Argument
David Shenk explains how Head Start, America's program for children of the working poor, has had made "'small to moderate' positive impacts on three- and four-year-old children" because of that fact that Head Start "wasn't getting hold of kids early enough" (45). Relate Shenk's argument to imprinting, considering sensitive periods, in terms of humans, yet validate Shenk's belief that "every human being can grow smarter if the environment demand it" regardless of age(44).
Bobbie Damani (vidhbie23@yahoo.com)
The Head Start program manages children of the working poor to keep low income kids out of poverty and away from crime. It is well funded and gets kid at a young age, but they had little success in raising kids’ academic success. For three and four year old children, there were “small to moderate positive impacts” in literacy and vocabulary and no impact on math skills (Shenk 45). The problem with the program was that the timing for these kids was totally off; they needed to start the program when the kids were younger. After a study done by Hart and Risley to crack the mystery of such insignificant improvement, they found that kids raised in professional homes had been exposed to 1500 more spoken words per hour than children in welfare homes. Over the course of four years, this amounts to a 32 million word gap for the children in welfare homes. Not only did this huge gap exist, but the complexity of their words was noticeably lower. These poor kids were getting into an “intellectual rut” before they even entered the program (before age three/four). From this study they concluded that a child’s cumulative experience before age 3 is crucial to later learning (Shenk 46).
ReplyDeleteMost animals, including humans, have a vital component to imprinting called the sensitive period, or critical period. It is the limited developmental phase when certain behaviors can be learned. During this time the offspring imprint on their parent to learn basic behaviors and respond when appropriate (directed by an imprinting stimulus) (Campbell 1126). For humans this critical period is from birth to age three. When a baby is born, its brain contains about 100 billion neurons and 2500 synapses per neuron, connections between the brain cells. By age three, this number increases to 15000 synapses per neuron. During the sensitive period, the brain creates and then gets rid of synapses, or connections, that are not used (http://umaine.edu/publications/4356e/). This is similar to the optimal foraging model in nature: minimize costs and maximize benefits (Campbell 1133). The brain gets rid of things that it does not need and keeps the synapses that are regularly used. During this period of time, there are environmental triggers that regulate, or express, genes according to the GxE paradigm. Some of these triggers include speaking to children early and often, reading to children early and often, embracing failure, and encouragement (Shenk 47). This is all a logical explanation for the “small to moderate” improvements in the poor children that participated in the Head Start program. They were not getting the proper attention and exposure during the sensitive period (age 1-3) that a child in a professional home might have received, putting them at an educational disadvantage.
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ReplyDeleteAlthough these children started out as having a disadvantage, it didn’t mean that they couldn’t reach a higher level of intelligence. Shenk believes that “every human being can grow smarter if the environment demand it” regardless of age (Shenk 44). Long ago, in a less complicated world, there were fewer demands for complex thinking. After comparing IQ test scores from the past to the present, the Flynn effect said that “a majority of our ancestors were mentally retarded” (Shenk 42). His statement caused controversy. We couldn’t have evolved into a smarter species in less than a century. It was discovered that contemporary children are not better with general knowledge or math, but in abstract reasoning, hypothetical thinking, and intuitive problem solving (Shenk 42). A more complex world has stimulated cognitive activity to condition our modern brains to think abstractly, also known as problem solving: a method to proceed from one state to another in the face of real or apparent obstacles (Campbell 1128). As our society has demanded advancement, our brains were forced to “grow smarter”. This proves that intelligence is not fixed. We are all born with the capacity, but environmental stimuli regulate the genes that we already had in order to keep up with the quickly maturing society that poses us with high expectations; this is often associated with the growth mindset. Our abilities are malleable, and the more we believe that we can develop our abilities, the more likely they will successfully develop (Shenk 48).
On a more “local level”, these different developmental demands are often overlooked and under-analyzed. For example, in a study done at the Baltimore dairy plant, uneducated carton packers revealed remarkable abilities in their work while educated workers showed mathematical intelligence on an IQ test. When the educated were put to work as the carton packers, they did not even come close to the expertise of an experienced low IQ assembler (Shenk 49). The carton packers had developed a mind to strategically find the most efficient way of packing the cartons, something that the educated white-collar workers had not developed. Although, as mentioned earlier, we all have the same ground work of genes, only those that are demanded in our every day tasks are actively regulated, but just because they are not activated now doesn’t mean they can never be. Over time, if an environment demands, every person has the capability of advancing to keep up with society.
(Katie Donnowitz kdonnowitz94@aol.com)