Children aged around four can be much better prepared for school by using "formal play" to teach them how to remember, pay attention and think, according to a study published today.
Research in America concludes that a recently-developed preschool curriculum could cut the gap in achievement between children from rich and poor areas, while helping to cut truancy and expulsion.
The Tools of Mind curriculum has been tested for the first time by Prof Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia and colleagues and they conclude it would be cheap and effective.
The curriculum would reduce the gap in achievement between poor children and children from wealthier homes and cut the incidence of antisocial behaviour, even attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). "It could make a huge difference, especially for disadvantaged children," says Prof Diamond.
"Rates of students dropping out of school or getting expelled, teacher burnout, crime, drug addiction, and diagnoses of ADHD and conduct disorder can be reduced if children are helped early in life."
The research published today in the journal Science is hailed by Prof Alan Smithers of the University of Buckingham as a "very important study" which builds on the European tradition of kindergarten education and should spur the UK Government on to develop "a pre-school curriculum aimed at closing the social class and gender gaps. The chances are much greater in this age range than for the later stages of education (as the test and exam results, and university admissions show)."
In England the focus has been on making flexible nursery provision available for three- and four-year-olds rather than on what is taught, he says. "It can at the younger end especially be just child minding," he says, adding that more to be done to ensure we "make the best and fairest use of it."
With the help of dramatic pretend play, visual aids, and their peers during reading and mathematics, and without specialist teachers or equipment, the curriculum helps children to avoid distractions, give a more considered response instead the first thing that goes through their minds, and to work with what they have been taught, even think "outside the box."
The programme has been used in several US states to improve so called "executive functions", which link better to academic success than conventional measures of IQ. But today's study marks the first time that the effects of Tools on executive functions has been measured, in this case by using computer games with 147 five-year-olds in a low-income, urban school district in the US Northeast.
Most children in Tools completed tests successfully, compared to fewer than one-third of children using another curriculum, called balanced literacy.
"At-risk five-year-old children in Tools showed markedly better executive function performance compared with closely-matched peers," says Prof Diamond, adding that the Tools curriculum was a more influential factor in their performance than either age or gender.
These results are consistent with the impressions of teachers who used the new curriculum. "After one year, so convinced were educators in that school that Tools children were doing substantially better than other children that they halted the experiment there and switched over all classrooms in their school to Tools," she says.
Co-author, and National Institute for Early Education Research Director, Steven Barnett, notes that "benefit-cost analyses have found that the longer term economic impacts of improving executive functions are quite large compared to the benefits of improving academic test scores alone, because executive functions leads to the avoidance of risky behaviours like smoking, teen pregnancy, and crime."
How formal play can help
The "Tools of the Mind" programme was developed over the past 12 years by American educational psychologists, Drs Deborah Leong and Elena Bodrova, based on the theories of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who believed a child's social interactions with the world aids learning.
Within a group setting, children first record the day's weather, update the class calendar, participate in story time and get their bodies moving with dance. Next, each child individually creates their "play plan" for that day.
As a result, a typical classroom using the curriculum might see little Cinderellas dancing at the ball, three-foot-tall knights survey their kingdom from the castle above, or the saga of the Three Little Pigs relived in the construction of cardboard brick houses.
