Category: Elementary Education

Posted on

Explainer: What do child prodigies have in common with kids with autism?

Joanne Ruthsatz, The Ohio State University

As a toddler growing up in the 1950s, Richard Wawro threw violent tantrums. Often, he would tap the same piano key for long stretches of time.

When he was three, his parents took him for testing at a nearby hospital. They were told that he was moderately to severely retarded. His family, however, never believed that his IQ was as low as the experts claimed.

A special education teacher began working with Richard when he was six. She introduced him to drawing with crayons, which he took to quickly.

He began filling sketchbooks (and the wallpaper of his Scotland home) with startlingly accurate depictions of cartoon characters like Yogi Bear. When Richard was 12, his artwork astounded a visiting artist who said that his drawings were created “with the precision of a mechanic and the vision of a poet.”

Richard could never read or write well. His speech remained limited. But his involvement with the art world spurred his social development. He participated in dozens of exhibitions and became a well-known artist. His artwork was celebrated by the media and in a documentary, “With Eyes Wide Open.” Both Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II owned Wawro’s originals.

Richard was a savant, an individual with a spike in a particular ability combined with an impairment or disability. In Richard’s case, that underlying condition was autism. Autism is a condition characterized by social and communication challenges, like difficulty making eye contact or making conversation, along with repetitive behaviors or intense interests.

It turns out that many savants have autism. In a 2015 paper, the savant expert Darold Treffert reported that among the congenital savants in his registry, 75 percent had an autism spectrum disorder, a term used to describe a group of disorders with variable symptoms and severity.

Exceptional memory and autism

Not every autistic individual has extraordinary talents.

In fact, autism can be accompanied by serious challenges that last a lifetime (as was also the case for Wawro, whose family handled his daily living needs until he died at age 53).

But when the astounding abilities are there, they are often rooted in extreme memory, excellent attention to detail and passionate interests – traits also linked to autism.

Many autistic kids show exceptional abilities.Valary, CC BY-NC-ND

My work has been with child prodigies, those astounding individuals who perform at an adult-professional level in a demanding field before adolescence.

In many ways, prodigies look a lot like savants. They have the same preternatural abilities. They have the same prolific output.

But there’s a key difference between the two. While in savants, these extreme abilities are paired with an underlying impairment or disability, prodigies don’t typically have any such disability.

Still, as I recount in my new book, The Prodigy’s Cousin, I have found the overlap between prodigy and autism to be striking. Even though prodigies are not typically autistic, they have the same excellent memories, extreme attention to detail, and passionate interests linked to autism and autistic savants.

The prodigies’ excellent memories were almost immediately apparent. When I investigated nine prodigies across two studies, each one scored in the 99th percentile for this ability. When this group was expanded to 18 prodigies in a 2014 study, the prodigies’ average working memory score was 140 – north of the 95th percentile.

Early work on autism

Reports linking extreme memory and autism date back to the first published reports of Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, the two scientists credited with identifying autism as an independent condition in the 1940s.

In his landmark 1943 study, Kanner remarked upon his subjects’ “excellent memory for events of several years before, the phenomenal rote memory for poems and names, and the precise recollection of complex patterns and sequences.”

Memory in autistic kids is complex. mimitalks, married, under grace, CC BY-NC-ND

He included a report of a boy, Donald T., with “an unusual memory for faces and names,” who had memorized “an inordinate number of pictures in a set of Compton’s Encyclopedia.” Another, Charles N., could distinguish between 18 symphonies at age one-and-a-half.

Since Kanner’s time, scientists have found that memory in autism is complex. But in a 2015 study, a team of researchers found that more than half of their 200 autistic subjects had notable memories. Treffert has described excellent memory as “integral” for savants in particular.

Prodigies and autism

As part of my 2012 study, the child prodigies I worked with were given the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, a self-administered test designed to measure autistic traits. On attention to detail, they outscored not only the controls, but also those with an autism spectrum disorder.

Attention to detail is another strength associated with autism. Some have described excellent attention to detail as “a universal feature of the autistic brain.” In 2006, the prominent autism researchers Francesca Happé and Uta Frith concluded that there was strong evidence that autism was associated with superiority on “tasks requiring detail-focused processing.”

Child prodigies are also exceptionally passionate about their area of expertise.

Such passionate interests are closely associated with autism. They are even part of autism’s diagnostic criteria.

This trait has been observed since the early days of autism research. Kanner’s 1943 paper includes a description of Alfred L., a child whose mother noted his tendency toward intense interests. As she put it:

He talks of little else while the interest exists, he frets when he is not able to indulge in it (by seeing it, coming in contact with it, drawing pictures of it), and it is difficult to get his attention because of his preoccupation.

