Experience and the Development of Intelligence in Young Children at Home and in Day Care

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between the antecedent everyday experiences of middle-class children in middle-class day-care centers and their intellectual development assessed by the Binet and tests of Spatial Abilities and Receptive Language at age 3. As in the previous study of children in home care, certain types of experiences were hypothesized in advance to be intellectually valuable in that they seemed to provide the clearest opportunities for the child to learn the skills required for successful test performance. The study demonstrated that these experiences were indeed uniquely intellectually valuable in that (apart from preparatory, planful activities) they comprised the only category of everyday experiences that predicted test scores. The research then compared the predictive power of various combinations of sources and topics of intellectual experiences. As expected from the home-care results, language-mastery experiences provided by caregivers when the child was 18--33 months old were clearly the most valuable type of intellectual experiences in predicting test scores at age 3. This subset of intellectual experiences stood out as the strongest predictor of IQ in day care. Performance on the Spatial Abilities and Receptive Language tests was also significantly predicted by language-mastery experiences but here, in contrast to IQ, other types of interactive experiences in which the child played a more prominent role vis-à-vis the caregiver and also experiences which focused on the acquisition of skills other than language were beneficial. The critical importance of intellectually stimulating interaction with caregivers was highlighted by the finding that, of the six combinations of sources and topics of intellectual experiences that proved predictive of test scores, four referred to experiences occurring in interactive situations in which the child are caregiver jointly created the intellectual experiences or in which the caregiver unilaterally structured the experiences for the child. By comparison, intellectual experiences that the child generated for himself in solitary play explained little of the variance in test performance. In sum, this study strongly suggested that, by reciprocally or unilaterally providing various forms of intellectual stimulation and especially experiences designed to foster the mastery of language, caregivers may play a essential, --at least insofar as the 3-year-old's intellectual competence is validly assessed by measures like IQ. Why teachers provided more of this stimulation to some children than others was not clear. Their differential treatment seems to have been guided in part by perceptions of individual intellectual development and especially language competence, but, as in the home-care study, their behavior also seems to have been affected by many other unmeasured factors.

The Medium Can Obscure the Message: Young Children's Understanding of Video

“…Surely this older group had even more exposure to video (Anderson & Lorch, 1983;Carew, 1980), yet they apparently recognized the connection between the video presentation and reality. The answer may be that the 2%-year-olds had also had more general symbolic experience, that is, more exposure to a wide variety of symbols and symbolic activities.…”

The Role of the Play Environment in Young Children's Language Development∗

“…Home and the child care physical environments together lead to better child development (including language development) than only the home or the child care physical environments (Clarke-Stewart, 1984;Phillips & Howes, 1987). Some other studies, however, have reported controversial results on what role is played by the physical play environment (Ackerman-Ross and Khanna, 1989;Carew, 1980;Cazden, 1966). Ackerman-Ross and Khanna (1989) have not found that language performance is related to the availability of materials.…”

Toddler language and play in the second year: stability, covariation and influences of parenting

“…So, for example, complex associations have been observed at specific points and across specific time spans in development as well as across specific domains of development (e.g., Bornstein 1989a, Lewis & Gregory 1987, Vibbert & Bornstein 1989, Wachs & Gruen 1982. On the basis of this research (e.g., Belsky et al 1980, Bornstein 1985, Carew 1980, Clarke-Stewart 1973, Clarke-Stewart & Hevey 1981, Slade 1987a, Wachs & Chan 1986, Zukow 1986), we hypothesized that parent-toddler interactions and toddler cognitive competencies would covary in specific and differentiated ways, such that parents' social interactions would relate to toddlers' play (rather than to language) competencies whereas parents' didactic interactions would relate to toddlers' language (rather than to play) capacities. Some research has pointed to contrasting patterns of verbal and non-verbal interaction styles in mothers and fathers (e.g., Clarke-Stewart 1978, Crawley & Sherrod 1984, Landerholm & Scriven 1981, McLaughlin, White, McDevitt & Raskin 1983, Parke 1981, Power & Parke 1983, Rondal 1980, Teti, Bond & Gibbs 1988).…”

“…Parental social interactions with children include the visual, verbal and physical behaviours used in engaging children in interpersonal exchanges, like play, mutual visual regard and reciprocal vocalizing (e.g., Beckwith 1972, Bornstein & Tamis-LeMonda 1989, Fiese 1990, Hardy-Brown, Plomin & DeFries 1981, Junefelt 1990, Matas, Arend & Sroufe 1978, Slade 1987a, 1987b, Sorce & Emde 1981. Parental didactic interactions consist of strategies used in stimulating children to engage and understand their environment, like involving play with toys, encouraging joint attention to surroundings, and describing and demonstrating (e.g., Belsky, Goode & Most 1980, Bornstein 1985, Bradley, Caldwell & Elardo 1979, Carew 1980, Clarke-Stewart 1973, Olson, Bayles & Bates 1986, Smith et al 1988, Wachs & Chan 1986. By the beginning of the second year, toddlers understand and differentiate the animate and inanimate worlds (Frye 1981, Gelman & Spelke 1981, Golinkoff 1983, Piaget 1981, and research shows that parental interactions with infants and toddlers increasingly distinguish these social and didactic orientations (e.g., Belsky, Gilstrap & Rovine 1984, Bornstein & TamisLeMonda 1990, Brown 1977, Penman, Cross, Milgrom-Friedman & Meares 1983.…”