 Hi, my name is Tracy, and this is a video on the concept of ages versus stages and prior experience and which really has more influence on learning outcomes. I'm really happy to share some ideas with you today and open up the debate about these questions. A lot has been focused on related to developmentally appropriate activities and we wanted to just sort of bring that out into the open and talk about how we use labels to maybe categorize people in perhaps not the most accurate ways and so to do that we're going to be looking at what we mean by ages, chronological ages, what we mean by stages of development because that's used kind of broadly and very generically and we want to give it some clear definitions here. And then we're going to talk about the role of prior experience as it builds the brain, how it is that people neuro constructively design their own understanding of the world. And then we're going to take that information just throw out a really juicy question, what does that mean then about the way we organize school education based on age groupings. So to begin with ages, where does this concept come from? And there's a really very interesting and quite simple explanation of looking at chronological age, how do we measure that? We also think about age, age of people when we think about how they should act and behave. We also look at mental age and behavior, but we know there's old people who act kind of young and young people who act kind of old. We also know that age has been used to sort of create a formula around how smart you should be, you know, their understanding of the world divided by your absolute chronological age is kind of interesting and so we think that the concept of age is very important to understand maybe a little bit more deeply than we typically do when we talk about the use of age-appropriate activities. Chronological age is basically nothing more according to Columbia University based on, you know, just how the earth, you know, orbits the sun. And so basically how long it takes and how we measure a year. And we use the Julian calendar and how there's 12 months and on and on and on. But this has implications for education. We do have school starts. We consider, you know, what is an appropriate entry to school to kindergarten? We've talked a lot about the great importance of high quality early childhood education having a great impact. You know, lousy early childhood education has no impact. And so what is really important is the quality of education, but the age that we began education, I think it's worth looking at an international comparative view of how we look at school start ages. If you look at the OECD country, you'll see that pretty much by the age of five, pretty much everyone goes to school all around the world. And the U.S. is about 93 percent of kids are in school, candidates 96 percent. And the OECD average for all the countries is 97. And for several of its countries, it's really 100 percent by the time they're five years older in a school situation. But if you clock it back a little, you know, if you look at age four, only 88 percent are going to school. And in age three, only 74 percent. And then age two, it's only 43 percent. And kids who are pretty much newborns, you don't get them a whole lot of them in school. Only about 19 percent are in school. And it's an absolutely fascinating look when you see the kinds of policies that different countries have to either incentivize that parents stay at home with the kids in the early years, or they actually have school systems set up very, very early on. And so one of the interesting things in the United States is that we have 50 different, you know, educational systems depending on the state you're in. So there is no regulated suggested start date, but it's very interesting to see that all around the world, more or less by the time you're five-ish, you begin your formal education, which is pretty interesting. And this idea started in the states way back with Horace Mann when he made a proposal that, you know, we should put a tax and everybody should get to go to school, which was a very radical idea at the time that everybody could and should go to school. And so this changed what had been happening up until that stage. Up until about then, we had one-room schoolhouses, which had a lot of mixed ability age groups. So he had people, you know, little Johnny at nine years old and his 14-year-old sister, and they would learn to read together, independent of their age. So this brought into question, you know, this was a fascinating idea that Horace Mann had, let's all go to school. But then what do you do with all these kids, right? And how do we divide them up? And so if you were to have asked Aristotle thousands of years ago, he would not have divvied up people by ages but rather by their cognitive abilities. And so this really throws into the question the way we use educational policies and practices. And so we think that there's, you know, there can be some huge drawbacks in using the kids' date of production, as Sir Ken Robinson likes to put it, as the one way that we decide which school groups they go into. But it has some real benefits in terms of planning. We know how many kids will be in, you know, a certain age group. So it's, you know, easy to guesstimate how many should be in a certain grade. But this has some drawbacks. And it also is meeting with a lot of resistance nowadays, where you have a lot more mixed age classrooms, especially at the university level. And so trying to figure out what the best way is to run education based on ages has proven to be a much more complicated problem than we thought. So keep that in mind. Hold that in your head while we talk about stages, stages of development. Stages of human development have typically been divided into physical development, psychosocial emotional development, language development, and then cognitive stages of development, which tends to draw from all of the other areas. But in terms of physical development, we have hundreds of years of really great studies that show even, you know, pre-birth, pre-natal development in the womb. What does a person look like? How does the body grow over time? That's really, really well established. And we also even have some really great hints as to the risk and protective factors of getting kids off to a good start when they begin their educational