This sort of passion can result in prolific output, as it did for Richard Wawro, who created at least 2,453 pictures in his lifetime.

Why do prodigies have autistic relatives?

The link between prodigy and autism could be even deeper than we think.

Researchers have found that child prodigies often have an autistic relative. hepingting, CC BY-SA

In addition to drawing from a similar well of cognitive abilities, there appears to be a family link between prodigy and autism. In a study I conducted in 2012, more than half of the prodigies investigated had a close autistic relative. In one instance, a prodigy had five autistic relatives.

Another study I conducted with colleagues at The Ohio State University suggests that prodigies and their autistic relatives may even share a genetic link. We found evidence that the prodigies and their autistic relatives both had a mutation on chromosome one not shared by their non-prodigious, non-autistic relatives.

The same traits that are celebrated in prodigies – like their excellent attention to detail and the passionate interests – are often recognized as strengths in the context of autism, too, though sometimes families report that the extreme nature of autistic interests can take a toll on family life.

This is a real challenge, as are other aspects of autism. Figuring out the best way to support those with autism and their families is essential.

But let’s remember the strengths of autism as well as the challenges.

Kimberly Stephens, coauthor of The Prodigy’s Cousin, contributed to this piece.

The Conversation

Joanne Ruthsatz, Assistant Professor of Psychology, The Ohio State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Posted on

When do children learn to write? Earlier than you might think

Rebecca Treiman, Washington University in St Louis and Lori Markson, Washington University in St Louis

We typically think of writing as something that is out of reach for preschool children. After all, young children can’t write recognizable letters, and they can’t spell words.

We have been studying young children’s knowledge about writing in our research. And we are finding that they know more about writing – even before they learn to read – than one might think.

Writing is smaller than drawing

Consider this production by a two-and-a-half-year-old American child, Sophia:

Sophia’s drawing.
WUSTL Photo / Courtesy of Rebecca Treiman, CC BY

Sophia identified the large circular portion on the right as a drawing of a circle. She said that the portion with small squiggles on the bottom and near the left was writing. Sophia’s writing did not use recognizable letters, nor was she spelling any specific word.

However, she seemed to know that writing is generally smaller than drawing and that writing is arranged along a line.

Research has supported what the example from Sophia suggests – that children as young as two or three years of age already know about some of the basic differences in appearance between writing and pictures. They try to reproduce these differences in their own attempts to write and draw.

Children know from early on that writing is arranged along a line. WUSTL Photo/Courtesy of Rebecca Treiman, CC BY

Consider a study in which Chinese children were asked to write several words, such as “sun,” and also to draw pictures of those same things. Two- and three-year-old children’s attempts to write characters were far off the mark, bearing little resemblance to the correct characters.

However, children’s writings tended to be smaller than their drawings. The writings were also less curvy and more angular, angularity being a property of characters in Chinese.

Not only did children make different sorts of marks when writing than when drawing, they also chose different implements to do so. Specifically, children would often choose dark pens or pencils to write and colored crayons to draw.

Children know the difference between writing and drawing. WUSTL Photo/Courtesy of Rebecca Treiman, CC BY

In another part of this study, adults were shown the productions that the children had made. They were told that some of them were produced in response to a request to write and that others were produced in response to a request to draw. The adults were not told which was which, and their job was to guess.

The adults found the task to be difficult, which is not surprising. However, they performed better than would be expected by random guessing even with the productions of two- and three-year-old children.

Clearly, children were doing something different when writing than when drawing – different enough that adults could even detect some of the differences.

Drawings can have different labels, words remain same

Young children may know that writing generally looks different from writing, but the next question is: do they have any understanding that it functions differently?

One important property of writing is that it represents a specific word in a specific language. The written word “rabbit,” for example, stands for the spoken word “rabbit.” It would not be appropriate to read this word as “bunny.”

In contrast, we can look at a picture of a rabbit and say that it is a rabbit or a bunny or an animal – any one of these labels, or others, would be considered correct.

In a recent study, we examined children’s knowledge of this important difference between writing and drawing. The children in the study ranged from three to five years old, and they were not able to read words themselves. A researcher would show a child a written word such as the word rabbit and would read it to the child.

Later, when a puppet employed in the experiment read the word as “bunny,” many children picked up the mistake. In a similar task with drawings, children were more likely to say that the puppet was correct in using the alternative label.

