Early Child Development and Care

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Effects of the "Bright Start" Program in Kindergarten on Teachers' Use of Mediation and Children's Cognitive Modifiability David Tzuriel a; Shlomo Kaniel a; Monika Zeliger a; Avigail Friedman a; H. Carl Haywood a a Bar llan University, Israel

Online Publication Date: 01 January 1998 To cite this Article: Tzuriel, David, Kaniel, Shlomo, Zeliger, Monika, Friedman, Avigail and Haywood, H. Carl (1998) 'Effects of the "Bright Start" Program in Kindergarten on Teachers' Use of Mediation and Children's Cognitive Modifiability', Early Child Development and Care, 143:1, 1 - 20 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/0300443981430101 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0300443981430101

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Effects of the "Bright Start" Program in Kindergarten on Teachers' Use of Mediation and Children's Cognitive Modifiability DAVID TZURIEL1, SHLOMO KANIEL1, MONIKA ZELIGER1, AVIGAIL FRIEDMAN1 and H. CARL HAYWOOD2 1

Bar llan University, Israel Touro College and Vanderbilt University, USA

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(Received 10 May 1998) Two studies were done to investigate the effects of participation in a cognitive early education program, Bright Start, on teachers' use of mediated learning strategies and on children's cognitive modifiability and task-intrinsic motivation. In Study 1,11 teachers who had been trained in and had taught Bright Start in their classrooms were compared to 11 teachers who had not had this training or experience, using an observation instrument to assess their use of mediational techniques in their classes, following one year of application of the program. There was evidence of greater use of mediation in the Bright Start group than In the control group, especially in the category of Mediation for Transcendence. In Study 2,51 socioeconomically disadvantaged children in kindergarten were randomly assigned to experimental (n=25) and control (n = 26) groups. Two of Bright Start's seven "cognitive small-group" units were systematically applied, for 3 months, with the experimental children while children in a control group received a skills-based but not cognitively oriented program. Both static and dynamic tests were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. Children in the Bright Start group improved their performance on cognitive tasks and showed a higher level of task-intrinsic motivation than did those in the control group. The change scores on dynamic assessment tasks were compared at post-treatment. The experimental group showed an overall higher performance than did the control group at pre- and postteaching phases of the Children's Analogical Thinking Modifiability (CATM) and Complex Figure tests. Significant Treatment X Time (pre- and post-teaching) interactions indicated that the Bright Start group improved its performance from pre- to post-teaching more than did the control group. The results are discussed in relation to developmental aspects and previous findings. Key words: 'Bright Start' program, kindergarten, effects

Even children who have high aptitude for school learning may fail in school; in fact, many such children are classified as learning disabled or mentally retarded (Feuerstein, Rand & Hoflman, 1979; Haywood, 1988; Tzuriel & Haywood, 1992). One explanation of their low school achievement is that they have failed to develop


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specific cognitive operations, especially those associated with Piaget's stage of concrete operations, and that developmental retardation has been associated with inadequate early "mediated learning" experiences (Feuerstein et al., 1979). For the same reason, these children have difficulty transferring what has been learned to other contexts and domains. Several attempts have been made to develop educational programs for preschool children with the aim of preparing diem for successful academic achievement (e.g., Bereiter & Engelman, 1966; Klaus & Gray, 1970; Montessori, 1967; Schweinhart, Barnes & Weikart, 1993). In spite of the proliferation of such programs for kindergarten children, too many children arrive at first grade unprepared to master the primary curriculum, and many of them are assigned to special education classes. Many of tiiese programs fail to take into account die vast individual differences among preschool children, as well as the basic cognitive operations and transfer skills that are essential for school achievement (Haywood, Brooks & Burns, 1986). The uniqueness of Bright Start, which is die focus of die present study, is diat it is based on a comprehensive uieoretical approach synthesized by its audiors from several developmental dieories, mainly from Haywood's transactional view of the nature and development of human ability (Haywood, 1995; Haywood & Switzky, 1992; Haywood, Tzuriel & Vaught, 1992). The Bright Start program, if applied systematically with preschool children, is expected to lead to increased learning effectiveness and more effective basic cognitive processes and diinking skills, and to prepare children for subsequent school learning. Considered by its authors to be an "equal opportunity" program, Bright Start was designed originally for use with normally developing children who were at high risk (because of poverty, ethnic minority status, inner-city residence, and social-cultural disadvantage) of learning failure in the primary grades. It has been used successfully widi such children, as well as those who have mild to severe mental retardation, emotional disturbance, autism and pervasive developmental disorders, neurological and sensory impairments, cerebral palsy, and orthopedic handicaps (Haywood, 1995). The program is focused on precognitive, cognitive, and metacognitive operations that appear to be prerequisite to academic learning in the primary grades. In the following parts of tiiis section Bright Start is described, followed by a discussion of previous research. A very important consideration in the evaluation of any educational program is the question of the extent to which the teachers absorbed die principles of die program and actually applied diem in tiieir classrooms. Failure to assure teachers' actual implementation of die core principles of educational programs has been identified as a major reason for die difficulties encountered in demonstrating die effectiveness of even well-known and respected programs (see, e.g., Haywood, 1992). In Bright Start, as in several otiier structured cognitive curricula, quite special teacher-learner interactions, characterized as "mediated learning," constitute a critical element; in fact, the success of such curricula undoubtedly depends on die teachers' understanding and implementation of die principles and techniques of mediated interactions witii die learners. In tins paper, we address tiiat aspect of die evaluation first, and tiien turn to evaluation of die effectiveness of die program itself. For detailed discussion of mediated learning experience, see Feuerstein and Rand (1974), and of die mediational teaching style, see Haywood (1993).


