit Bharat represents a blueprint for India’s development. It aims to achieve the ‘India Great’ target by the year 2047; which was termed as ‘Amrit Kaal’. On 3rd March 2024, the Prime Minister chaired the Council of Ministers, where he talked about a plan for the next five years to work on the ‘Viksit Bharat 2047’ vision.

He stated that if the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) forms a government after the upcoming Lok Sabha elections in 2024, the government will aim to make India a global power in terms of economic growth, social development, technological innovations and soft diplomacy. 

‘ Today, the goal of the country is Viksit Bharat, Shrestha Bharat!’ – PM Narendra Modi

The Viksit Bharat has been the prime focus of the NDA. The Prime Minister has expressed his ministry’s action plan to make India a developed nation by 2047. The immediate objectives of the Viksit Bharat scheme are economic growth and sustainable development goals, better standard of living, ease of doing business, infrastructure, social welfare, etc.

To achieve the Viksit Bharat objectives, the Indian Prime Minister aims to enable every Indian citizen to participate in the country’s development at their own level. PM Modi’s vision is strong and sustainable, where every individual will be offered decent living standards and an opportunity to serve their mother country. 

The government is encouraging investors to invest in India for advanced economic growth in the subsequent years. The sub-schemes launched under this mission show the government’s dedication to creating a favourable environment for economic growth and business development.

The government is constantly encouraging the youth to actively participate in the government’s schemes and engage in entrepreneurial activities. With schemes like Startup India, Made in India, and Digital India, more and more people are encouraged to participate in the government’s plans for India’s development.

The government is launching schemes on its digital platforms that encourage people to understand the importance of indigenous products and rely on their skills.’

Developing world-class infrastructure to promote sustainable development and an enhanced standard of living for everyone is another objective of the Viksit Bharat scheme. The government is launching large-scale projects to develop the country’s infrastructure, which includes the construction of world-class roads and highways, trains and railway stations, ports, etc. Some of the popular projects launched by the government are the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana , Smart Cities Mission, Bharatmala, Sagarmala, etc. 

Quick Read: 200+ English Essay Topics

Unveiling the 10 pillars of Viksit Bharat Abhiyan with #economy at the core- paving the way for a #prosperous and #Developed India. India’s model of #development should lead the way for the world to follow. To know more, visit: https://t.co/sqRvRGJePp pic.twitter.com/qhYT2UqeLf — Viksit Bharat Abhiyan (@ViksitBharat) March 5, 2023

India is currently ranked #5 in economic development in the world, where the nominal GDP is approximately USD 4 Trillion. However, the Indian government is planning to secure the 3rd spot in economic development by surpassing Japan and Germany. 

On 3rd March 2024, the Prime Minister discussed the entire roadmap of this scheme with the Cabinet Ministers. Viksit Bharat is a result of over 2 years of intensive preparation. It involves a holistic approach where all the ministries are involved to achieve its prime objective: Make India Great.

The government strategised its planning by consulting its ministers, state governments, academic institutions, private organizations, and ordinary people to come up with innovative and sustained ideas for India’s growth.

Ans. The Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, has an ambition for India; that is to make India a ‘Developed Country’. The Leader has stated that every action of an Indian civilian should be done to make India a developed country; that is, Viksit Bharat. The formal launch of the Viksit Bharat Mission was a major milestone in India’s development. It is an opportunity for India to show its true potential and become a developed country by 2047, which will complete the 100 years of India’s independence. With the rapid development in major sectors of the economy, experts have predicted that this mission will be accomplished within its time limit. 

Ans. Individuals can visit the MyGov portal to participate in the Viksit Bharat scheme at https://www.mygov.in/.

Ans. On 11 December 2023, the Indian Prime Minister launched the Viksit Bharat @2047 scheme via a video conferencing platform. The four pillars of the Viksit Bharat scheme are Yuva (Youth), Garib (Poor), Mahila (Women) and Kisan (Framers). The immediate objectives of the Viksit Bharat scheme are economic growth and sustainable development goals, better standard of living, ease of doing business, infrastructure, social welfare, etc.

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Why Taiwan Was So Prepared for a Powerful Earthquake

Decades of learning from disasters, tightening building codes and increasing public awareness may have helped its people better weather strong quakes.

Search-and-rescue teams recover a body from a leaning building in Hualien, Taiwan. Thanks to improvements in building codes after past earthquakes, many structures withstood Wednesday’s quake. Credit...

