Delay Kindergarten at Your Child's Peril - NYTimes.com - 2 views
www.nytimes.com/...your-kindergartners-start.html
redshirting children development cognitive research
shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 11
- No Cached
-
THIS fall, one in 11 kindergarten-age children in the United States will not be going to class. Parents of these children often delay school entry in an attempt to give them a leg up on peers, but this strategy is likely to be counterproductive.
-
Teachers may encourage redshirting because more mature children are easier to handle in the classroom and initially produce better test scores than their younger classmates.
-
This advantage fades by the end of elementary school, though, and disadvantages start to accumulate. In high school, redshirted children are less motivated and perform less well. By adulthood, they are no better off in wages or educational attainment — in fa
- ...9 more annotations...
-
ct, their lifetime earnings are reduced by one year.
-
The benefits of being younger are even greater for those who skip a grade, an option available to many high-achieving children. Compared with nonskippers of similar talent and motivation, these youngsters pursue advanced degrees and enter professional school more often. Acceleration is a powerful intervention, with effects on achievement that are twice as large as programs for the gifted.
-
Parents who want to give their young children an academic advantage have a powerful tool: school itself. In a large-scale study at 26 Canadian elementary schools, first graders who were young for their year made considerably more progress in reading and math than kindergartners who were old for their year
-
The question we should ask instead is: What approach gives children the greatest opportunity to learn?
-
school makes children smarter.
-
These differences may come from the increased challenges of a demanding environment. Learning is maximized not by getting all the answers right, but by making errors and correcting them quickly.
-
Some children, especially boys, are slow to mature emotionally, a process that may be aided by the presence of older children.
-
The benefits of interacting with older children may extend to empathetic abilities. Empathy requires the ability to reason about the beliefs of others. This capacity relies on brain maturation, but it is also influenced by interactions with other children. Having an older (but not younger) sibling speeds the onset of this capacity in 3- to 5-year-olds. The acceleration is large: up to half a year per sibling.
-
children are not on a fixed trajectory but learn actively from teachers — and classmates. It matters very much who a child’s peers are. Redshirted children begin school with others who are a little further behind them. Because learning is social, the real winners in that situation are their classmates.
-
I had never realized how incredibly critical the first years of a child's life were. This situation seems almost like a win-lose one; the younger children are more challenged and thus more prepared later on in life while the older ones will always be less motivated and all-around strong. Does this mean that we must set up our classrooms to have some students be statistically advantaged in life while others might potentially suffer? ARE WE GONNA DO THAT?!