13.8: Early Education

Table \(\PageIndex{1}\): - Types of Early Childhood Education Programs[1]

Program	Founder	Characteristics
Montessori	Dr. Maria Montessori	Refers to children’s activity as work (not play); children are given long periods of time to work Focus on individual learning Features child-sized furniture and defined work areas Materials are carefully chosen and introduced to children by teacher Features mixed-aged grouping Teachers should be certified
Waldorf	Rudolf Steiner	Focus on whole child Features connections to nature, sensory learning, and imagination Provides large blocks of time for play Delay formal academic instruction Environment protects children from negative influences Relationships are important so groupings last for several years (looping) Teachers should be certified
Reggio Emilia	Loris Malaguzzi	Teachers and children co-construct the curriculum Teachers are researchers Environment is the third teacher and features beauty and order Children’s learning is documented through the multiple methods (100 languages of children) Have atelier (art studio) with an atelierista (artist) to instruct children Believe children are competent and capable Children stay together for 3 years Parents partner with teachers Community is extension of school
High Scope	David Weikart	Features defined learning areas Has 8 content areas with 58 key developmental indicators Consistency of daily routine is important Uses plan-do-review sequence in which they make a plan, act on it, and then reflect on the results Teachers are partners and use the Child Observation Record (COR) to help assess children and plan curriculum Utilizes 6 step process to teach children conflict resolution
Bank Street	Lucy Sprague Mitchell	Also referred to as the Developmental-Interactionist Approach Environment is arranged into learning centers Focus on hands-on experience with long periods of time given Teacher uses questions to further children’s exploration Blocks are primary material in the classroom Field trips are frequently used
Creative Curriculum	Diane Trister Dodge	Focus on children’s play and self-selected activities Environment is arranged into learning areas Large blocks of time are given for self-selected play Uses projects as basis for curriculum Is researched based and includes assessment system

Maria Montessori: The Montessori Method

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): This child in a Montessori classroom is experimenting with crafts. (Photo Source: Eric Blocher, CC BY SA 3.0)

Maria Montessori scientifically observed and measured the behaviors of young children which resulted in her development of The Montessori Method–an educational teaching method and philosophy. According to Montessori, a child’s mind is quickly developing within the first six years of life (“the absorbent mind”) whereby a child takes in as much as possible from one’s environment.[2]

Key hallmarks of The Montessori Method include self-directed, hands-on experiential learning, collaborative play, and freedom of movement and activity within a safe, multi-sensory environment. Trained teachers maximize these hallmarks by offering developmentally-appropriate activities that promote individualized learning to optimize children’s physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development.

Children work at their own pace and engage in free choice activities within clear, firm, reasonable, and developmentally-appropriate boundaries established by trained teachers. Montessori’s research deduced that these practices stimulate deeper learning experiences, independent thinking, problem- solving, creativity, confidence, and lifelong enthusiasm for learning.

A recent longitudinal study by Lillard et al (2017) found that Montessori preschools (and up to 8th grade) had strong positive effects on children's academic and social learning. These researchers reported "preschool programs tend to either be teacher-led and didactic, or else to lack academic content. One preschool model that involves both child-directed, freely chosen activity and academic content is Montessori. Here we report a longitudinal study that took advantage of randomized lottery-based admission to two public Montessori magnet schools in a high-poverty American city. The final sample included 141 children, 70 in Montessori and 71 in other schools, most of whom were tested 4 times over 3 years, from the first semester to the end of preschool (ages 3–6), on a variety of cognitive and socio-emotional measures. Montessori preschool elevated children’s outcomes in several ways. Although not different at the first test point, over time the Montessori children fared better on measures of academic achievement, social understanding, and mastery orientation, and they also reported relatively more liking of scholastic tasks. They also scored higher on executive function when they were 4. In addition to elevating overall performance on these measures, Montessori preschool also equalized outcomes among subgroups that typically have unequal outcomes. First, the difference in academic achievement between lower income Montessori and higher income conventionally schooled children was smaller at each time point, and was not (statistically speaking) significantly different at the end of the study. Second, defying the typical finding that executive function predicts academic achievement, in Montessori classrooms children with lower executive function scored as well on academic achievement as those with higher executive function. This suggests that Montessori preschool has potential to elevate and equalize important outcomes, and a larger study of public Montessori preschools is warranted."