Children know that writing and drawing function in different ways. Donnie Ray Jones, CC BY

The different results in the writing and drawing tasks suggest that young children have some understanding that a written word stands for one specific unit of language in a way that a drawing does not.

They are beginning to understand that, while a written word should be read the same way each time, it is sometimes appropriate to use different labels for a drawing. Importantly, children begin to acquire this understanding even before they can sound out words themselves.

Encouraging children to write

Parents and teachers sometimes dismiss children’s early productions as scribbles – signs of a lack of knowledge about how to write and how to draw.

Reading activities are common in preschools, and parents appreciate the importance of reading to their young children. The value of writing is less widely appreciated. Reading activities are more common than writing activities in preschools. And parents too tend to give more importance to reading. Preschool writing activities may be limited to having children write their names.

The research we have reviewed, together with other findings, shows that children begin to learn about some of the visible distinctions between writing and drawing from an early age. Our research shows that from a surprisingly young age, children have some knowledge about what writing looks like and how it functions. That is, young children know more about writing than we might think. There is more to their scribbles than meets the eye.

Preschool teachers and parents can build on the knowledge that children have. If we know what to look for, we can acknowledge what children already know, for example by saying, “You did a good job of writing on a line here.” This can help children advance to the next step.

The Conversation

Rebecca Treiman, Burke and Elizabeth High Baker Professor of Child Developmental Psychology, Washington University in St Louis and Lori Markson, Associate Professor of Psychology, Washington University in St Louis

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Posted on

Stressed out: the psychological effects of tests on primary school children

Laura Nicholson, Edge Hill University

Some parents are so angry with the testing regime facing their children that they have come together in an attempt to boycott primary school exams. Preparation by teachers for these standardised achievement tests (SATs) in England have involved a narrowing of the curriculum, including a specific focus on spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Parents believe that their children should be stimulated instead by more enriching activities and projects. There is also a worry that the tests may cause undue stress and pressure on their young children to perform well. These beliefs are widespread: more than 49,000 parents have signed a petition to abolish SATs altogether.

An awareness of pressure

Teachers are under considerable pressure for pupils to perform well on SATs. Performance-related pay and position in school league tables depend on test results. Parents believe that exam results will have a bearing on their young child’s future and understandably want them to do well.

But the children are also well-aware that their performance on the SATs is important to their teachers and parents. Teachers may unwittingly transmit the stress they are under to their pupils. Children can also pick up on their parents’ attitudes and associated behaviour and feel under pressure to make them proud.

Too much, too young? Shuravaya/www.shutterstock.com

This pressure from parents is perhaps the largest source of stress for children aged ten to 11 who are working towards their Key Stage 2 exams. One Year 6 pupil my colleagues and I interviewed described the source of the pressure he felt:

You want to get them [SATS questions] right because other people want you to get them right and, like, you don’t want to disappoint people.

Test anxiety

Stress and pressure about forthcoming exams can result in what education researchers have termed “test anxiety”. This can present itself via a number of symptoms.

Children can suffer from negative thoughts such as: “If I don’t pass this test, I will never get a good job”. They can also suffer physiological symptoms such as tight muscles or trembling and distracting behaviours such as playing with a pencil. The effects of anxiety during a test can influence the child’s ability to process and understand test questions and perform at their best.

It is well established that pupils with high levels of test anxiety perform more poorly in their exams. The overall prevalence of test anxiety in primary school children is on the increase and it is fairly common for children at the end of primary school. Year 6 pupils report experiencing anxiety either some or most of the time when asked two weeks prior to their exams.

But there are differences in how SATs are viewed by different children. Some perceive them to be stressful, while others view them as a challenge. As well as pressure from parents, pupils in Year 6 have cited the demands of the testing situation as a cause of stress. This includes completing exams under timed conditions and having no contact with classmates or teachers. There are also concerns about exam results being used to influence which set a child will be put in at secondary school. Another Year 6 pupil my colleagues and I interviewed said:

You look at your booklet and you’ve got like loads of questions left and you’re like, ‘I can’t do this’. You just want to just sit there and go ‘I can’t do this’ and walk off.

The extent to which children aged six to seven, working towards Key Stage 1 exams, feel test-anxious, is unclear. Very little research has been conducted exclusively with them. Some younger children, however, have been found to display clear signs of anxiety or stress during the period leading up to the SATs.

Reducing the pressure

How resilient a child is can reduce the negative effects of test anxiety on performance. Specifically, children who believe they can succeed, trust and seek comfort from others easily and who are not overly sensitive, can be better at combatting the problems associated with test anxiety. Parents may therefore help their children by attempting to nurture and boost their resilience.

