We do, though, show it's a myth that bright poor children lose their talent as they develop
Allegra Stratton discussed our research into the development of the cognitive skills of young children from different socioeconomic backgrounds (Inside politics: Feinstein's theory, 14 April).
"The central assumption of government thinking about social mobility might be statistically invalid," she said. "That is the striking conclusion of a new paper from the Institute of Education." But that is not what our work discovered.
Stratton went on to claim that our research meant that "the entire basis for the government's social mobility strategy is wrong". However, far from undermining the coalition's social mobility strategy, our study actually confirms the previous research evidence on which the strategy is based ? which has shown that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have very poor cognitive skills compared to their richer contemporaries, and that this socioeconomic gap emerges early in childhood.
Our research endorses the need for policy to reduce this early-years skills gap, a key point recognised both by the coalition in their social mobility strategy and by the previous government.
Stratton's article also claimed that we were mounting a "statistical attack" on the work of Professor Leon Feinstein, a government adviser who is an expert on social mobility. While we do criticise the interpretation placed on one aspect of Feinstein's work, we totally agree with his central finding that children as young as 22 months have much better cognitive skills if they come from a more advantaged background.
Our research challenges the assumption that "bright" children from poor homes rapidly fall behind richer but less able contemporaries in terms of their cognitive skill. We cast doubt on the extent to which these socioeconomic gaps grow as children age.
In particular, we show that the apparent decline suffered by initially able children from disadvantaged homes before the age of 10 is not evident once we allow for a statistical problem called regression to the mean, which can occur when taking repeated measures of individuals' skills over time: when a sample of children are tested to assess their skills, and ranked accordingly, are those who score highest really the most skilled? Put another way, if the same individuals were tested again, would we expect the exact same ranking in terms of ability? Probably not ? some individuals will "get lucky" in a single test.
Maybe their particular skills align with the selection of questions in that particular test. Maybe they had more practice with a specific topic. Either way, some of the achievement (or indeed lack of it) will be down to chance.
So children defined as "high ability" based on one exam are not necessarily the most talented in the population. When we take into account that some children have particularly high or low scores on the initial test due to chance, we find that bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds do not fall behind their less able but richer peers.
Hence our work dispels the myth that bright poor children lose their talent as they develop: this makes for an even stronger case for supporting bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/28/social-mobility-early-years
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