Applications of Early Education

Understanding how children think and learn has proven useful for improving education. Activities like playing games that involve working with numbers and spatial relationships can give young children a developmental advantage over peers who have less exposure to the same concepts.

Mathematics

Even before they enter kindergarten, the mathematical knowledge of children from low-income backgrounds lags far behind that of children from more affluent backgrounds. Ramani and Siegler (2008) hypothesized that this difference is due to the children in middle- and upper-income families engaging more frequently in numerical activities, for example playing numerical board games such as Chutes and Ladders. Chutes and Ladders is a game with a number in each square; children start at the number one and spin a spinner or throw a dice to determine how far to move their token. Playing this game seemed likely to teach children about numbers, because in it, larger numbers are associated with greater values on a variety of dimensions. In particular, the higher the number that a child’s token reaches, the greater the distance the token will have traveled from the starting point, the greater the number of physical movements the child will have made in moving the token from one square to another, the greater the number of number-words the child will have said and heard, and the more time will have passed since the beginning of the game. These spatial, kinesthetic, verbal, and time-based cues provide a broad-based, multisensory foundation for knowledge of numerical magnitudes (the sizes of numbers), a type of knowledge that is closely related to mathematics achievement test scores (Booth & Siegler, 2006).

Playing this numerical board game for roughly 1 hour, distributed over a 2-week period, improved low-income children’s knowledge of numerical magnitudes, ability to read printed numbers, and skill at learning novel arithmetic problems. The gains lasted for months after the game-playing experience (Ramani & Siegler, 2008; Siegler & Ramani, 2009). An advantage of this type of educational intervention is that it has minimal if any cost—a parent could just draw a game on a piece of paper.

Reading

Cognitive developmental research has shown that phonemic awareness—that is, awareness of the component sounds within words—is a crucial skill in learning to read. To measure awareness of the component sounds within words, researchers ask children to decide whether two words rhyme, to decide whether the words start with the same sound, to identify the component sounds within words, and to indicate what would be left if a given sound were removed from a word. Kindergartners’ performance on these tasks is the strongest predictor of reading achievement in third and fourth grade, even stronger than IQ or social class background (Nation, 2008). Moreover, teaching these skills to randomly chosen 4- and 5-year-olds results in their being better readers years later (National Reading Panel, 2000).

Continuing Brain Maturation

Understanding of cognitive development is advancing on many different fronts. One exciting area is linking changes in brain activity to changes in children’s thinking (Nelson et al., 2006). Although many people believe that brain maturation is something that occurs before birth, the brain actually continues to change in large ways for many years thereafter. For example, a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is located at the front of the brain and is particularly involved with planning and flexible problem solving, continues to develop throughout adolescence (Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006). Such new research domains, as well as enduring issues such as nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity, and how to apply cognitive development research to education, insure that cognitive development will continue to be an exciting area of research in the coming years.[3]

Attributions:

Child Growth and Development by Jennifer Paris, Antoinette Ricardo, and Dawn Rymond, 2019, is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (adapted by Bhadha, 2023)

[1] Gordon, A. M., & Browne, K. W. (2016). Beginning essentials in early childhood education. (3rd ed.). Cengage: Boston.

[2] Montessori, M. (1917). The Montessori elementary manual (A. Livingston, Trans.). Frederick A. Stokes Company. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42869/42869-h/42869-h.htm

[3] Children’s Development by Ana R. Leon is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Parenting and Family Diversity Issues by Diana Lang, 2020, published by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Montessori preschool elevates and equalizes child outcomes: A longitudinal study. by Lillard AS, Heise MJ, Richey EM, Tong X, Hart A and Bray PM (2017) in Front. Psychol. 8:1783. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01783 Licensed CC-BY 4.0