Keeping SATs “low-key” is crucial to minimising anxiety and stress among children. Parents should reassure their children that results are not critical and that the most important thing is that they try their best. In the classroom, teachers should direct time and effort towards familiarising children to the format and procedures involved in standardised testing. For instance, practising with past test papers while children sit at individual desks, could help.

Both parents and teachers could also keep a conscious check of how they may subconsciously transmit feelings of stress or tension to young children. Pupils who display signs of test anxiety require more space and understanding, both at school and home – this includes increased tolerance during the testing period.

These strategies may go some way to reducing the pressure of tests on young children. It is essential that schools and teachers take the time to focus on the social, emotional and mental health and development of children.

The Conversation

Laura Nicholson, Researcher, Faculty of Education and Associate Tutor, Department of Psychology, Edge Hill University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Posted on

How do children learn to detect snakes, spiders and other dangerous things?

Vanessa LoBue, Rutgers University Newark

As summer approaches, children will be spending less time in the classroom and more time navigating the outside world. Outdoor activities are a fun and exciting part of summertime, but they can also filled with natural (and unnatural) dangers, like fast-moving cars, steep cliffs, crashing waves and even the occasional bear.

Despite these daily hazards, most kids make it to the end of the day unscathed, other than the occasional scraped knee.

Research shows children have an ability to detect threat quickly. How are perceptions of what’s safe and what’s threatening in the outside world shaped from an early age?

Detecting natural threats

Because detecting threat would have been advantageous for human survival, researchers have theorized that humans have a predisposition to detect certain kinds of natural threats very quickly. These threats would consist of things like snakes and spiders, or animals that would have threatened the reproduction of our ancient human ancestors.

Consistent with this theory, psychologists have found that when presented with photographs of threatening images like snakes and spiders and nonthreatening images like flowers and mushrooms, adults are quicker to identify the threatening than the nonthreatening images.

In my own lab, we study how children and babies – who lack significant experience with snakes and spiders – respond to these creepy-crawlies.

In one study, we presented three-year-olds and adults with a series of nine pictures arranged in a 3-by-3 matrix on a touchscreen. One of the pictures was always the target, and the other eight were distractors.

Children detect threatening things such as spiders more quickly. Anthony Easton, CC BY

When the targets were snakes and spiders, children and adults were much faster at finding them than when the targets were flowers, mushrooms, frogs, caterpillars or even cockroaches.

We found similar results when we tested babies using a simplified version of the task: After presenting 9- to 12-month-olds with two images at once – one snake and one flower – we found that the babies turned their heads more quickly to look at snakes than at flowers.

This finding extends to animals as well. Research from a lab in Japan reported that even monkeys detect snakes more quickly than flowers.

Learning to detect threat

At first blush, it seems as though my research supports the idea that humans have an evolved predisposition to detect natural threats very quickly.

However, further research has shown that adults quickly detect a variety of unnatural threats as well, threats like guns, needles and knives.

Since these man-made threats weren’t around when humans were evolving, the evolutionary theory can’t explain why we detect these things so quickly as well. The fact that we do suggests that rapid threat detection of dangerous objects can be learned.

Several lines of research support this idea. My own work has shown that although preschool-aged children detect needles very quickly (more quickly than pens), they do not detect knives particularly quickly (when compared to spoons).

Experience with injections makes children fearful of them.PROAlex Proimos, CC BY-NC

Importantly, these results seem to be related to negative experience with the objects: While the children had a great deal of experience with inoculations, they were not allowed to handle knives at home and had never been cut by one. Thus, children might have learned to detect needles (but not knives) very quickly via the negative experience of an injection.

Similarly, research with adults from another lab has shown that after being conditioned to associate the occurrence of an unpleasant electric shock with nonthreatening animals like dogs, birds or fish, the adults learned to detect these animals very quickly – just as quickly as they detected snakes and spiders.

Together, this research suggests that although learning might not be involved in the detection of snakes and spiders, humans can easily learn to detect a variety of threats very quickly as well – that is, after they learn that they are indeed threatening.

One final factor that leads us to detect threatening objects very quickly is emotion – either our emotional state, or our propensity to behave emotionally (as dictated by our personalities).

For example, in another study, I found that adults who watched a scary movie clip were faster to detect anything – even a very simple shape – faster than adults who watched a neutral clip.

Further, individuals who have a specific phobia detect the object of that phobia faster than nonphobic adults. Similarly, both adults and children with social anxiety detect social signals of threat (like an angry face) more quickly than their nonanxious counterparts.