journey. What is it that a person, a human being needs to grow well? So physical growth is something that we know quite a lot about. Psychosocial emotional development has really blossomed since the 50s when it began to be a separate branch of development to see how people manage their emotional states, how they work in social groups. And so there's several theories that are out there about social emotional development. And they have a huge range of different theories that have started back from the 50s all the way until today. We have a lot of new theories coming out about social emotional development. One thing that is clear throughout all of those different theories is that people actually tend to get better at emotional intelligence. They become to know themselves better emotionally over time, even when they stop learning other types of things. So even after you finish going to school, you actually keep getting to know yourself a lot better. And so it's pretty interesting, but all of these theories point to the idea that know thyself is a lifelong quest. And so getting to know yourself socially emotionally actually does take a lot of time. In terms of language development, another area where we have a huge amount of research that's already been done. It's really clear what key milestones are for kids. When should they Google Gaga? When should they begin to have two, three word sentences and how they can label and categorize things? That is really, really clear. So we see language development and we've used language in quite a number of ways to be a proxy for intelligence. So there's no intelligence test in the world that does not measure language. And so language is really a key element here. We also know from philosophy and linguistics that there's different ways that people sort of hold up language to this higher level when it comes down to cognitive abilities, basically because all cognitive abilities are mediated through language. Wittgenstein once said the limits of my language or the limits of my world, which pretty much means, you know, the more vocabulary I have to sort of describe all of these things in the world around me, the better off I will be, the more intelligent I might seem, right? And also in other cases, you know, there's this hierarchy of linguistic structures. So you learn to perceive the world, then you can learn to talk. And reading and writing can happen in parallel, but typically reading and then writing and basically looking at written expression as being one of these highest forms of intelligence that we can play to the rest of the world. And so there's a lot of information out there about linguistic development as a way that people grow. There's also research, a lot of it controversial, but looks at the way that early language development in the early years has a huge implication because it typically correlates with intellectual trajectories. And so really super sad news that Hart and Risley found is that basically kids who are growing up in poverty or in situations of risk where parents might have lower education, no books in the house are not stimulated through language, you know, reading storybooks at night or things like that. Basically here, they have heard been exposed to 30 million words fewer than kids who are in upper middle class neighborhoods, who do have books at home, who have parents who are educated. And so this is really influential in the fact that we know that many kids, many kids start off school at a disadvantage and it's not any fault of their own. It's not that they can't catch up, but they have been exposed less. They have less words. They are less able to express themselves and linguistically they might be developmentally behind. This gets us into cognitive development, which uses information from these other areas, but it also puts a big emphasis on the way your brain is actually pulling all of these different things together. And there's many, many theorists that are out there by Gotsky, Bruner, Piaget, all of these are well known cognitive developmental theorists and they have different types of theories. Jean Piaget looked at different stages of cognitive development going from sensor motor, preoperational, concrete, operational, formal operational structures and looked at this very clear to him hierarchy or trajectory of learning, how a kid would go from the very earliest of age to coordinate with the senses and have symbolic thinking, then be able to attach concrete ideas to situations and then have theoretical or hypothetical ideas, imagination, right? So while Piaget's ideas are some of the strongest and we still structure a lot of our educational experiences around them, there's others, for example, Maria Montsori, who really took Piaget's work and thought of it in slightly a different way and looked at the child in their context, how they interact with their world around them and how does that actually influence then what they are able to develop in their in their minds and brains. And so giving them freedom with limits was one way that they could explore the world. So this was a different way to look at enhancing cognitive development by giving a kid's choice. Other theorists like Vygotsky, always spoken about also in pairs with Piaget, he had a really amazing theories about the zone of proximal development that we, you know, putting a child into a situation where it's just a little bit harder than he can manage, but also giving him that scaffolding so that he could actually reach what something he couldn't yet do was key to development, just giving him these key scaffolds along the way would help him grow. And that depends a lot on social interactions with others, people being able to contribute to that growth by giving you what you need to be able to have that scaffolding to build up and fill in those gaps of prerequisite knowledge so that you could learn the new information, right? But he also thought that this was your cognitive development was really greatly tied to your social context and the historical implications and the culture within which you lived had a huge influence on how well you could learn. And then all of this comes together through thought and language and the way you disentangle, you know, is thinking only through language was a huge piece of this. And so Vygotsky's work was heavily influential throughout the 70s and 80s. And many other people spend a lot of