On your marks

A simple test may show which children would benefit from early intervention, says Kathryn Duckworth

The development of children's abilities is a subject that interests researchers as well as those working in early years education fuelled by the knowledge that learning is not a formal process that begins on the first day of school, but rather is a cumulative process beginning with the understanding of many basic cognitive, linguistic, perceptual and motor processes, which provide the basis for subsequent successful achievement.

Early development of these capabilities has the potential to affect children's long-term achievement, through their school lives and into adulthood. A greater understanding of the processes at work in these early years and their role in later success is therefore important to ensure that teaching and resources are appropriately balanced and targeted.

What aspects of children's development between ages three and five, then, predict later success?

Our research 'Development in the Early Years: its importance for school performance and adult outcomes,' uses data from a study of all the people born in Great Britain in one week in 1970 (the British Cohert Study), who have been followed up at regular intervals since birth. Our major objective was to examine the development of children's different abilities and understand their importance for their subsequent school and labour market achievement. This longitudinal design allows us to explore the role of development (as opposed to innate capability) in the pre-school years and can give insight into the aspects of children's development that help lay important foundational skills for later success.

Key findings

The results of our study show that development in cognitive ability (measured by improvement in vocabulary and drawing tests) between the ages of five and three years was highly predictive of subsequent relationship with both educational success and income at age 30.

However, one measure in particular was much more predictive of later achievement, namely children's ability to accurately copy shapes and simple patterns. This copying test evaluates visual-motor maturity, sign recognition and decoding skills such as the ability to separate and integrate information. Such tests are associated with other developmental tests such as language ability and various aspects of intelligence such as visual perception, manual motor ability, memory, and temporal and spatial concepts of organisation.

It is also interesting to note that the skills involved in scoring highly in this test appear to be more beneficial and yield higher gains in school than improvement in language and vocabulary skills, for reading as well as for maths. The implication is that the copying designs test is a very good measure of long-term cognitive skill and that the underlying features of cognitive ability that it assesses may bring lasting benefits to children in terms of their school attainment and subsequent labour market productivity.

What is particularly interesting, however, is that the gains associated with the highly predictive copying score held across all groups in the sample, except for children from more socially disadvantaged backgrounds. That is, children from families of low socioeconomic status (SES) with strong, positive development between the ages of three and five do not show the same gains at either age ten or age 30 as children from families with middle or high socioeconomic status with the same early positive development. In other words, for some reason the potential advantages of high copying skills for low SES children fail to be realised. This may be because these abilities are not recognised and responded to with appropriately supportive learning (scaffolding) in the classroom.

Conclusions

Our study suggests that development in the ability to accurately copy simple shapes is an important early foundational skill for academic and labour market success. But what is it about this seemingly simple skill that is so predictive? What abilities and dispositions might successful copying reveal?

Theoretical models that look at the processes involved in the development of literacy highlight the importance of decoding abilities required for later reading comprehension. These decoding skills included left-to-right and top-to-bottom orientation of print, using stored information to aid forward scanning, connecting words into familiar sequences and searching for larger units of meaning. In children who are just beginning to read, one of the key skills to be mastered is the perception and discrimination of shapes. Thus it may be that the features of ability assessed within the copying test are early precursors of these skills, providing the foundations for later reading skills.

These results also demonstrate that there are important environmental influences that support (or hinder) reading competence in the pre-school years. The social stratification in the results of our study indicate a barrier to the development of potential for an important group of children and suggest a failure of family and/or school contexts to build on the early cognitive development of high-achieving children from low SES groups. Such a failure may be a crucial and under-recognised difference between children from disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds, as well as key reason for social immobility.

The results of our study do not mean that ‘teaching to the test’ per se will result in gains for all, but rather that such a test might provide a very good early indicator for the early identification of basic skill difficulties. Given the failure of children from low SES groups who have high early measures of cognitive ability to achieve success in later life, the copying designs test may also provide a means of identifying children showing high cognitive ability who are at risk of not developing to their full potential.

Using such diagnostic tools would allow early intervention to ensure children receive appropriate support to maintain their rate of development. The simple nature of the test has the added benefit of holding the attention and interest of young children.

Finally we believe our findings add to the debate on the appropriate balance between cognitive and non-skills at different ages and for different groups of children. In particular, failure to place sufficient emphasis on cognitive development and the scaffolding of these skills may run counter to the interests of children from lower SES groups. We believe that pedagogy should continue to address ways in which cognitive and non-cognitive abilities can support and enhance one another and how the interactions between these different types of skills can best be harnessed for different groups.

(Extracted from an article by Kathryn Duckworth, Nursery World, 15.02.07)