Human threat detectors

This body of research demonstrates that humans can acquire a propensity to detect various kinds of threats through different mechanisms. An ability to detect natural threats like snakes and spiders is developed early. The detection of unnatural threats is learned through negative experience. Finally, we can detect any object (threatening or not) very quickly given a fearful or anxious state of mind.

Together, this flexibility in responding quickly to whatever happens to threaten us makes humans (even very young children) highly effective threat detectors.

This ability is important, as it gives us the freedom to explore potentially new and scary things, while at the same time alerting us when something in the environment might be worth keeping an eye on.

The Conversation

Vanessa LoBue, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Rutgers University Newark

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Posted on

Why schools should provide one laptop per child

Binbin Zheng, Michigan State University and Mark Warschauer, University of California, Irvine

A recent international study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found no positive evidence of impact of educational technology on student performance.

It did not find any significant improvement in reading, math or science in countries that heavily invested in technology to improve student achievement. In fact, the report found that technology perhaps even widened the achievement gaps.

Does this mean we should abandon attempts to integrate technology in schools?

We are researchers of technology and learning in K-12 environments, and our research suggests this would be shortsighted.

Impact of one-to-one laptop programs

For the last 10 years, our research team has been investigating what are called “one-to-one” programs, where all the students in a classroom, grade, school or district are provided laptop computers for use throughout the school day, and often at home, in different school districts across the United States.

The largest one-to-one laptop program in the world is OLPC (One Laptop per Child), which mainly targets developing countries, with the mission “to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children.” In the United States, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) launched a one-to-one laptop initiative in fall 2002, which made Maine the first state to use technology to transform teaching and learning in classrooms statewide. Later, these programs were extended to other school districts as well.

In addition to our own extensive observations, we conducted a synthesis of the results of 96 published global studies on these programs in K-12 schools during 2001-2015. Among them, 10 rigorously designed studies, mostly from the U.S., were included, to examine the relationship between these programs and academic achievement. We found significant benefits.

We found students’ test scores in science, writing, math and English language arts improved significantly.

And the benefits were not limited to test scores.

Laptop use led to significant benefits for students.Tim & Selena Middleton, CC BY

We found students with laptops wrote more frequently across a wider variety of genres. They also received more feedback on their writing. In addition, we found they edited and revised their papers more often, drew on a wider range of resources to write, and published or shared their work with others more often.

Student surveys, teacher interviews and classroom observations in these studies revealed that students with access to laptops worked more autonomously and gained experience in project-based learning. This allowed them to synthesize and critically apply knowledge.

For example, researcher Chrystalla Mouza found that elementary school students with access to laptops were able to create electronic storybooks and publish reports in language arts classrooms.

One-to-one laptop programs also enhanced students’ 21st-century skills – skills needed in an information age – such as the ability to locate and use internet resources. Students also improved their collaborative learning skills – that is, they were more capable of working collaboratively with others.

Research led by Deborah L. Lowther at University of Memphis found that when students were given a problem and related answer to consider, students with laptops exhibited higher problem-solving skills than those in the comparison group.

A closer look at the OECD report also reveals that students in the United States performed particularly well on technology-based tasks such as online navigation, digital reading and using computers to solve math problems.

Can laptop use reduce educational gap?

However, our study did not find firm evidence on whether these one-to-one laptop programs helped lessen the academic gap between academically advantaged and disadvantaged students.

Earlier studies have found that laptop programs could help shorten the achievement gap between low-income students and their peers. We did not find such positive evidence in all programs.

One possible explanation is that difficulty in using technology sometimes places an extra load on already challenged students. In contrast, wealthier students are usually more tech-savvy so they can maximize the benefits of using computers to support learning.

Not all laptop programs are effective

One issue here is that not all programs are successful. In our study, although most programs were successful, there were some stark failures as well.

These tended to be in school districts that treated computers like magical devices that would solve educational problems merely through their distribution, without sufficient planning on how they could best be deployed to improve learning.

Some schools phased out their laptop program. Mere access to a computer does not improve learning. Schoolchildren image via www.shutterstock.com

Some of these schools, after observing no progress with laptops, decided to phase them out. For example, Liverpool Central School District, a public school district in a suburban community near Syracuse, New York, decided to drop the laptop program from fall 2007.

A school district in Philadelphia had to abandon its program after being sued over its use of laptop webcams to capture pictures of students at home. The district claimed it was an effort to track down missing laptops.

For schools and classrooms that are already poorly organized, merely having access to a computer connected to the internet will not improve learning. However, for classrooms that focus on improving students’ writing, analysis, research, problem solving and critical thinking, those same internet-connected computers could be invaluable tools.

