The Early Years Need Not Predict Later Success
By Professor John Hattie and Educator Kyle Hattie, Co-Authors of 10 Steps to Develop Great Learners
There are many claims about the power of the early years to predict later success in school. There are two major problems with this argument.
First, if correct, this would mean those who struggle in the early years have higher probabilities of being doomed later on; you then have to seriously question the role of schools. Surely the role of schools is to mess up, for the betterment of all, any high correlation between early years and school outcomes. Some schools are brilliant at doing this, whereas others accept the correlational-fate and offer many reasons why some students cannot achieve.
Second, the evidence is not that supportive of a high correlation; the relationship is more modest. If there is a high correlation, then we need to ensure every pre-school child goes to a wonderful pre-school. By age 8, however, it can be hard to identify which students went to a pre-school or not. Too many pre-schools are not that wonderful at doing the best possible job of developing learning in pre-schoolers. Too many pre-schools shun notions of learning the fundamentals of reading and numeracy, by which we mean exposing children to concepts about print and counting numbers – not teaching them to read or do sums.
We analyzed many thousands of 5-year-old children who completed a battery of entrance to school measures as they started school These measures included concepts about print, oral language, and a sense of number. There were about 5–8% who had such low scores that their chances of catching up were bleak. Take the first item on concepts about print – give a child a book upside down and ask them to turn to the first page. One out of 12 children did not know to turn the book around before opening – and many had been to pre-school. Further, when you ask teachers to identify at age 5 those students who are unlikely to reach fundamental levels of literacy and numeracy at age 8, they are very accurate. So given these students can be identified, why is something not done to help them? The best estimate is that, on average, there are four to five of these students in every elementary school – teachers need to put faces and actions to these children immediately. No child should be lacking adequate reading and number skills by age 8 (when most classes are well past teaching the basics of these subjects); if they do lack the skills at age 8, the Matthew effect shows they will continue to struggle. Make sure your child is not in this category. And if so, then much work is needed to provide additional teaching to catch up as soon as possible. This is the major reason for attending to the skills we have outlined, and have emphasized the importance of language, language, and language in the early years.
John Bruer has written a wonderful exposé of the myth of the first three years being critical, which should give hope to all parents and teachers who falsely believe these years are destiny. A neuroscientist deeply embedded in his profession and a well-cited author of many papers, Bruer is cautious about what neuroscience can say to parents about child-reading, preferring to say ‘absolutely nothing’, although we would temper that with an additional word ‘yet’.
Take the argument that the building blocks of the brain and the development of neural connections are developed in the first three years. Yes they are, but they also change rapidly over the years. At birth we have approximately the same synaptic densities that we do as adults – but there is also rapid synapse formation, and there is much elimination beginning at puberty. Also, this growing and eliminating process does not follow the same pattern as our growth in our ability to learn: more synapses do not necessarily mean more brain power. Even further, the early growth in synapses is impervious to the quantity or stimulation, either to deprivation or to overstimulation – the early growth is more a genetic attribute of humans than influenced by environment.
Bruer also attacks the notion that there are ‘critical periods’ such that if a child does not develop specific skills in these periods it is then too late to remedy this later. Most learning is ‘not confined to windows of opportunities that slam shut’ (p. 103). Yes, he says, we should be attentive to ensuring sensory receptors are working, be sensitive to language problems and hearing loss at the earliest possible time as these indeed can harm later skills in learning. Most of all, however, we need to care about parent-child attachment and the quality of relationships, as ‘children show significantly better cognitive and language development when they are cared for by adults who engage with them in frequent affectionate responsive interactions’ (p. 191). So these early years are important, just not deterministic.
Our message is to focus on the basics of learning – through the development of language, talking, skills in listening, asking ‘why’ questions, helping your child build a theory about their world, and beginning the fundamentals of concepts about print and a sense of ordination, patterning, and skills with numbers. Ellen Galinsky11 has an excellent list of early literacy skills: It’s about expression, it’s about understanding rather than drills, and it’s about enjoyment and playful ways of learning. It’s about connecting the visual with the verbal, it’s about concepts about print (holding the book the right way up, mov- ing from left to right), and it’s about talking, listening, discussing, and imagining. And it’s about encouraging children to talk about ideas, it’s about making fun to crack the code (listening to sounds, noting letters), and it’s about promoting expression in all forms. She also advocates for helping children in estimating magnitudes of numbers, and we would add that rhyme is an excellent precursor of reading as it emphasizes listening to sounds.
No matter the school, you can be the leader in learning for your child at home, helping them through times with teachers who have a lesser impact on them or whom your child cannot relate to. Early missed opportunities can be regained. Home is the safe haven, the warm environment in which to explore what they do not know, as well as for testing what they think they know. It is language, language, language that matters most in the early years.
Professor John Hattie is a renowned researcher in education. His research interests include performance indicators, models of measurement and evaluation of teaching and learning. John Hattie became known to a wider public with the publication of his two books, Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers, the result of 15 years of research. The books are a synthesis of more than 800 meta-studies covering more than 80 million students. The Visible Learning series has sold more than 1.5 million copies, and has been translated into 29 different languages. TES once called John “possibly the world’s most influential education academic.” He is also the co-author of 10 Steps to Develop Great Learners, available April 8, 2022. He has been Director of the Melbourne Educational Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, since March 2011. Before, he was Project Director of asTTle and Professor of Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada. You can find a full CV of Professor John Hattie (PDF) at the website of the University of Auckland.
Kyle Hattie is a Year 6 Teacher working in a Primary School in the Northern Suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Over his 10-year career, he has taught at many year levels, from Prep to Year 6 in both Australia and New Zealand. Kyle has held various leadership titles and has a passion for understanding how students become learners. Kyle Hattie is the co-author of 10 Steps to Develop Great Learners, available April 8, 2022.
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