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By Chris Buckley ,  Meaghan Tobin and Siyi Zhao

Photographs by Lam Yik Fei

Chris Buckley reported from the city of Hualien, Meaghan Tobin from Taipei, in Taiwan.

• April 4, 2024

When the largest earthquake in Taiwan in half a century struck off its east coast, the buildings in the closest city, Hualien, swayed and rocked. As more than 300 aftershocks rocked the island over the next 24 hours to Thursday morning, the buildings shook again and again.

But for the most part, they stood.

Even the two buildings that suffered the most damage remained largely intact, allowing residents to climb to safety out the windows of upper stories. One of them, the rounded, red brick Uranus Building, which leaned precariously after its first floors collapsed, was mostly drawing curious onlookers.

The building is a reminder of how much Taiwan has prepared for disasters like the magnitude-7.4 earthquake that jolted the island on Wednesday. Perhaps because of improvements in building codes, greater public awareness and highly trained search-and-rescue operations — and, likely, a dose of good luck — the casualty figures were relatively low. By Thursday, 10 people had died and more than 1,000 others were injured. Several dozen were missing.

“Similar level earthquakes in other societies have killed far more people,” said Daniel Aldrich , a director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University. Of Taiwan, he added: “And most of these deaths, it seems, have come from rock slides and boulders, rather than building collapses.”

Across the island, rail traffic had resumed by Thursday, including trains to Hualien. Workers who had been stuck in a rock quarry were lifted out by helicopter. Roads were slowly being repaired. Hundreds of people were stranded at a hotel near a national park because of a blocked road, but they were visited by rescuers and medics.

On Thursday in Hualien city, the area around the Uranus Building was sealed off, while construction workers tried to prevent the leaning structure from toppling completely. First they placed three-legged concrete blocks that resembled giant Lego pieces in front of the building, and then they piled dirt and rocks on top of those blocks with excavators.

“We came to see for ourselves how serious it was, why it has tilted,” said Chang Mei-chu, 66, a retiree who rode a scooter with her husband Lai Yung-chi, 72, to the building on Thursday. Mr. Lai said he was a retired builder who used to install power and water pipes in buildings, and so he knew about building standards. The couple’s apartment, near Hualien’s train station, had not been badly damaged, he said.

“I wasn’t worried about our building, because I know they paid attention to earthquake resistance when building it. I watched them pour the cement to make sure,” Mr. Lai said. “There have been improvements. After each earthquake, they raise the standards some more.”

It was possible to walk for city blocks without seeing clear signs of the powerful earthquake. Many buildings remained intact, some of them old and weather-worn; others modern, multistory concrete-and-glass structures. Shops were open, selling coffee, ice cream and betel nuts. Next to the Uranus Building, a popular night market with food stalls offering fried seafood, dumplings and sweets was up and running by Thursday evening.

Earthquakes are unavoidable in Taiwan, which sits on multiple active faults. Decades of work learning from other disasters, implementing strict building codes and increasing public awareness have gone into helping its people weather frequent strong quakes.

Not far from the Uranus Building, for example, officials had inspected a building with cracked pillars and concluded that it was dangerous to stay in. Residents were given 15 minutes to dash inside and retrieve as many belongings as they could. Some ran out with computers, while others threw bags of clothes out of windows onto the street, which was also still littered with broken glass and cement fragments from the quake.

One of its residents, Chen Ching-ming, a preacher at a church next door, said he thought the building might be torn down. He was able to salvage a TV and some bedding, which now sat on the sidewalk, and was preparing to go back in for more. “I’ll lose a lot of valuable things — a fridge, a microwave, a washing machine,” he said. “All gone.”

Requirements for earthquake resistance have been built into Taiwan’s building codes since 1974. In the decades since, the writers of Taiwan’s building code also applied lessons learned from other major earthquakes around the world, including in Mexico and Los Angeles, to strengthen Taiwan’s code.

After more than 2,400 people were killed and at least 10,000 others injured during the Chi-Chi quake of 1999, thousands of buildings built before the quake were reviewed and reinforced. After another strong quake in 2018 in Hualien, the government ordered a new round of building inspections. Since then, multiple updates to the building code have been released.

“We have retrofitted more than 10,000 school buildings in the last 20 years,” said Chung-Che Chou, the director general of the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering in Taipei.