Technology to train future citizens

Perhaps we could learn a lesson from the business world. When computers were first introduced into corporations, it took a number of years to increase productivity.
Today it is hard to imagine any field of commerce or knowledge production succeeding while shunning computers.

Well-organized programs that make individual computers available to students are already getting excellent test score results. Such programs are critical for helping students develop necessary skills for the future. These programs deserve our support.

The Conversation

Binbin Zheng, Assistant Professor, Michigan State University and Mark Warschauer, Professor of Education and Informatics, University of California, Irvine

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Posted on

Reading to your child: the difference it makes

Peggy Albers, Georgia State University

If you are a parent or a teacher, you most probably read stories to young children. Together, you laugh and point at the pictures. You engage them with a few simple questions. And they respond.

So what happens to children when they participate in shared reading? Does it make a difference to their learning? If so, what aspects of their learning are affected?

Shared reading for language development

British researcher Don Holdaway was the first to point out the benefits of shared reading. He noted that children found these moments to be some of their happiest. He also found that children developed positive and strong associations with spoken language and the physical book itself, during these moments.

Since then a number of studies have been conducted showing the value of shared reading in children’s language development, especially in vocabulary and concept development.

Early childhood researcher Vivian Paley, for example, during her work in the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, found that kindergarten children learned when a story was dramatized in shared reading. Not only did children develop oral language, they imaginatively learned the conventions of a story, such as character, plot and themes. In shared storytelling, children also learned how to use language in multiple ways.

Other research found that shared reading was related to the development of expressive vocabulary. That is, children developed listening skills and built an understanding of grammar as well as vocabulary in the context of the story.

Connecting words to emotions

As a language and literacy researcher, I work with teachers to develop reading strategies that develop children’s interest in reading and help them think critically. Kay Cowan, an early childhood researcher who studies the role of the arts in language learning, and I conducted two studies to understand children’s language development in grades one to five.

Grade 5 child generates vocabulary through shared reading. Kay Cowan, CC BY

We worked with approximately 75 children across grade levels. We began our language study by talking with the students about the power of words, and the role they play in and outside of school. Following this, we discussed the pleasures associated with words. We then read “Shadow,” an award-winning picture book by children’s author Marcia Brown, and poems by Shel Silverstein, another children’s author.

Children were then asked to think of an “absolutely wonderful” event that they had experienced, and associate an emotion with it. Children chose a personal event that elicited emotions. They then drew contrasting images of the word that showed opposite emotions, and studied synonyms and antonyms to understand the “shades of meaning.” They then wrote descriptive poetry to convey this emotion.

All children – even those who were at the risk of failing – used vivid language. Children described words like “ebullient” and “melancholy” in ways that related to their own emotion.

One child described her word “ebullient” as “bright,” and “merry,” and “never asking for anything.” “Ebullient” was also “warm,” and “gypsy-like,” and so on. Another described loneliness as “…making me feel cold/Like an icicle/wanting to melt away.”

Following this exercise, children noticed that their writing was much better. It showed us how wide and varied reading, repetition and varied encounters with words were extremely important for children to have a depth of understanding as well as verbal flexibility – being able to express the meaning of word in different ways.

Why home matters

The quality of exchanges between children and adults during shared reading is found to be critical to their language development. So, the role of home in shared reading is crucial.

Long-term studies by linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath and other literacy scholars have documented children’s ability to read as related to their families’ beliefs about reading, the quality of conversation at home and access to print materials prior to their entry into school.

Mother reads with children. Diana Ramsey, CC BY

For 10 years, Heath studied two communities a few miles a part, one black working-class and one white working-class. She documented how family practices (e.g., oral storytelling, reading books, talk) influenced children’s language development at home and in school. For example, children read and talked about stories, were asked questions about the stories or told stories about their lives, events and situations in which they were involved. Parents engaged their children in these experiences to prepare them to do well in school.

Similarly, researcher Victoria Purcell-Gates worked with an Appalachian family, specifically mother Jenny and son Donny, to help them learn to read. With Jenny, they read and talked about picture books, listened to and read along with books on tape and wrote in a journal. With Donny, they shared reading, labeled pictures and wrote stories. Jenny was able to read picture books to her sons, while Donny learned to write letters to his dad in prison.

Other researchers have found that when parents, specifically mothers, knew how to interact with their children during shared reading using positive reinforcement and asking questions about the story, both children and mothers benefited.

