Fighting the war on poverty with high quality early childhood education programs is an issue discussed and supported by numerous contributors to La recherche globale pour l'éducation série. Researchers, educators and policy makers have argued that vital learning can and should begin before age 5. When schooling starts for poor children at kindergarten or first grade they have already missed out on vital opportunities to develop skills needed to help them thrive academically, socialement, physiquement et émotionnellement dans leurs premières années d'apprentissage.
Aujourd'hui, dans La recherche globale pour l'éducation, ce est notre honneur de partager les vues du professeur Dr. Wolfgang Schneider sur l'apprentissage préscolaire et d'autres matières relatives aux systèmes éducatifs allemand et d'autres.
Dr. Wolfgang Schneider est actuellement professeur de psychologie dans le Département de psychologie, Université de Würzburg, Allemagne. His research interests include the development of memory and metacognition, douance et d'expertise, le développement de la lecture et de l'orthographe, as well as the prevention of reading and math difficulties. He was Vice President and President of the German Psychological Society (2000-2004), et également vice-président de l'Université de Würzburg (2004-2009). Il est auteur et co-éditeur d'environ 40 livres, Y compris Memory Development between Two and Twenty, which he co-authored with Michael Pressley. He is currently President of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development (ISSBD).
There are a number of prominent views in the US that pre-school education makes a significant difference in the success of children in primary school. What are the essential elements of this education and what is the impact on child development? Do you believe it can have a significant impact on the achievement gap between affluent and poor children?
Early language skills have to be developed. This is something that the German government is trying to intensify at the moment. We have made some progress regarding the phonological training programs in our country. We also have evidence that training children in phonological awareness helps them to develop the first stages of reading and spelling in school. We have evidence regarding early math training programs too and there are a few rather effective approaches there.
So there has been evidence that early pre-school programs make a difference, particularly for kids at risk. We did a couple of studies with children at risk and compared their improvement with normally developed children. We found that children at risk really can catch up if they have training in the early years. And when they are able to move up to the same level as normal kindergarten kids, they seem to be able to develop well in school.
What is the nature of the kindergarten training programs that you designed and what impact has it had on the mental development of children? Are the programs equally as effective with affluent and poor?
We designed a popular training program with two components. One focuses on phonological awareness in both the broad and narrow sense. Phonological awareness in the broad sense would be something like rhyme identification or syllable segmentation. Phonological awareness in the narrow sense means identification of phonemes in syllables. We found it was possible to get German speaking kindergarten children to identify phonemes in syllables and words, and those kids who satisfied that criteria were able to acquire reading and spelling skills earlier than usual. We combined the phonological awareness training with letter-sound coordination training. And so for some frequently used letters, we taught children how they link to phonemes. This helped the children pick up the letter phonemes training in school. We had control groups in our studies that did not receive phonological training but participated in the usual kindergarten program. Thus we were able to compare kids who were trained and kids who did not participate. We discovered that the trained kids had an advantage by the end of kindergarten and kept that advantage during their first years in school. It’s very important that there was a long lasting effect here. Particularly with kids who had poor initial skills.
En ce moment, nous développons un programme d'éducation précoce pour les enfants de la maternelle pour tous 16 États en Allemagne. Nous finirons notre proposition à la fin de 2012.
Do you think that the PISA test is an effective measure of the full range of mental aptitudes of students?
I don’t think it’s an effective measure of the full range of mental aptitudes. It does give you a good impression of 15-year-old students’ reading skills, math skills and their ability to cope in the science area, but we don’t get any evidence about their intellectual abilities. Dans 2000 we included a measure of non-verbal intelligence in a German extension of the PISA study which compared performance among the 16 German states and which was based on a large sample of about 50,000 étudiants. When we assessed the impact of intelligence on performance in math, reading and science, we figured out that non-verbal intelligence was a strong predictor in most of these tests.
Do you think that in some countries, teaching to the PISA test is now occurring?
I think that this probably does happen and I think that is a problem. Cependant, I also believe that the way the PISA organization process works makes it difficult. In Germany for example, schools are selected at random. And there is almost no chance for a school to escape once it has been selected. I suppose there could be a couple of schools in the sample that have practiced for the test but we don’t think that would apply to the entire sample.
Pensez-vous que certains pays ont des programmes d'enseignement qui offrent une meilleure préparation pour le test que d'autres? Cela vous surprend que “broyeur” countries like South Korea and less structured countries such as Finland both do very well on the test?
As to the impact of different educational systems on the results of the PISA test, it seems very difficult to come up with clear-cut conclusions. You have a diverse group of countries included in the PISA sample with different educational systems, so you have to be very careful when you compare. Cependant, the achievement patterns observed for the various PISA samples that we’ve seen from 2000 à 2009 seem to be rather consistent for most of the countries participating. The countries at the top for reading and math, such as Finland and the Asian countries, are famous for their superior curricula in these domains and their competent training programs. So their excellent performance does not seem to be surprising.