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DESCRIPTION OF THE BRIGHT START PROGRAM

According to its authors (Haywood, Brooks & Burns, 1986, 1992), Bright Start has the following goals: (a) development and elaboration of basic cognitive functions, especially those necessary to accede to (Piaget's) stage of concrete operations; (b) identification and remediation of deficient cognitive functions; (c) development of task-intrinsic motivation; (d) development of representational thinking; (e) enhancement of learning effectiveness and readiness for school learning; (f) prevention of inappropriate special education placement. Bright Start has five components whose combination is essential for effective implementation of the program: the theoretical base, the mediational teaching style, the seven cognitive "small group" curriculum units, a cognitive-mediational behavior management system, and a program of parent participation. The mediational teaching style is characterized by mediating to the children basic thinking skills, generalized meanings of the children's experiences, and the children's own metacognitive processes. This component is considered by the Bright Start authors as the most important and distinguishing characteristic of teacher's behavior. Teachers, for example, help the children to examine their own interactions and evaluate their compatibility with MLE criteria. During structured activity teachers try to elicit evidence of systematic thinking, use process oriented questioning, and accept as much as possible of the children's responses while challenging their answers and requiring justification. By using a mediational teaching style the teachers facilitate children's understanding of the generalized meaning of their experiences, and foster efficient strategies of gathering information and its elaboration, systematic thinking processes, and accurate communication strategies. The 7 cognitive instructional units, used with the children in small groups, constitute the core of the program. The small group units address fundamental aspects of preschool children's cognitive functioning. Each lesson of these units is taught in groups of 4-6 children, for a period of 15 to 20 minutes each day. During each lesson the teacher encourages discussion about the activities in the lessons. The small group units are Self-regulation, Number Concepts, Comparison, Role Taking, Classification, Sequences and Patterns/Seriation, and Letter-Shape Concepts/Distinctive Features. (See Haywood, 1995 for recent detailed descriptions of the program and its components.)

PREVIOUS RESEARCH

Haywood, Brooks and Burns (1986) studied the efficacy of the Bright Start program with two groups of preschool children. The first group was composed of 27 mentally retarded children with a mean IQ of 58.85, and the second group was composed of 48 "high-risk" children from lowsocioeconomic status (SES) families with a mean IQ, of 89.48. These groups received Bright Start for 7 months and were tested before and after the program on the McCarthy Scale of Children's Abilities, which yields a General Cognitive Index (equivalent to IQ) as well as specific scores on Verbal