Mothers learned how to ask open-ended questions, and prompted their children to respond to stories. Children were more engaged and enthusiastic about the shared reading experience. They also were able to talk more about the story’s content, and were able to talk about the relationship between pictures and story.

What’s more, shared story experiences have also been shown to have an influence on children’s understanding of math concepts and geometry in kindergarten.

Children more readily learn math concepts like numbers, size (bigger, smaller) and estimation/approximation (lots, many) when parents engaged in “math talk” while reading picture books.

Shared reading in a digital world

While shared reading is often associated with print books, shared reading can be extended to digital texts such as blogs, podcasts, text messages, video and other complex combinations of print, image, sound, animation and so on.

Good video games, for example, incorporate many learning principles, such as interaction, problem-solving and risk-taking, among others. As in shared reading, children interact with their parents, teachers or peers as they engage in stories.

South African children share reading on computer. Amy Seely Flint, CC BY

Literacy researcher Jason Ranker’s case study of eight-year-old Adrian shows that young children can actually “redesign” how stories are read, discussed and told when they engage actively with video game narratives.

Adrian, who played a video game, Gauntlet Legends, created a story in Ranker’s class, to which he added many drawings to show the movement of characters.

In this case study, Ranker found that children like Adrian who play video games learn how to produce stories that do not follow the linear pattern found in print stories (exposition, climax, resolution). Rather, children experience stories at “levels” that allow characters and plots to move in many directions, eventually coming to resolution.

Similarly, children with access to certain apps are coordinating their storytelling on a touchscreen. They choose characters for their stories. They move them around with their fingers, and drag-and-drop them in and out of the story. If they want to create more complex stories, they work with others to coordinate characters’ movements. Sharing stories, then, becomes collaborative, imaginative and dynamic through these digital mediums.

Children, in essence, have redesigned how stories are told and experienced, demonstrating imagination, vision and problem-solving.

One thing that is clear across research is that rich complex language development does not happen merely by pointing at letters or pronouncing words out of context. It is engagement, and guided attention to language conventions, that matter in shared reading.

Ultimately, what is important is that shared reading must be a joyful experience for the child. Sharing stories must allow for a personal connection and allow for interaction and a shared learning.

The Conversation

Peggy Albers, Professor of Language and Literacy Education, Georgia State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Posted on

Should parents ask their children to apologize?

Craig Smith, University of Michigan

Have you ever felt deserving of an apology and been upset when you didn’t get one? Have you ever found it hard to deliver the words, I’m sorry?

Such experiences show how much apologies matter. The importance placed on apologies is shared by many cultures. Diverse cultures even share a great deal in common when it comes to how apologies are communicated.

When adults feel wronged, apologies have been shown to help in a variety of ways:
Apologies can reduce retaliation; they can bring about forgiveness and empathy for wrongdoers; and they can aid in the repair of broken trust. Further, sincere apologies have the physiological effect of lowering blood pressure more quickly, especially among those who are prone to hold on to anger.

How do children view and experience apologies? And what do parents think about when to prompt their young ones to apologize?

How children understand apologies

Research shows that children as young as age four grasp the emotional implications of apology. They understand, for example, that an apology can improve the feelings of someone who’s been upset. Preschoolers also judge apologizing wrongdoers to be more likable, and more desirable as partners for interaction and cooperation.

Children as young as four understand the emotional meaning of an apology. Funkyah, CC BY-NC-ND

Recent studies have tested the actual impact of apologies on children. In one such study, a group of four- to seven-year-olds received an apology from a child who failed to share, while another group did not get an apology. The participants who received the apology felt better and viewed the offending child as nicer as well as more remorseful.

Another study exposed children to a more distressing event: A person knocked over a tower that six- to seven-year-olds were building. Some children got an apology, some did not. In this case, a spontaneous apology did not improve children’s upset feelings. However, the apology still had an impact. Children who got an apology were willing to share more of their attractive stickers with the person who knocked over the tower compared to those who did not get an apology.

This finding suggests that an apology led to forgiveness in children, even if sadness about the incident understandably lingered. Notably, children did feel better when the other person offered to help rebuild their toppled towers. In other words, for children, both remorseful words and restorative actions make a difference.

When does a child’s apology matter to parents?

Although apologies carry meaning for children, views on whether parents should ask their children to apologize vary. A recent caution against apology prompting was based on the mistaken notion that young children have limited social understanding. In fact, young children understand a great deal about others’ viewpoints.

When and why parents prompt their children to apologize has not been systematically studied. In order to gain better insight into this question, I recently conducted a study with my colleagues Jee Young Noh and Michael Rizzo at the University of Maryland and Paul Harris at Harvard University.