The government had also helped reinforce private apartment buildings over the past six years by adding new steel braces and increasing column and beam sizes, Dr. Chou said. Not far from the buildings that partially collapsed in Hualien, some of the older buildings that had been retrofitted in this way survived Wednesday’s quake, he said.

The result of all this is that even Taiwan’s tallest skyscrapers can withstand regular seismic jolts. The capital city’s most iconic building, Taipei 101, once the tallest building in the world, was engineered to stand through typhoon winds and frequent quakes. Still, some experts say that more needs to be done to either strengthen or demolish structures that don’t meet standards, and such calls have grown louder in the wake of the latest earthquake.

Taiwan has another major reason to protect its infrastructure: It is home to the majority of production for the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest maker of advanced computer chips. The supply chain for electronics from smartphones to cars to fighter jets rests on the output of TSMC’s factories, which make these chips in facilities that cost billions of dollars to build.

The 1999 quake also prompted TSMC to take extra steps to insulate its factories from earthquake damage. The company made major structural adjustments and adopted new technologies like early warning systems. When another large quake struck the southern city of Kaohsiung in February 2016, TSMC’s two nearby factories survived without structural damage.

Taiwan has made strides in its response to disasters, experts say. In the first 24 hours after the quake, rescuers freed hundreds of people who were trapped in cars in between rockfalls on the highway and stranded on mountain ledges in rock quarries.

“After years of hard work on capacity building, the overall performance of the island has improved significantly,” said Bruce Wong, an emergency management consultant in Hong Kong. Taiwan’s rescue teams have come to specialize in complex efforts, he said, and it has also been able to tap the skills of trained volunteers.

Taiwan’s resilience also stems from a strong civil society that is involved in public preparedness for disasters.

Ou Chi-hu, a member of a group of Taiwanese military veterans, was helping distribute water and other supplies at a school that was serving as a shelter for displaced residents in Hualien. He said that people had learned from the 1999 earthquake how to be more prepared.

“They know to shelter in a corner of the room or somewhere else safer,” he said. Many residents also keep a bag of essentials next to their beds, and own fire extinguishers, he added.

Around him, a dozen or so other charities and groups were offering residents food, money, counseling and childcare. The Tzu Chi Foundation, a large Taiwanese Buddhist charity, provided tents for families to use inside the school hall so they could have more privacy. Huang Yu-chi, a disaster relief manager with the foundation, said nonprofits had learned from earlier disasters.

“Now we’re more systematic and have a better idea of disaster prevention,” Mr. Huang said.

Mike Ives contributed reporting from Seoul.

Chris Buckley , the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues. More about Chris Buckley

Meaghan Tobin is a technology correspondent for The Times based in Taipei, covering business and tech stories in Asia with a focus on China. More about Meaghan Tobin

Siyi Zhao is a reporter and researcher who covers news in mainland China for The Times in Seoul. More about Siyi Zhao

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U.S. Department of the Treasury

Remarks by secretary of the treasury janet l. yellen ahead of meeting with beijing university national school of development students.

As Prepared for Delivery

Thank you for welcoming me to your campus today.

It is exciting to be among the bright minds of China’s next generation of economists and policymakers.

As I shared with your professors when I met with them earlier today, I began my career as a professor of economics. Throughout my time in academia, I greatly valued frequent exchanges with my fellow faculty members. And I equally enjoyed teaching and learning from students.

This approach of considering new ideas—and constantly testing my own assumptions—has greatly benefited me as I became a policymaker and government official focused on taking a pragmatic approach to difficult problems. I encourage you to carry that spirit forward as you progress in your own careers.

This is why I came to Peking University today.

Over the past year two years, the United States and China have been focused on strengthening communication, including deepening our understanding of each other’s economic policies. This is key to building a healthy U.S.-China economic relationship that brings benefits to workers and firms in both our countries.

And I’ve deepened my understanding not just through discussions with senior government officials, but through discussions with businesses and academics, such as with your professors earlier, who are leaders in their fields.

And now I get the chance to hear from you and the next generation of Chinese economic leaders that you represent.

I have been told that the National School of Development is one of the best places to study public policy and economics.

I encourage you to make the most of your time here.

And as I tell students at home in the United States, you have a tremendous amount to contribute. You bring fresh new perspectives grounded in your own academic work and life experiences. It’s your ideas that will one day help shape your country’s future.

Thank you again for welcoming me to your campus.

