Children are not acquiring the necessary foundational skills for learning, writes Louis Benjamin.
We have a serious problem in our schools. Children are not acquiring the necessary foundational skills for learning, without which it is impossible to learn to read, write, communicate or calculate. These children might even have attended early childhood centres or pre-schools, but still do not make adequate scholastic progress.
A study commissioned by the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation in the Presidency, conducted by the Research on Socio-Economic Policy (ReSEP) unit under the leadership of Servaas van der Berg, has found that while there has been an increase in access to Grade R, this has had little to no impact on educational outcomes in the lowest quintile (poorest) schools. Another South African study found that 65 percent of Grade R pupils enter Grade 1 without the necessary skills or concepts to master reading.
After 15 years in the field, I would concur that most Grade 1 pupils do not cope from day one of their formal education. This puts them at a huge disadvantage, as children who start off their school careers with such enormous scholastic backlogs tend to fall further and further behind as they continue through the system and encounter increasingly complex content. It should therefore not be surprising that the average age of a matriculant is 20.
The usual knee-jerk response to such epidemic levels of educational failure and poor school-preparedness is to blame teachers, pupils, parents and the system. However, scant attention is paid to diagnosing the underlying problems, and then systematically attempting to remedy them. Children are not born reading, writing and calculating, but need to be introduced to these formal, higher order cultural tools of our time. It took human society 2 000 years to develop the alphabetic system – it would be remiss to think that society could produce literate citizens without intensive investment in developing these cultural tools.
In practice at schools and even preschools, it often seems that pupils are given formulaic “crash courses” in the alphabet and number systems, in the belief that learning will follow. However, it takes time to internalise these core abstract concepts for formal learning. This does not happen in a moment of instruction or through dumbed-down repetition, nor does it only happen at school. The language and conceptual cognitive processes required for learning need to be “switched on” and fine-tuned from the outset of a child’s life.
A seminal international study by researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley (1995) found that by the age of four, children from poor homes in the US heard approximately 30 million fewer words than their peers from higher socio-economic backgrounds. This exposure (or lack thereof) to language has been found to have a profound impact on a child’s cognitive functioning and academic success. In the US, the Thirty Million Words Project is addressing this “language/achievement gap” by helping parents to create more language-rich environments for children.
The pre-school years present a great opportunity for language learning, and good quality education and interventions during this time play a vital role in achievement in formal schooling. Evidence, however, stresses that while good quality Early Childhood Development (ECD) produces positive outcomes, poor quality ECD could result in aggressive behaviour and poor language and cognitive development. The ReSEP study showed little to no impact of Grade R in lower quintile schools, but showed a much greater impact in higher quintile (more affluent) schools. In essence, Grade R merely widened the gap between poor and affluent schools.
What can we do about this learning deficit in our Grade 1 pupils? First, we need a mind shift – formal school learning does not happen automatically, or simply because a child attends school. We as educators/parents/society are tasked with “growing the minds” of our children. We need to talk to our children from birth and continue to speak to them in increasingly complex and sophisticated ways.
Second, as suggested by the ReSEP study, the quality of Grade R teachers needs to improve by, inter alia, giving them more training and support (including how children learn and how to facilitate learning). Teachers also need to become acutely aware of the importance of language and conceptual development in education.
Specific interventions are required to address these language and cognitive development issues. The Basic Concepts Programme (basicconcepts.co.za) is one such intervention which has been implemented in multiple sites with positive results. It involves training and supporting teachers to mediate conceptual language and the thinking processes required for formal school learning. In a review of nine projects it was found that 79 percent of pupils who received the intervention in Grade R were school-ready at the beginning of Grade 1.
While most South African children are not school-ready, educators can successfully be trained to prepare children for the cognitive complexities that await them. If teachers are given a clear and systematic approach to developing the conceptual tools that every child needs for learning, their chances of successfully bridging the gaps are greatly increased.
* Dr Benjamin is a cognitive educational consultant who specialises in early childhood development and the Foundation Phase of the education system. He is a board member of Thinking Schools South Africa.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
Cape Times