Early schooling and cognitive growth

The role of early education in cognitive growth was examined, by capitalizing on a natural experiment termed" school cutoff." Children who just made vs, missed the cutoff for grade one, were compared on growth of memory, language, and reading skills over a two year peiod. Findings revealed that early schooling produced a power· ful and unique improvement in short-term memory skills and strategies, with no evidence of an age X experience interaction. Further, growth of three levels phonological segmentation skill (syllabic, subsyllabic and phonemic) showed distinctly different developmental and schooling influences, conforming to a domain-specific view of early cognitive growth. Finally, the contribution of age alone to early acadmic success was found to be minimal. Together, results revealed the powerful and unique impact of early schooling on cognitive development. In addition, findings confirmed the usefulness of the school cutoff methodology in elucidating important sources of developmental change in young school-age children. The nature-nurture controversy in research on human cognitive development settled into a complacent, middle-aged interactionism some time over the last two decades, lulled there, in part, by the dominance of classic Piagetian theory and by the almost exclusive reliance on cross-sectional methodology and laboratory-based experimentation (Morrison, Lord, and Keating, 1982). These dominant orienting attitudes and practices tended to create a view of the child as advancing intellectually and socially in readily predictable sequences (or even stages), with rather domain general skills emerging as a function of experience. In reality, notwithstanding interactionist claims, this dominant perspective created a rather traditional maturationalist ethos in which the actual role of experience was simply not adequately addressed (Fischer, 1980). In practice, a kind of • horticultural' metaphor of development emerged, in which children were viewed like flowers that grow and develop in an orderly, predictable fashion with the environment relegated to the status of soil, whose sole contribution was to provide richer or poorer nutrients and thus accelerate or retard the rate of development of a sequence of events coded in and Request for reprint should be addressed to Professor Frederick J. Morrison at Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina-Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27412-5001, U. S. A.