time comparing these early theorists against one another, you know, how Vygotsky and Piaget actually thought of learning or language or growth or knowledge, you know, these different types of developmental processes, which is really fascinating to see how close they were, but how they differed on very fundamental things. For example, in terms of language, you know, Vygotsky thought that speech was social, you know, and that people reacted to what was, you know, happening on the outside and they were able to then express it. And then Piaget thought, well, it's inside. It's my thinking that becomes auditory, that becomes speech. And so these very small differences really have driven what is now looked at through neuropsychology, trying to understand what's really going on in the brain, in a child's brain as they develop. And so these developmental theories broaden out, especially in the 60s, 70s, 80s with Jerome Bruner's work, trying to understand how do you do this to scale? What does this mean in school context? And he talked a lot about a spiral curriculum, about how it's kind of like, you know, two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. And that really nurtured other people's thinking about how education really did work, how do people get exposed to things, experiment with things and then consolidate them and then move on. And especially people like Kurt Fisher, Harvard, who started the International Mind-Brain Education Society, thought of this web of skills. You know, how you have to learn something, you seem to advance a lot, but then you have to sort of backtrack and consolidate, and then you're able to move forward. So it's a big dance of going a few steps forward and then a step back. But it's never a straight line. It's not like the teacher teaches something and then it's learned, but there has to be this back and forth and this connections in the brain. Everything you learn passes through the filter of prior experience. So how is it that we're using this dynamic exchange between what I already know and what's coming at me new to negotiate a new way of understanding things and creating those new neural connections in the brain? This gets us to this last idea then of prior experience. All new learning passes through the filter of prior experience. So everything that you hear and know and see has to go through your brain in this basic way. You pay attention to the world, you perceive it through some of your senses, right? Then you have to think about this and what it does, it goes up, travels up through the brainstem and the first stop that that signal makes are in hubs that are related to memory, either emotional memory, semantic memories, but they pass through the mingala, go to the cantalobes, return back to the hippocampus within a split second, but checking with memory systems to figure out, do I already know something about this? Because the brain is so smart, the brain is trying to save you energy because it takes a lot of energy to make a new connection. But if you already know something about something that you've just been exposed to, you can reinforce a connection which takes a lot less energy. So if I already know something, it just latches on, adds on a bunch more glial cells, makes the speed of connection faster for what was already known, or it forges a whole new neural synapse, it forges a whole new connection. And then it begins again. And so this leads us to this understanding that all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience. What you already know influences what you can know, which in turn means that the more you know about everything in the world, the greater possibilities of connecting to something you already know. This really elevates what we mean by prior experience. So oftentimes in school, you're told stimulate the children's prior knowledge about things. Little did you know that this saves the brain a whole lot of energy in doing that. And so helping kids connect information, that only makes it an authentic experience, but it also gives them some neural connections that may already exist to lean into. So here's another way of looking at it. You perceive the world, you have sensory perception. There's this short term number of items that you can remember in a small amount of time, but typically you can forget a lot of stuff. So not everything you're exposed to are you able to work into memory. But then it can go, if it gets into working memory, you have the phonological loop in the visual sketch pad and episodic buffer as badly pointed out to us and the central executive functions that decide what to keep or not. If you're lucky enough to get into long-term memory, then you can have new learning. And you need to rehearse it in order to retain it. Use it or lose it, right? And so prior experiences, creating the situations under which prior experience can even be a thing is very complex in the brain. But if you can use your prior experiences, that's definitely the shortest road to learning. If you already have an experience, what you're basically doing is fortifying this myelin sheath here that goes between these different neural connections, the neural synapses or the dendrites here. And if you have to forge a whole new synapse, because you don't know anything about it, what you're actually doing is looking into some of these dendrites and creating a new synapse based on that new experience that you were exposed to through that stimuli that you experienced from the outside world or from your internal reflection on it. This really basically is about constructing the brain, how do you neuro-constructively design the brain? And the key idea here is that basic information has to be in place before you can get to these higher order concepts. This is why if you know how to add, I can teach you how to subtract in like 10 steps. Super easy. But if you have gaps in your knowledge of addition and I'm trying to teach you subtraction, I don't have a firm base onto which I can actually hook that information. So prior experience is huge in new learning. And this is built off of Piaget's and Bygotsky's idea of constructivism, how do we build our own worlds? But it's actually now physiologically speaking, something we can talk about in the physical neuro-constructivism, right? And when we talk about prior experience, we can divide this in a couple of different ways. One is that the brain is always