The Critical Importance of Early Learning

In this article in American Educator, author and ACT Inc. researcher Chrys Dougherty says that early learning is key to closing the economic achievement gap. Why? Because disadvantaged students start school behind, learning takes time, learning is cumulative, students develop strong interests in the primary grades, and catching up becomes increasingly difficult as students move through the grades. 

What are the important components of early-learning programs? Strong leadership, skillful staff selection, clear academic goals, robust instructional programs and strategies, a good start in reading, a content-rich curriculum (including vocabulary development), monitoring and effective use of data to adjust instruction and intervene with struggling students, and activities that develop students’ academic and social behaviors – paying attention, completing assignments, persisting with difficult tasks, and regulating impulses. 

All this is well known, so what prevents districts from doing a better job with early education? Dougherty points to some accountability designs that lead to short-sighted decisions limiting instruction in science, social studies and fine arts; weak professional development of teachers; and several erroneous beliefs about early learning:

• Content learning will be boring for young children – “Whether content is meaningful and interesting to students depends largely on how it is taught and on whether students have the prior knowledge needed to appreciate the new information,” says Dougherty. 

• Young students should mainly learn content close to their everyday experience. The perennial “expanding horizons” curriculum embodies this belief – learning about families in kindergarten and first grade, neighborhoods in second, the community in third, state history in fourth, U.S. history in fifth. Dougherty believes this seriously limits young students who are capable of learning about the wider world much earlier in their development.

• Students can learn everything they need later by looking it up online. “Understanding and evaluating the cacophony of information and opinion on the Internet – or even knowing what to look up – requires prior knowledge of the subject area being addressed,” says Dougherty. “[L]earning enough to make informed decisions usually requires sustained study, not just the acquisition of a few isolated pieces of information.” Students need to be exposed to lots of well-chosen background knowledge from the very beginning.

• Teaching academic content in science, social studies, and fine arts will crowd out the basics. Not true, says Dougherty, if content knowledge and vocabulary are integrated into reading and math by using read-alouds and media. Early research suggests that this approach may actually produce higher student achievement in reading and math.

“Starting Off Strong: The Importance of Early Learning” by Chrys Dougherty in American Educator, Summer 2014 (Vol. 38, #2, p. 14-18), 

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2014/Dougherty.pdf 

From the Marshall Memo #543