The Finnish educational system really focuses on all children, including the weak children, dans les salles de classe. En conséquence, la variance de réalisation chez les enfants finlandais est beaucoup plus petite que la variance des enfants dans la plupart des autres pays. Donc, la Finlande est réussie avec apportant tous leurs enfants à un niveau élevé, de nombreux autres pays ne atteignent pas.
Quand vous regardez les procédures d'instruction dans un pays comme la Corée du Sud, you see that there is a lot of drilling and practice and very heavy workloads on the students. This is something we do not have in Germany. So I think the quantity of instruction in South Korea makes a big difference here. In former times, Benjamin Bloom in the US already noticed that the quantity of instruction and the time given to reach a criterion is usually a good indicator of student outcomes.
What are the key strengths and weaknesses of the German educational system as you see it?
In Germany we have different curricula in 16 different states. A couple of states, including Bavaria and Saxony, seem to do very well and may even compare with the Finnish achievement scores. The teachers follow the curriculum pretty strictly, which seems to make an impact. We have systematic findings that show while some of our states perform very well others perform poorly. Each state has its own policy. The policies differ a lot, and the states are not able to agree on a common curriculum. Our federal ministry of education has tried to change that but it is difficult as our law states that education must be linked to the state policy.
Quel est le mélange des arts dans les programmes habituelle en Allemagne? Comment faire le rôle de voir des arts dans l'éducation primaire et secondaire?
I believe the arts are underestimated in our system. Whenever teachers have to cut hours in a curriculum, the arts get cut first. We have to change that. I believe the arts are important. Je pense que nous devrions commencer une éducation artistique au début de l'école primaire, which is not the case now. The major argument against the arts is always that kids shouldn’t do too much in the early years of their education where the emphasis must be on reading, writing and math. Thirty years ago this was not the case as music education started earlier. Now that has changed and it is not a good development.
Photos courtesy of Professor Dr. Wolfgang Schneider.
Dans La Recherche globale pour l'éducation, joindre à moi et leaders d'opinion de renommée mondiale dont Sir Michael Barber (Royaume-Uni), Dr. Michael Bloquer (États-Unis), Dr. Leon Botstein (États-Unis), Professeur Clay Christensen (États-Unis), Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond (États-Unis), Dr. Madhav Chavan (Inde), Le professeur Michael Fullan (Canada), Professeur Howard Gardner (États-Unis), Professeur Yvonne Hellman (Pays-Bas), Professeur Kristin Helstad (Norvège), Jean Hendrickson (États-Unis), Professeur Rose Hipkins (Nouvelle-Zélande), Professeur Cornelia Hoogland (Canada), Mme. Chantal Kaufmann (Belgique), Dr. Eija Kauppinen (Finlande), Le secrétaire d'Etat Tapio Kosunen (Finlande), Professor Dominique Lafontaine (Belgique), Professeur Hugh Lauder (Royaume-Uni), Professeur Ben Levin (Canada), Professeur Barry McGaw (Australie), Shiv Nadar (Inde), Professeur R. Natarajan (Inde), Dr. PAK NG (Singapour), Dr. Denise Pape (États-Unis), Sridhar Rajagopalan (Inde), Dr. Diane Ravitch (États-Unis), Sir Ken Robinson (Royaume-Uni), Professeur Pasi Sahlberg (Finlande), Andreas Schleicher (PISA, OCDE), Dr. Anthony Seldon (Royaume-Uni), Dr. David Shaffer (États-Unis), Dr. Kirsten immersive, (Norvège), Chancelier Stephen Spahn (États-Unis), Yves Thézé (Lycee Francais US), Professeur Charles Ungerleider (Canada), Professeur Tony Wagner (États-Unis), Sir David Watson (Royaume-Uni), Professeur Dylan Wiliam (Royaume-Uni), Dr. Mark Wormald (Royaume-Uni), Professeur Theo Wubbels (Pays-Bas), Professeur Michael Young (Royaume-Uni), et le professeur Zhang Minxuan (Chine) alors qu'ils explorent les grandes questions d'éducation de l'image que toutes les nations doivent faire face aujourd'hui. La recherche globale pour l'éducation communautaire page
C. M. Rubin est l'auteur de deux séries en ligne largement lecture pour lequel elle a reçu une 2011 Upton Sinclair prix, “La recherche globale pour l'éducation” et “Comment allons-nous savoir?” Elle est également l'auteur de trois livres à succès, Y compris The Real Alice au pays des merveilles.
Commentaires récents