looking for patterns. What do I already know about this? What have I seen that is similar? This is why teaching through analogies is a wonderful way to introduce new ideas if the person has nothing to grasp onto. If you use analogical thinking, at least they have some pattern of experience that they can use to hang that new information on. So once you have that pattern going, that's wonderful. But the brain is also super-prime to look for novelty. What is different about this information? And if the differences are slight enough, like Bygotsky pointed out with the zone of proximal development, if we can scaffold it, that we're just missing one little piece and that's new, but that helps facilitate the speed with which we can grasp that new knowledge because we can point out what's novel and that novelty then is baked into that prior knowledge. What can I fit that into? But how does that fit with something I already know? So novelty is a great way to grab attention, but it also can be used to facilitate new learning if it's scaffolded well. So if we think about this in summary, ages and stages and prior experiences are all great ways to think about organizing schools and school systems and education and textbooks, et cetera, but you gotta admit, you know, ages is a pretty lame way to think about dividing kids. Cognitive stages of development are pretty important and interesting, but there is nothing more important or nothing that predicts a child's ability to learn new things more than prior experience. So prior experience is really, you know, the winner here. And if it is, that makes us think, you know, how should we set up schools? Especially if we know human variability exists, right? It's crazy to say that seven-year-olds should be able to do acts when one kid might be seven years old and one day and one is seven years old, 11 months and 20 days old. Their variability is huge and their prior experiences are much more important than that age label that we've given them. Some of those kids, for example, we presume seven-year-olds should be able to learn how to read. Well, what if one of those seven-year-olds came from a home that was rich and loving and full of reading and was read to every day of his life and has a ton of little books in his own little library already and that other kid shows up to school maybe even older than him but has never seen a book, never gone to a library. Nobody's read him a book in his life and here he is now at school with his other kid and you're supposed to be at the same level cognitively? They're not, they're definitely not and it's not anybody's fault. It's just that one kid has less prior experience and contact with literacy than the other and so we need to be able to fill in those gaps, right? So since variability is real, this gives us a huge question mark over what does it mean to be school-ready? When is that three, four, five, six-year-old ready to go to school? So many things influences where they came from, what their home environment was like, what are the kind of life experiences have they had? Do they have siblings? All of these things play into this and so it's not very easy to tell people when a kid should start school and also depends on your value systems and it also depends on your economic situation. Some people put their kids into daycare the time, they're one years old because they need to go to work. That could be a wonderful experience if it's a high quality head start program, fantastic. The kids will get a lot of good stuff out of it but if it's a poorly run program, it can be pretty devastating to that kid to have such a bad start in an educational environment and so hopefully, and it also depends on our goals. If we're looking for greater socialization, there's nothing better than being in a wonderful school environment but if you're looking for one-on-one reading time, there's nothing like a home so it depends on what we mean by ready to learn. So we have to be very, very, very careful when we talk about age appropriate or when school readiness is tied to age. What does this mean? I mean, going into multi-age groupings like Socrates had would be kind of brilliant, wouldn't it? And there are schools that actually do this and that's been pretty successful. You all know about the Montessori school systems which typically have age groupings, three, four, five-year-olds together. You sort of group up to three years range but now this goes on and on. We now have middle school, high school and adult learning that can occur by ignoring age groupings and looking more towards individual interests, their cognitive stages where they're ready to learn the information. So this leads us to a recommendation of saying that ages should, you know, it's useful information. It's a great benchmark but it should not be the determinant of when a kid begins school or what grade he should be in. And we really need to rethink the way that textbooks use the term age appropriate when they design a curriculum. We should really be looking at this neural trajectory, this natural hierarchy of subjects in the brain as opposed to looking at an age group to define those kinds of things. My strong opinion on that, okay? So past experience matters as much or probably more than ages and stages. And we really do need to take that into consideration. What does that kid already know? This is why we say you can't teach him if you don't know him. The more you know what that kid had or didn't have as far as input before he got to you, we'll make a big difference in what you need to do to shore up his skills, get those prerequisites skills going, have that strong base so that you can have that higher order thinking going on. Okay? So we looked at this idea of chronological ages versus stages of development and all of their different shades there and talked about the role of prior experience. And I leave with you this big question. How should schools really be designed then if we know there's such a huge variation within ages and stages? Thank you so much for listening and I hope you guys will take the time. There are several videos that are suggested here to have a look at what we mean by early development and also into the old aging brain as well as resilience and wellbeing, social, emotional development for kids. Do take some time to have a look at those extra videos there and don't forget to do your reflection. Thanks a lot.