We surveyed 483 parents of three- to 10-year-old children. Most participants were mothers, but there was a sizable group of fathers as well. Parents were recruited via online parenting discussion groups and came from communities all around the U.S.. The discussion groups had a variety of orientations toward parenting.

In order to account for the possibility that parents might want to show themselves in the best light, we took a measure of “social desirability bias” from each parent. The results reported here emerged after we statistically corrected for the influence of this bias.

A card from daughter to mother. Todd Ehlers, CC BY-ND

We asked parents to imagine their children committing what they would consider to be “transgressions.” We then asked them how likely they would be to prompt an apology in each scenario. We also asked parents to rate how important they felt it was for their children to learn to apologize in a variety of situations. Finally, we asked the parents about their general approaches to parenting.

The large majority of parents (96 percent) felt that it was important for their children to learn to apologize following an incident in which children upset another person on purpose. Further, 88 percent felt it was important for their children to learn to apologize in the aftermath of upsetting someone by mistake.

Fewer than five percent of the parents surveyed endorsed the view that apologies are empty words. However, parents were sensitive to context.

Parents reported being especially likely to prompt apologies following their children’s intentional and accidental “moral transgressions.” Moral transgressions involve issues of welfare, justice, and rights, such as stealing from or hurting another person.

Parents viewed apologies as relatively less important following their children’s transgressions of social convention (e.g., breaking a rule in a game, interrupting a conversation).

Apology as a way to mend rifts

It’s noteworthy that parents were very likely to anticipate prompting apologies following incidents in which their children upset others on purpose and by mistake.

This suggests that a focus for many parents, when prompting apologies, is addressing the outcomes of their children’s social missteps. Our data suggest that parents use apology prompts to teach their children how to manage difficult social situations, regardless of underlying intentions.

Parents may prompt an apology to mend an interpersonal rift. Girl image via www.shutterstock.com

For example, 88 percent of parents indicated that they would typically prompt an apology if their child broke a peer’s toy by mistake (in the event that the child did not apologize spontaneously).

Indeed, parents especially anticipated prompting apologies following accidental mishaps that involved their children’s peers (and not parents themselves as the wronged parties). When a child’s peer is a victim, parents likely recognize that apologies can quickly mend potential interpersonal rifts that may otherwise linger.

We also asked parents why they viewed apology prompts as important for their children. In the case of moral transgressions, parents saw these prompts as tools for helping children take responsibility. In addition, they used apology prompts for promoting empathy, teaching about harm, helping others feel better and clearing up confusing situations.

However, not all parents viewed the importance of apology prompting in the same way. There was a subset of parents who were relatively permissive: warm and caring but not overly inclined to provide discipline or expect mature behavior from their children.

Most of these parents were not wholly dismissive of the importance of apologies, but they consistently indicated being less likely to provide prompting to their children, compared to the other parents in the study.

When to prompt an apology

Overall, most parents in our study viewed apologies as important in the lives of children. And the child development research described above indicates that many children share this view.

But are there more and less effective ways to prompt a child to apologize? I argue that parents should consider whether a child will offer a prompted apology willingly and sincerely. A recently completed study sheds some light on why.

When should parents prompt an apology? Zvi Kons, CC BY-NC

In this study – currently under review – we asked four- to nine-year-old children to evaluate two types of apologies that were prompted by an adult. One apology was willingly given to the victim after the apology prompt; the other apology was given only after additional adult coercion (“You need to say you’re sorry!”).

We found that 90 percent of the children viewed the recipient of the prompted, “willingly given” apology as feeling better. However, only 22 percent of the children connected a coerced apology to improved feelings in the victim.

So, as parents ponder the merits of prompting apologies from children, it seems important to refrain from pushing one’s child to apologize when he or she is not ready, or is simply not remorseful. Most young children don’t view coerced apologies as effective.

In such cases, interventions aimed at calming down, increasing empathy and making amends may be more constructive than pushing a resistant child to deliver an apology. And, of course, components like making amends can accompany willingly given apologies as well.

Finally, to arguments that apologies are merely empty words that young children parrot, it’s worth noting that we have many rituals that involve rather scripted verbal exchanges, such as when two people in love say “I do” at a wedding or commitment ceremony.

Just as these scripted words carry deep cultural and personal meaning, so too can other culturally valued verbal scripts, such the words in an apology. Thoughtfully teaching young children about apologizing is one aspect of teaching them how to be caring and well-regarded members of their communities.

The Conversation

Craig Smith, Research Investigator, University of Michigan

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.