Ready for School-readiness

If you're observing a preschool class in York, Pennsylvania, you may see the following behavior: two children are playing and a disagreement ensues. Suddenly one of the children stops arguing, and hunches over with her arms crossed over her chest, as if protecting herself. Chances are, the other child will watch and do the same. What are they doing? They're acting like Twiggle the turtle.

"The theory behind Twiggle is, when you're feeling upset, you go into your shell," explains Karen Bierman. "It stops the behavior, and keeps you from acting impulsively. Then you take a deep breath and say the problem and how it makes you feel. That's the beginning of effective self-control and problem-solving."

Karen Bierman Distinguished Professor of Psychology

Twiggle is just one tool preschool children are learning through Bierman's project, Head Start REDI, which has grown out of the School Readiness Initiative, developed in 2002. A collaborative effort supported by Penn State's Child Study Center (in the College of the Liberal Arts), the Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development (in the College of Health and Human Development), and Head Start Programs in York, Huntingdon, and Blair counties, the initiative blends an interdisciplinary group of researchers who are interested in developmental research and early elementary educational programs.

"Ten years ago, research on school readiness was piece-meal," explains Bierman. "Educational researchers tended to focus on promoting cognitive skills—pre-reading and writing skills. Developmental psychologists and sociologists focused more on social-emotional development, and the role of the family and child-care in promoting readiness."

In 2002, the federal Interagency School Readiness Consortium was formed, led by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Focused on reducing the negative impact of poverty on school readiness, the Consortium decided that the difference of opinion regarding what defines school readiness was not useful, and began looking for early childhood programs that had a multifaceted approach. Bierman's fit the bill.

"We were able to take the Preschool PATHS curriculum, developed by colleagues in HHD to support early social-emotional development, and blend it with educational strategies focused on promoting language development and pre-reading skills," says Bierman. "So we took the best research-based practices across these domains and organized them into the Head Start REDI program. REDI stands for REsearch-based, Developmentally Informed."

The program is now being implemented in forty-four Head Start classrooms across central Pennsylvania, and features some innovative activities. Scripted reading exercises foster vocabulary acquisition, increase levels of conversation, and heighten interest in books. “Sound games” build pre-reading skills. Small-group lessons focus on helping children identify emotions and form friendships. All of the activities—and there are more than those listed here—also help boost children's attachment to school.

Another research initiative of Bierman's is Forming Outreach Community University Systems for Engagement Model (FOCUS), created from a newly awarded grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. FOCUS represents the collaboration of an interdisciplinary faculty team working with the Child Study Center School Readiness Initiative and the Outreach system of Penn State. FOCUS's approach to enhancing school readiness is to reach out to parents and other family members, working in partnership with community teams that include school district and other community agency representatives.

"We wanted to create new engagement models in real settings to help communities with school readiness issues," she explains. "The goal is to enhance school adjustment—socially and academically—which really go hand in hand."

The researchers discovered that although all parents hope their children will succeed in school, they are often unsure what they can do to help. The challenge is particularly difficult for parents who themselves had a hard time in school and for families with few resources.

"When children begin kindergarten, they are faced with a completely new set of demands and expectations—for behavior and for learning. Parental support makes a big difference," says Bierman. "We provide parents with information about what they can do to help, and we provide them with a whole set of learning activities they can use at home to support school-readiness skills.“

An essential component of FOCUS is the community-university partnership model of action. The communities implementing the program—in Harrisburg, Lancaster, and Mifflin counties—have local teams that include school district and community representatives. A local community member serves as the team leader and organizational link with the university. The objective is to promote positive working relationships within the community, as well as between the community and university, in order to address societal issues, like school readiness, that affect everyone.

Bierman also leads another school readiness research project, Fast Track, that is designed to prevent the development of serious conduct problems among children showing risky behaviors at school entry.

”Working with the interdisciplinary team on the School Readiness Initiative is one of the best parts of my job,” says Bierman. “I particularly value our school and community collaborations, which challenge us to make our research useful in the 'real world‘ and demonstrate to us how the work we are doing is making a real difference in the lives of children and families.”

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Attention on ADHD

What might neuropsychological processes contribute to the development of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children? That question provides a focus to Cynthia Huang-Pollock's research at the Child Study Center—research that shows, that the most widespread belief about the all-too-common disorder is actually … wrong.

Cynthia Huang-Pollock assistant professor of psychology

"In terms of their behavior, children who have ADHD often have trouble focusing and are easily distracted," she says. "One of the things I am interested in is understanding what cognitive processes might cause those behaviors. My research has shown that children with ADHD do not actually have an attention deficit, as cognitively defined. That is, there does not seem to be a fundamental, basic attention process that can account for inattentive behavior."

