Early Intervention and Mediating Processes in Cognitive Performance of Children of Low-Income African American Families

Burchinal, Margaret; Campbell, Frances; Bryant, Donna; Wasik, Barbara H.; Ramey, Craig T.

doi:10.2307/1132043

Cited by 217 publications

(137 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

126

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…However, for both general understanding of the workings of the reform and assessment of the IV/2SLS approach, it is useful to measure the effect of the reform on full educational attainment at the age of 30 y. As documented in column [6] in Table 2, the reform had little effect on educational attainment beyond the secondary level; use of information on full educational attainment only increases the effect of the reform on education from 0.163 to 0.172. Furthermore, the IV/2SLS estimate of the effect of education on IQ is unaffected to all intents and purposes.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Column [5] presents results from a specification with municipal-specific quadratic trends. Column [6] presents results with full length of education at the age of 30 y. Column [7] presents alternative robust SEs with clustering on municipality.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A growing consensus points to the major role that early childhood environment and interventions play in the development of economically and socially relevant cognitive skills (4)(5)(6), but the effectiveness and efficiency of later interventions, such as formal schooling, in raising IQ are less certain.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Schooling in adolescence raises IQ scores

Brinch

Galloway

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

206

135

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although some scholars maintain that education has little effect on intelligence quotient (IQ) scores, others claim that IQ scores are indeed malleable, primarily through intervention in early childhood. The causal effect of education on IQ at later ages is often difficult to uncover because analyses based on observational data are plagued by problems of reverse causation and self-selection into further education. We exploit a reform that increased compulsory schooling from 7 to 9 y in Norway in the 1960s to estimate the effect of education on IQ. We find that this schooling reform, which primarily affected education in the middle teenage years, had a substantial effect on IQ scores measured at the age of 19 y.E ver since the advent of intelligence testing, the malleability of intelligence quotient (IQ) scores by education and training has been intensely debated; given that IQ is associated with a host of social and economic outcomes (1-3), insights on this issue are of clear and definite relevance for society. A growing consensus points to the major role that early childhood environment and interventions play in the development of economically and socially relevant cognitive skills (4-6), but the effectiveness and efficiency of later interventions, such as formal schooling, in raising IQ are less certain.Although the high correlation between IQ and length of schooling is well-documented (1, 7), clear conclusions about both the direction and extent of the possible causal relationship between schooling and IQ scores remain elusive and highly controversial. Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (3) famously emphasized the role of IQ in self-selection or sorting into educational levels and provided both an extensive literature review and empirical analyses to support claims about the limited malleability of IQ by schooling and/or training. However, reviews by other scholars (7, 8) reach the opposite conclusion, contending that schooling does itself have a substantial independent effect on IQ. These disparities in interpreting the existing evidence arise primarily because empirical analyses of nonexperimental data generally cannot discount reverse causation (i.e., that higher IQ causes a person to obtain more education rather than vice versa or that some other underlying omitted variable or factor is responsible for both high IQ and higher educational attainment).More recent contributions based on different empirical strategies for addressing the difficulties in observational data, each with its own specific strengths and weaknesses, have been reported (9-13). However, there is one main type of evidence that is both highly relevant and potentially convincing but entirely missing from this literature: analysis of the effect on IQ of major large-scale policy interventions to raise compulsory schooling levels. This current study exploits exogenous variation in individual educational attainments generated by just such a major intervention: a comprehensive compulsory schooling reform that was introduced in Norway in the...

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Schooling in adolescence raises IQ scores

Brinch

Galloway

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

206

135

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…When administered at 3 years of age, the BSID-II demonstrates only moderate predictive power for subsequent intelligence and school performance but is clinically useful for children performing in the subnormal range. 34,[37][38][39] Children's status can be classified as normal or delayed (scores of ≤85) on the basis of a standardized cutoff point of 1 SD. In the present study, each child was tested under controlled conditions in the study office by a trained bilingual research assistant, checked for reliability.…”

Section: Measures Of Child Behavior and Neurodevelopmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Prenatal Chlorpyrifos Exposure on Neurodevelopment in the First 3 Years of Life Among Inner-City Children

et al. 2006

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

OBJECTIVE-The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos on 3-year neurodevelopment and behavior in a sample of inner-city minority children.METHODS-As part of an ongoing prospective cohort study in an inner-city minority population, neurotoxicant effects of prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos were evaluated in 254 children through the first 3 years of life. This report examined cognitive and motor development at 12, 24, and 36 months (measured with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development II) and child behavior at 36 months (measured with the Child Behavior Checklist) as a function of chlorpyrifos levels in umbilical cord plasma.RESULTS-Highly exposed children (chlorpyrifos levels of >6.17 pg/g plasma) scored, on average, 6.5 points lower on the Bayley Psychomotor Development Index and 3.3 points lower on the Bayley Mental Development Index at 3 years of age compared with those with lower levels of exposure. Children exposed to higher, compared with lower, chlorpyrifos levels were also significantly more likely to experience Psychomotor Development Index and Mental Development Index delays, attention problems, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder problems, and pervasive developmental disorder problems at 3 years of age. CONCLUSIONS-The adjusted mean 36-month Psychomotor Development Index and MentalDevelopment Index scores of the highly and lower exposed groups differed by only 7.1 and 3.0 points, respectively, but the proportion of delayed children in the high-exposure group, compared with the low-exposure group, was 5 times greater for the Psychomotor Development Index and 2.4 times greater for the Mental Development Index, increasing the number of children possibly needing early intervention services. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptPediatrics. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2012 July 06. As a result of heavy indoor use, largely for cockroach control, pesticide exposure is widespread among pregnant women living in New York City. [3][4][5][6][7][8] Specifically, 72% to 85% of women participating in 2 different cohort studies reported using some form of pest control during pregnancy, 3,7-9 and 46% reported using ≥1 of the higher-toxicity methods, such as exterminator sprays, can sprays, and pest bombs. 3 A survey of pest control measures conducted in 2000 and 2001 by the office of the New York State Attorney General found that 93% of New York City public housing residents applied pesticides at home and more than one half did so approximately once per week. 6 In a previous report from the present cohort, detectable levels of chlorpyrifos were found in 99.7% of personal air samples and 100% of indoor air samples from stationary residential monitors for a sample of pregnant women. 8 Chlorpyrifos was also detected in 64% to 70% of blood samples collected from mothers and newborns at delivery. Maternal levels and newborn levels were correlated strongly, which indicates that this pesticide crosses the placenta readily. 3 Since the ban, levels of chlorpyr...

show abstract

“…The Abecedarian Preschool Treatment significantly ameliorated the effects of some biological and behavioral risk factors including low Apgar scores (Brietmayer & Ramey, 1986), difficult temperament (Ramey et al, 1982), and fetal undernourishment (Zeskind & Ramey, 1978. The primary mechanism for this increased resilience was through improving children's cognitive development by enhancing their responsiveness to their early social environments (Burchinal, Campbell, Bryant, Wasik, & Ramey, 1997).…”

Section: Sdmentioning

confidence: 99%