• Vehicle Technologies Office
• About the Vehicle Technologies Office
• Technology Areas
• Technology Integration
• Reports and Publications

Office: Vehicle Technologies Office FOA number:  DE-FOA-0003248 Link to apply:  Apply on EERE Exchange FOA Amount: $45,800,000

Today, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced $45.8 million in new funding for projects that will advance research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) critical to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. The funding will drive innovation in equitable clean transportation and is aligned with strategies detailed in the U.S. National Blueprint for Transportation Decarbonization . 

The funding is through DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). Topic areas in the Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 R&D funding opportunity include:

• Next-generation phosphate-based cathodes.
• Advancing the state of the art for sodium-ion batteries.
• Developing concepts for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions from off-road vehicles such as construction, agriculture, mining, and forestry vehicles.
• Developing and deploying vehicle-to-everything technologies that can lead to meaningful savings at the vehicle and transportation system level.
• Developing high-performance, domestically produced electrical steels (E-steels) for use in electrified powertrains.
• Addressing critical cybersecurity needs for smart and secure electric vehicle charging.

As part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to ensuring the benefits of a clean transportation system are shared equally, the funding seeks the participation of underserved communities and underrepresented groups. Applicants are required to describe how diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives will be incorporated into their project. 

VTO provides a series of funding opportunity announcement (FOA) information session videos , which help applicants understand VTO’s FOA process and requirements. The recently released, Session 3: Tips for a Strong FOA Application, includes best practices for incorporating Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in a project.

Learn more about this and other funding opportunities on VTO’s funding webpage . 

Topic Areas

Topic Area 1: Next-Generation Phosphate-Based Cathodes

This topic area targets the development of phosphate-based cathode materials that surpass the performance of state-of-the-art lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathode materials, which are currently gaining traction as an alternative low-cost solution. The primary objective of this area of interest is to develop high energy density battery cells containing phosphate-based cathodes at the material and cell level.

Topic Area 2: Na-ion Battery Seedling Projects for Electric Vehicle Applications

While shifting to alternative cathode materials like LFP can alleviate the impact of nickel and cobalt, the impact of lithium has not been adequately addressed. One alternative to lithium is sodium (Na). While there is much promise for Na-ion chemistries, key issues still limit their adoption. This objective of this topic area is to advance the state of the art for Na-ion batteries by solving key challenges for the cathode, anode, or electrolyte through the development of 1 Ah full cells utilizing cell chemistries that are significant advancements over current industry state-of-the-art Na-ion technology.

Topic Area 3: Low-GHG Concepts for Off-Road Vehicles

The objective of this topic area is to develop and validate technology concepts capable of significantly decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, harmful criteria emissions, and total cost of ownership across the entire off-road vehicle sector, including construction, agriculture, mining, forestry, ports, warehouses, etc. Concepts must demonstrate they can meet the unique requirements for off-road vehicles and gain customer acceptance.

Topic Area 4: Saving Energy with Connectivity

Research has shown that vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications can lead to meaningful energy savings at the vehicle and transportation system level by integrating interoperable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communications. The objective of this topic area is to develop and deploy V2X technologies with a focus on the efficiency and convenience of the mobility ecosystem, while reducing transportation’s environmental impacts. Examples could include but are not limited to eco-driving along connected corridors, transit or freight priority, integrated corridor management, or passenger or freight trip-chaining optimization.

Topic Area 5: Domestically Produced Electrical Steels (E-Steels)

The US transportation sector is in a technology revolution where light-duty vehicles are rapidly transitioning from internal combustion engines to electrified powertrains. Although most of the vehicles are produced in the US, many of the powertrain components rely on imports and foreign supply chains. Of particular interest are traction motors and their components. The objective of this topic are is to develop E-Steels meeting properties including frequency, thickness, ductility, cost, and manufacturability. 