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Performance, Perceptual Performance, Memory, and Motor abilities. Other tests included the Stencil Design Test, adapted by Burn (1991) from the Grace Arthur Point Scale of Performance for administration as a static standard test and as a dynamic test. A contrast group of 44 children with a mean IQ of 91.45 from the same SES group as the high-risk children participated in a good but non-cognitively oriented "Project Head Start" program. The mentally retarded and the high-risk Bright Start groups gained 12 and 9 points, respectively, on the General Cognitive Index, as compared to a gain of 1 point in the contrast group. The high risk/Bright Start children showed significant improvement on 3 of the 4 sub-scales of the McCarthy (Quantitative, Perceptual Performance, and Memory), and the retarded children gained significantly on all four (including the Verbal sub-scale). On the Stencil Design Test the retarded children doubled their performance from pre-test to post-test, but the gain in the experimental high risk group was not greater than in the control group. The authors suggested that this task is sensitive to maturational changes and therefore the gains could not be attributed to treatment effects. The McCarthy results were replicated in another study (Samuels & Killip, unpublished) on a socially heterogeneous group of preschool children who were diagnosed as learning disabled, mentally retarded, and emotionally disturbed. The Bright Start children improved their performance significantly from pre- to post-treatment on the McCarthy Scales, on a test of expressive language, and on the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales as compared to a comparison group. Other results indicated that children whose parents participated in the program showed more gains on some measures than did children of nonparticipating parents. Also, a higher percentage of the Bright Start children were assigned to "regular" classes, whereas most of the comparison children were assigned to special education classes. Studies in Belgium (Wamez, 1991; Vanden Wijngaert, 1991) showed remarkable improvement in abstract reasoning among young deaf children and those with significant language delays who had received a few months of twice-weekly Bright Start lessons. These two studies had no control or comparison groups, so their results can be interpreted only within the framework of other studies. Bright Start was systematically applied in Israel, for 10 months, with 82 preschool socioeconomically disadvantaged children while 52 children in a comparison group received a skills-based but not cognitively oriented program (Tzuriel, Kaniel, Kaner & Haywood, 1997). Both static and dynamic tests were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the program along with tests of task-intrinsic motivation and metacognitive activity. A follow-up study was carried out in Grade 1 to study the program's effects on cognitive performance and on achievement tests in Math and Reading Comprehension. The findings showed that children in the experimental group improved their performance on different cognitive tasks and showed more task-intrinsic motivation and metacognitive behavior than did those in the comparison group. The change scores on dynamic assessment tasks were compared for each group at pre-treatment, post-treatment, and follow-up. The follow-up evaluation was carried out one year after the end of the intervention, when the children were in first grade. The objectives of the follow-up study were to investigate the stability of the program's effects one year after it had been finished and the transfer of the acquired


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learning skills to school achievement in the areas of reading comprehension and math, two of the most basic academic areas in primary school. Although lower at pre-test, the experimental group progressively closed the initial gap with the comparison group and showed superiority towards the end of Grade 1. In fact, achievement in Grade 1 Math and Reading Comprehension revealed slight (non-significant) superiority of the experimental over the comparison group, in spite of the relatively limited application of Bright Start, the emphasis on basic readiness skills in the comparison group, and the relatively higher initial cognitive level of children in the comparison group. Bright Start has been applied partially with immigrant and low-SES socially disadvantaged children in France (Cebe & Paour, 1996; Paour, Cebe, Luiu & Lagarrigue, 1993). These children were compared to control children of low- and high-SES groups. The children received only two small group units during the year, Selfregulation, and Comparison. All children were tested extensively at the end of the year with psychometric tests, Piagetian tasks, school achievement tests, metacognitive tasks, and an intrinsic motivation measure. The experimental children scored higher than did the control children of similar SES on almost all the cognitive measures, and on some measures even higher than the control group of children from high-SES families. One of the interesting measures was the number of times in some tests of comparison that responses earned zero scores. The low-SES control children had 60 zero responses as compared to only 5 in the parallel Bright Start group. On the metacognitive tasks the low-SES Bright Start children exceeded the performance of their parallel control children. As for achievement tests, the experimental children showed higher performance on general information, as well as on a reading task, especially when the list was composed of "difficult" words. This last result was interpreted to mean that the cognitive education program enhances application of systematic cognitive strategies that enable children to process novel information rather than merely increasing their store of specific knowledge. In a follow-up done two years after the end of the program, the Bright Start children showed clear superiority over the control children in reading and math, a result that lends support to the hypothesis that cognitive education programs may bring about the development of cognitive processes that are then generalized to the learning of academic subjects.

