Experience and the Development of Intelligence in Young Children at Home and in Day Care

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between the antecedent everyday experiences of middle-class children in middle-class day-care centers and their intellectual development assessed by the Binet and tests of Spatial Abilities and Receptive Language at age 3. As in the previous study of children in home care, certain types of experiences were hypothesized in advance to be intellectually valuable in that they seemed to provide the clearest opportunities for the child to learn the skills required for successful test performance. The study demonstrated that these experiences were indeed uniquely intellectually valuable in that (apart from preparatory, planful activities) they comprised the only category of everyday experiences that predicted test scores. The research then compared the predictive power of various combinations of sources and topics of intellectual experiences. As expected from the home-care results, language-mastery experiences provided by caregivers when the child was 18--33 months old were clearly the most valuable type of intellectual experiences in predicting test scores at age 3. This subset of intellectual experiences stood out as the strongest predictor of IQ in day care. Performance on the Spatial Abilities and Receptive Language tests was also significantly predicted by language-mastery experiences but here, in contrast to IQ, other types of interactive experiences in which the child played a more prominent role vis-à-vis the caregiver and also experiences which focused on the acquisition of skills other than language were beneficial. The critical importance of intellectually stimulating interaction with caregivers was highlighted by the finding that, of the six combinations of sources and topics of intellectual experiences that proved predictive of test scores, four referred to experiences occurring in interactive situations in which the child are caregiver jointly created the intellectual experiences or in which the caregiver unilaterally structured the experiences for the child. By comparison, intellectual experiences that the child generated for himself in solitary play explained little of the variance in test performance. In sum, this study strongly suggested that, by reciprocally or unilaterally providing various forms of intellectual stimulation and especially experiences designed to foster the mastery of language, caregivers may play a essential, --at least insofar as the 3-year-old's intellectual competence is validly assessed by measures like IQ. Why teachers provided more of this stimulation to some children than others was not clear. Their differential treatment seems to have been guided in part by perceptions of individual intellectual development and especially language competence, but, as in the home-care study, their behavior also seems to have been affected by many other unmeasured factors.