Topic Area 6: Cybersecurity for Smart and Secure Electric Vehicle Charging

This topic area is addressing critical cybersecurity needs to address through two subtopics: 

• Subtopic 6.a: Enabling Wide-scale, Cybersecure EV/EVSE Aggregation for Grid Services :  To support the integration of electric vehicles (EVs) and their charging requirements with the electric grid, both government and the private sector have made significant investments in the development of smart charge management (SCM) systems and technologies for EV charging infrastructure. The objective of this subtopic area is to research, develop, and demonstrate systems, technologies, and tools necessary for the cybersecure aggregation of EVs and charging infrastructure to provide widescale, cybersecure grid services.
• Subtopic 6.b: Tools to Assess EV/EVSE/Charging System Cybersecurity Posture and Compliance with Standards and Protocols for Communications, Controls, and Monitoring :   Testing and evaluation of Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) by DOE national laboratories has clearly indicated a lack of compliance by many vendors with certified and/or regulated EV charging standards and protocols. In addition to creating cybersecurity vulnerabilities, this non-compliance greatly inhibits interoperability, supplier-managed SCM, and right-to-repair. The objective of this subtopic is to research, develop, and validate a suite of tools and associated procedures to comprehensively assess EV/EVSE/charging system compliance with relevant standards and protocols and cybersecurity posture.

Additional Information

• Download the full funding opportunity  on the EERE Exchange website.
• For FOA-specific support, contact  [email protected] . 
• Sign up for the  Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) funding email list  to get notified of new EERE funding opportunities. Also sign up for  VTO’s newsletter to stay current with the latest news.
• Watch the VTO Funding Opportunity Announcement information series webinars.

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AT&T says a data breach leaked millions of customers’ information online. Were you affected?

FILE - The sign in front of an AT&T retail store is seen in Miami, July 18, 2019. The theft of sensitive information belonging to millions of AT&T’s current and former customers has been recently discovered online, the telecommunications giant said Saturday, March 30, 2024. In an announcement addressing the data breach, AT&T said that a dataset found on the dark web contains information including some Social Security numbers and passcodes for about 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — The theft of sensitive information belonging to millions of AT&T’s current and former customers has been recently discovered online, the telecommunications giant said this weekend.

In a Saturday announcement addressing the data breach, AT&T said that a dataset found on the “dark web” contains information including some Social Security numbers and passcodes for about 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.

Whether the data “originated from AT&T or one of its vendors” is still unknown, the Dallas-based company noted — adding that it had launched an investigation into the incident. AT&T has also begun notifying customers whose personal information was compromised.

Here’s what you need to know.

WHAT INFORMATION WAS COMPROMISED IN THIS BREACH?

Although varying by each customer and account, AT&T says that information involved in this breach included Social Security numbers and passcodes — which, unlike passwords, are numerical PINS that are typically four digits long.

Full names, email addresses, mailing address, phone numbers, dates of birth and AT&T account numbers may have also been compromised. The impacted data is from 2019 or earlier and does not appear to include financial information or call history, the company said.

HOW DO I KNOW IF I WAS AFFECTED?

Consumers impacted by this breach should be receiving an email or letter directly from AT&T about the incident. The email notices began going out on Saturday, an AT&T spokesperson confirmed to The Associated Press.

WHAT ACTION HAS AT&T TAKEN?

Beyond these notifications, AT&T said that it had already reset the passcodes of current users. The company added that it would pay for credit monitoring services where applicable.

AT&T also said that it “launched a robust investigation” with internal and external cybersecurity experts to investigate the situation further.

HAS AT&T SEEN DATA BREACHES LIKE THIS BEFORE?

AT&T has seen several data breaches that range in size and impact over the years .

While the company says the data in this latest breach surfaced on a hacking forum nearly two weeks ago, it closely resembles a similar breach that surfaced in 2021 but which AT&T never acknowledged, cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt told the AP Saturday.

“If they assess this and they made the wrong call on it, and we’ve had a course of years pass without them being able to notify impacted customers,” then it’s likely the company will soon face class action lawsuits, said Hunt, founder of an Australia-based website that warns people when their personal information has been exposed.

A spokesperson for AT&T declined to comment further when asked about these similarities Sunday.

HOW CAN I PROTECT MYSELF GOING FORWARD?

Avoiding data breaches entirely can be tricky in our ever-digitized world, but consumers can take some steps to help protect themselves going forward.

The basics include creating hard-to-guess passwords and using multifactor authentication when possible. If you receive a notice about a breach, it’s good idea to change your password and monitor account activity for any suspicious transactions. You’ll also want to visit a company’s official website for reliable contact information — as scammers sometimes try to take advantage of news like data breaches to gain your trust through look-alike phishing emails or phone calls.

In addition, the Federal Trade Commission notes that nationwide credit bureaus — such as Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — offer free credit freezes and fraud alerts that consumers can set up to help protect themselves from identity theft and other malicious activity.

AP Reporter Matt O’Brien contributed to this report from Providence, Rhode Island.