Humans show remarkable cultural diversity. Different groups—let’s call them tribes—use different technologies, economic organizations, political organizations, they hold different religious beliefs, and so on. Explanations of this diversity typically fall into one of two categories:

1. Humans inhabit almost every corner of the globe. Diversity of tribes’ behavior is a product of environmental diversity and the fact that humans are so good at problem-solving. Different environments prompt different behaviors, but even when environments are similar people are so ingenious they come up with different solutions to the same environmental challenges.
2. Diversity of behavior is due to cultural traditions. Sure, there are some environmental constraints on what I do—people living in the desert won’t fish—but diversity is so high because small changes are preserved with fidelity. People keep doing what the tribe has always done.

 
The first account predicts that local environmental conditions will determine tribe behaviors. Two predictions may be drawn from the second of these accounts: (1) tribes that live spatially near one another will be more behaviorally similar and; (2) behaviors will persist across generations.
 
A recent study sought to test both predictions using an enormous dataset of 172 tribes in western North America.  The dataset records 297 behavioral variables (e.g., what people eat, their religious practices, family organization, and so on) and 133 variables concerning the environment (available flora & fauna, characteristics of soil, altitude, precipitation, etc.). All data represent practices and conditions at the time the tribe first encountered Europeans.
 
Spatial distance between tribes is simple enough to measure.  The researchers used language phylogeny as a proxy of cultural phylogeny. Analyses of the similarity of languages yields an “evolutionary tree” of languages, so the distance of any two languages on the tree can be measured with a “most recent common ancestor” approach.
 
The question of interest is which of three variables predicts whether two tribes show similar behaviors. If behavior is mostly a matter of smart individuals adapting to the local ecology, then tribes inhabiting similar terrain should behave similarly. But if learning is mostly social, then tribes that are physically and/or culturally close should be more likely to behave similarly.
 
The results showed that cultural history and ecology both affect everything…but cultural history generally has the stronger effect. Within cultural history, phylogeny mattered more than spatial distance.
 
This analysis is about group behaviors, things that most people in a tribe do. But the result showing the importance of social learning may hold a lesson for those of us who think about the education of individuals. It’s easy to be a little dazzled by the brilliance of the human mind, and to see most of cognitive development as the intrepid mind of the individual, exploring the environment like a little scientist.
 
That’s certainly the emphasis we get from many psychologists. Bandura’s social learning duly noted, the towering figure of Piaget puts the child’s individual discoveries at the center of learning.
 
When it comes to schooling, I sometimes sense a similar reverence for learning that is the product of an individual mind at work, over the mere copying of someone else’s solution. It’s true that you only get true invention/innovation from original thought. But it’s a whole lot quicker and more reliable to copy what others have done. That is probably why social learning seems to be the workhorse of cultural learning.

This article first appeared at RealClearEducation.com on June 26, 2014

According to an article in the New York Times, the American Academy of Pediatrics will soon recommend that children be read to from birth. The Academy also wants pediatricians to make this recommendation every time a baby visits the doctor. It’s a good idea, but it could use some fine-tuning.

As most readers of RealClearEducation know, reading aloud to children is associated with a variety of good academic outcomes, including improved vocabulary, better understanding of more complex syntax, improved phonemic awareness, , and the beginnings of letter knowledge and knowledge of the alphabetic principle (e.g., Lonigan & Shanahan, 2008).

It’s worth noting that most of these studies are correlational, and so a host of genetic and environmental factors could be what are actually prompting differences in outcomes among kids. (Naturally, researchers do their best to statistically remove out these factors when they analyze the data).  The problem in doing a true experiment (in which we randomly assign people to read to their kids or not) is that it’s hard to get people to sign on to read daily (or to refrain from it) for months or years—and we might expect that it would take that long to see results. Shorter-term experiments have been conducted and reading aloud actually shows little or no benefit unless a particular reading aloud strategy--dialogic reading—is used (Justice & Pullen, 2003; Mol et al., 2008).

Even though the evidence is not as iron-clad as we’d like, I don’t think the American Academy of Pediatrics is going out on a limb rashly. I think reading aloud to children is good advice. Still, there are a couple of ways I’d tweak the suggestion.

First, “from birth” is too early. It’s too early because parents of newborns really do have other, more pressing things to think about such as sleeping, and figuring out how family routines change with the new family member. It’s also too early because a newborn probably is not getting that much out of being read to. Newborn can’t really see much of a book—their vision is 20/500, and they don’t see blues very well until around age 3 months. And babies are much more social at a few months of age. My fear is that parents of newborns will either ignore the advice given their other concerns, or try to follow it, find it unrewarding, and drop it. The American Academy of Pediatrics might do better to direct members to recommend read-alouds beginning when children are to get the set of immunizations delivered at 4 months of age.

Second, telling parents might help, but this advice is more likely to take hold if you not only tell them, but also make it easy for them to carry it out. One way would be for pediatricians to have age-appropriate books that parents could take home for read-alouds. This would not be terribly costly, and if the publicity is not enough to entice a publisher like Scholastic to take it on, I would think that a foundation could be persuaded to help.

