Academic Versus Intellectual Goals

This week’s article summary is Report debunks "Earlier is Better" Academic Instruction for Young Children 

While the article’s focus is on the optimal curriculum for preschool, the tension between “academic goals” versus what the article terms “intellectual goals” is present at any grade.

Research clearly leans towards schools and classrooms focusing more on “intellectual goals,” which to most of us include Information Age skills, Tony Wagner’s 4 Cs, SEL standards, Bloom’s higher-order thinking skills, executive function skills/habits, etc.

The key for all of us as educators is finding the proper balance of “academic versus intellectual” emphasis in the classroom. Those of us who lean a little more traditional educationally most likely give more time to “academic goals” while those who are a little more progressive provide more classroom time to “intellectual” development.

I have spoken and written about how prior to the Information Age we now live in the principal goal of education was knowledge acquisition stored and readily accessible in our brains. Today, however, with the ubiquity and availability of knowledge at our fingertips (Who was the eleventh President of the United States, what are secondary colors, what’s an isthmus, did Bogart ever win an Oscar?), the balance in the classroom between academic and intellectual goals favors more time for intellectual.

Today, an essential question teachers, not only in preschool, need to ask is how much time do they devote to academic goals and how much time to intellectual goal development?

Joe

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The debate about appropriate curriculum for young children generally centers on two options: free play and basic activities vs. straight academics (which is what many kindergartens across the country have adopted, often reducing or eliminating time for play).
A new report, “Lively Minds,” offers a new way to look at what is appropriate in early childhood education.
The report says that beyond free play and academics, another major component of education – is to provide a wide range of experiences, opportunities, resources and contexts that will provoke, stimulate, and support children’s innate intellectual dispositions.
As the title of the paper indicates there is a distinction between academic goals and intellectual goals for young children.

ACADEMIC GOALS

Academic goals are those concerned with the mastery of small discrete elements of disembodied information, usually related to pre-literacy skills in the early years, and practiced in drills, worksheets, and other kinds of exercises designed to prepare children for the next levels of literacy and numeracy learning.

The items learned and practiced have correct answers, rely heavily on memorization, the application of formulae versus understanding, and consist largely of giving the teacher the one, correct answer.

These bits of information are essential components of reading, writing, and other academic competencies useful in the later school years.

The question is not whether academic skills matter; rather it is about both when they matter and what proportion of the curriculum they warrant, especially during the early years.

 INTELLECTUAL GOALS

Intellectual goals, on the other hand, are those that address the life of the mind in its fullest sense, e.g. reasoning, predicting, analyzing, questioning, and the range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities. The formal definition of intellectual emphasizes reasoning, hypothesizing, posing questions, predicting answers to the questions, predicting the findings produced by investigation, the development and analysis of ideas and the quest for understanding and so forth.

An appropriate curriculum for young children is one that includes the focus on supporting children’s in-born intellectual dispositions, their natural inclinations.

An appropriate curriculum in the early years, then, is one that includes the encouragement and motivation of the children to seek mastery of basic academic skills, e.g., beginning writing skills, in the service of their intellectual pursuits.

In-depth investigation projects in preschool and kindergarten children has clearly supported the assumption that the children come to appreciate the usefulness of a range of basic academic skills related to literacy and mathematics as they strive to share their findings from their investigations with classmates and others.

It is useful to assume that all the basic intellectual skills and dispositions are in-born in all children, though stronger in some individuals than in others.

Longitudinal studies of different kinds of preschool curriculum models debunk the seemingly common-sense notion that “earlier is better” in terms of academic instruction.

While formal instruction produces good test results in the short term, preschool curriculum and teaching methods that emphasize children’s interactive roles and initiative may be not so impressive in the short run but yield better school achievement in the long term.

That reflects a finding in a report released earlier this year, titled “Reading in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose,” which says that there is no evidence to support a widespread belief that children must read in prekindergarten or kindergarten to become strong readers and achieve academic success. You can read about that report here.

“Earlier is better” is not supported in neurological research, which does not imply that formal academic instruction is the way to optimize early brain development. Rather, the research suggests that preschool programs are best when they focus on social, emotional and intellectual goals rather than narrow academic goals and provide early experiences that provoke self-regulation, initiative and sustained synchronous interaction in which the child is interactive with others in some continuous process, rather than a mere passive recipient of isolated bits of information for stimulation.


“Intellectual dispositions” of young children may actually be weakened or even damaged by excessive and premature formal instruction and that they are not likely to be strengthened by many of the mindless, trivial if not banal activities frequently offered in child care, preschool and kindergarten programs.