Part of the confusion, she explains, is that the term "attention" is not very well defined and can refer to processes that are as basic as being able to orient to a location in space (e.g. looking to where a bright light has just flashed) to “executive attention,” like that needed when someone is engaged in a hard or complex activity.

"However, we do know that kids with ADHD are at much higher risk for poor academic achievement," says Huang-Pollock. "In fact, 30 percent of kids with ADHD will fail at least one grade, over half will receive some type of academic assistance, and a smaller percentage will attend college, which on average results in lower occupational success and socioeconomic status."

So if the basic attention processes are intact in these kids, what might account for poor academic functioning?

"When we first learn a complex task, such as driving or playing a musical instrument, it's hard," Huang-Pollock says. "We have to tune out distractions and really concentrate on what we're trying to do. But over time, if we do the task over and over again, it becomes automatic, and doesn't require our attention at all. Practice makes perfect. We have data in my lab that show that despite equal amounts of practice, children with ADHD are still slower, and make more errors, than children without ADHD. The process requires more effort and has not become automatic."

Why would this be? Huang-Pollock suggests that weaknesses in a cognitive process called “working memory,” may be the culprit. Working memory is the ability to simultaneously hold a piece of information in mind and manipulate it, like when doing mental arithmetic. Large amounts of working memory are required during the new learning stages of a task. But, if children with ADHD have a smaller working memory capacities, this may prevent them from mastering that task.

Thus, Huang-Pollock speculates, part of the motivational and behavior problems often seen in children with ADHD may in part stem from the fact that difficult tasks do not become easier, and so children with ADHD do not in turn reap the rewards of their hard labor.

"A lot of parents and teachers say, 'If you would just try harder, you could do it'," says Huang-Pollock. "But what if it's the opposite? If you have a problem automating a task, you would always be putting an exceeding amount of effort into whatever you are trying to learn, with little to no payoff. And that frustration could then lead to the behavior and motivational problems so common in children with ADHD."

Huang-Pollock's Child Attention and Learning Study was recently awarded funding from the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) to expand its scope of study. They are currently enrolling children between the ages of 8–12 with or without a history of attention problems. Interested parents can call the study office at 814-863-0250 for more information.

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Regulating Emotion

Understanding how children learn to regulate their emotions is the question behind Dr. Pamela Cole's research, the third big project housed at the Child Study Center highlighted in this issue of LAzine.

"Regulation of emotions is critical to school readiness," says Cole, who received her Ph.D. from Penn State and joined the faculty in 1994. "We are trying to identify the characteristics that forecast problems in certain children.”

Although her study at the Child Study Center formally began tracking children around 2001, it builds on work Cole began several years ago at the National Institutes of Mental Health. She explains that for many years, clinical psychology and developmental psychology were completely divorced from each other. Clinicians would see children who needed therapeutic intervention for problems and yet not have a model for normal childhood development. As the two areas became more integrated, it became obvious that most of the difficulties children were having were similar.

"It was all about emotions," says Cole. "We decided to look at how children develop emotional regulation. Young children go through many emotional

Pamela Cole professor of psychology

episodes in a single day. We wondered when and how they begin to adjust to the social world; when do they begin to understand and manage their emotions?"

Cole's project, the Development of Toddlers Study, or DOTS, has followed about 120 children for four years. The children were all aged 18 months when they began the study, and were seen by the researchers at six-month intervals.

"By age 4, children should have some expertise over their emotions, which goes along with the beginning of school," says Cole. "If you're a kindergarten teacher, you shouldn't have to take care of a student's every emotion every minute. Part of school readiness is the expectation that students can manage their emotions under normal circumstances."

Cole also stresses that emotional regulation doesn't necessarily mean every situation has to be resolved in a calm way.

“Children have to adjust their emotional state to the situation,” she explains. “Sometimes it's okay to get mad, or exasperated—that's often the way to accomplish a difficult goal. That's why emotions have endured in human beings—they're adaptive to our survival. But it has to be done in a way that doesn't harm people.”

The study also measures how children develop strategies for recovering from anger or other disruptive behavior. For example, deliberate distraction, a method by which children intentionally distract themselves with another task, is a common strategy for coping—particularly if a child has to wait for something.

“By studying how and when children's emotions develop normally, we hope to catch those with problems at an earlier age,” Cole says. “Hopefully we can then intervene and make a real difference before a child enters preschool.”

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