Pediatricians can also increase the chances that their advice will be heeded if they tell parents the basics of a good read-aloud. Jim Trelease has written an entire book on the subject (and it’s excellent) but some important principles could be summarized on a bookmark. Here are a few, taken from my own book on reading, which will be published this winter:

·         Read aloud at the same time each day, to help make it a habit.

·         Read a little slower than you think you need to. Even simple stories are challenging for children.

·         Don’t demand perfect behavior from your child.

·         Use a dramatic voice. Ham it up. Your child is not judging your acting ability.

It’s nice to see that the American Academy of Pediatrics is using its position to try to improve early child education. It would be a shame if minor, readily-correctable details prevented the program from having the impact it might.

References:

Justice, L. M. & Pullen, P. C. (2003). Promising interventions for promoting emergent literacy skills: Three evidence-based approaches. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 23, 99-113.

Lonigan, C. J., & Shanahan, T. (2008). Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel. A Scientific Synthesis of Early Literacy Development and Implications for Intervention. National Institute for Literacy. Downloaded from http://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/NELPReport09.pdf

 Mol, S. E., Bus, A. G., Jong, M. T. de, & Smeets, D. J. H. (2008). Added value of dialogic parent-child book readings: A meta-analysis. Early Education and Development, 19,  7-26.

A blog posting over at Schools Matter @ The Chalk Face has gathered a lot of interest--78 comments, many of them outraged.

The New York State Education Dept. has a website that is meant to help teachers prepare for the Common Core Standards. Author Chris Cerrone posted a bit of a 1st grade curriculum module on early civilizations. Here it is:

Cerrone asked primary grade educators to weigh in: "what do you think of the vocabulary contained in this unit of study?"

The responses in the 78 comments were nearly uniformly negative. As you might expect from that volume of commentary, the criticisms were wide-ranging, much of it directed more generally at standardized testing and the idea of the CCSS themselves.

But a lot of the commentary concerned cognitive development, and I want to focus there. This comment was typical (click for larger image).

There is an important idea at the heart of this criticism: developmental stages. This commenter specifically invokes Piaget, but you don't have to be a Piagetian to think that stages are a good way to think about children's thinking. Stage theories hold that children's thinking is relatively stable, but then undergoes a big shift in a relatively brief time (say, a few months) whereupon it stabilizes again.

So lessons would be developmentally inappropriate if they demanded a type of thinking that the child was simply incapable of, given his developmental stage.

I have argued in some detail that stage theories have two major problems: first, data from the last twenty years or so make development look like it's continuous, rather than occurring in discrete stages. Second, children's cognition is fairly variable day to day, even when the same child tries the same task.

I have argued elsewhere that trying to take a psychological finding and using it to draw strong conclusions about instruction--including what children are, in principle, ready for--is fraught with problems. How much the more is that true when using a psychological theory rather than an experimental finding.

So if Piaget will not be our guide as to what 1st graders are ready for, what should be?

The experience of early elementary educators, of course, and some of the people commenting on the blog posting are or were first grade teachers. And almost unanimously, they thought this material was inappropriate for first graders. (Some thought kids this age shouldn't be learning about other religions at this age. No argument there, that's a matter of ones values. I'm only talking about what kids can cognitively handle.)

But if we adopt a proof-of-the-pudding-is-in-the-eating criterion, lessons on ancient civilizations are fine because they are in use and children are learning. The material shown above is part of the Core Knowledge sequence, around for more than a decade and used by over a thousand schools. (NB: I'm on the Board of the Core Knowledge Foundation.)

And Core Knowledge is not alone. Another curriculum has had first-graders learn about ancient civilizations not for a decade, but for about a century: Montessori. (NB again: my children experienced these lessons at their school, and my wife teaches them--she's an early elementary Montessori teacher.)

Montessori schools teach the same "Five Great Lessons" at the beginning of first, second, and third grades. They are

1. The history of the universe and earth
2. The coming of life
3. The origins of human beings
4. The history of signs and writing
5. The story of numbers and mathematics

Naturally, these lessons are presented in ways that make sense to young children, but they are far from devoid of content. Montessori educators see them as the foundation and the wellspring of interest for everything to come: biology, geology, mathematics, reading, writing, chemistry and so on.


If it seems impossible or highly unlikely to you that 6 year olds could really get anything out of such lessons, I'll ask you to consider this. Our understanding of any new concept is always incomplete.

For example, how do children learn that some people they hear about (Peter Pan) are made up and never lived, whereas others (the Pharaohs) were real? Not by an inevitable process of neurological maturation that makes their brain "ready" for this information, whereupon  they master it quickly. They learn it bit by bit, in fits and starts, sometimes seeming to get it, other times not.

And you can't always wait until children are "ready." Think about mathematics. Children are born understanding numerosity, but they understand it on a logarithmic scale--the difference between five and ten is larger than the difference between 70 and 75. To understand elementary mathematics they must learn to think of numbers of a linear scale. In this case, teachers have to undo Nature. And if you wait until the child is "developmentally ready" to understand numbers this way, you'll never teach them mathematics. It will never happen.

In sum, I don't think developmental psychology is a good guide to what children should learn; it provides some help in thinking about how children learn. The best guide to "what" is what children know now, and where you want their learning to head.