OBJECTIVES OF PRESENT STUDIES

Two studies were carried out, each with a different set of objectives. The major objective of the first study was to investigate the effects of training in Bright Start on level of the mediational teaching style among teachers. Kindergarten teachers were trained in Bright Start and they then taught the program for one year in their own classrooms. A group of teachers pair-matched to the experimental teachers did not receive Bright Start training, nor did they teach the program in their classes. These teachers were compared to the Bright Start teachers on mediational teaching


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style in two content oriented lessons with a small group of children. The interactions were analyzed by the Observation of Mediation Instrument (Klein, 1988) adapted for both age (children were older than those in Klein's original studies were) and smallgroup interactions. In the second study, a sample of kindergarten children was randomly selected from kindergartens and given two Bright Start units, Classification, and Seriation, for a period of 3 months. The experimental children were compared to a control group who were randomly selected from the same kindergartens but who did not receive the Bright Start program, using both static and dynamic assessment instruments. The control children received a basic-skills program during the experimental period. Given that one of the major goals of the program is to teach "learning to learn," it was essential to use dynamic tests in which change and improvement criteria could be assessed. STUDY 1 Sample

The sample consisted of 11 kindergarten teachers who were trained in Bright Start for one year and assigned to kindergartens designated for implementation of the Bright Start program. The teachers were sampled based on preliminary selection of several kindergartens considered by the Ministry of Education to have a high proportion of socially disadvantaged and high-risk children and therefore requiring application of a cognitive education program. The experimental group was actually composed of all the active teachers in those designated kindergartens that year. A group of control teachers (n= 11) was selected from neighborhoods of similar socioeconomic level. The control teachers were pair-matched to the experimental teachers on the basis of years of education, children's socioeconomic level in kindergarten, and years of experience in teaching. Training of experimental teachers included a preliminary workshop of 20 hours during one week. They then applied the program for 10 months while they received supervised training during the year for one hour each week. A sample of 220 children was selected for the observation of MLE processes at the end of the intervention. Each teacher was asked to choose from her kindergarten 10 children, 5 considered by her as functioning on a low level and 5 as functioning on a high level. Thus, the number of children in each treatment group was 110 (2 x 5 x 11). Each teacher was asked to teach the group a specific subject given to her by the investigators (see Procedure). The teaching sessions were videotaped separately and later on analyzed for mediated learning criteria. Measures The Observation of Mediation Instrument (OMI, Klein, 1988). The OMI is related to

the first 5 MLE criteria: Intentionality and Reciprocity, Transcendence, Communication of Meaning, Mediation of a Feeling of Competence, and Regulation of Behavior. The behavior of teachers and children was coded in relation to each


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other's behavior and the meaning conveyed through their behavior. Each criterion relates to either giving or requesting mediation, and each type can be expressed verbally or non-verbally. The criteria are operationalized in terms of specific behavior that reflects each type of mediation. Klein used a macroanalytic rather than a microanalytic approach to assess the quality of interactions. Her observation method differs from the microanalytic, sequential procedures of observation (e.g., Farran & Ramey, 1980) which usually end up with an overwhelming, unwieldy number of detailed behavior codes that require some later form of data reduction to make them manageable and interpretable. One of Klein's arguments was that previous attempts to measure mother-child interactions (Caldwell, 1967; Clarke-Stewart, 1973; Yarrow, Rubenstein & Pedersen, 1975) "do not offer clear understanding of which behaviors occurring during parent-child interaction represent necessary and sufficient conditions for learning experience" (p. 56). The advantage of the molar observational approach over other approaches (e.g., Farran & Ramey, 1980) is in allowing identification of meaningful patterns of continuity in parents (or teachers') behavior across a developmental continuum. Sroufe (1983) has argued that understanding of continuity in child development is not characterized by mere additions of behavioral components but rather by transformations and epigenesis. The qualitative characteristics of the MLE observation approach do not reflect only a better interaction of reality but also allow comparison of similarities in behavioral patterns across time. This approach coincides with others' emphasis on holism and the need to look at the meaning of behavior within a psychological context rather than isolated incidents (Santostefano, 1978; Sroufe & Waters, 1977). The following operational definitions are used in the OMI: (a) Intentionality and Reciprocity is characterized by the direct efforts of the mediator to focus the child in order to convey information. For example, if the mediator hands a toy to her child it is coded as reflecting intentionality only if it was met by a reciprocal response on the part of the child, (b) Mediation of Meaning is recorded if the mediator or the child uses affect, expresses feelings, and emphasizes the importance of an object, person, or event by labeling it and/or attaching feelings, (c) Mediation of Transcendence is recorded when the mediator refers to the content of an experience by expanding its content, clarification of a process, and explanation of general rules and principles, (d) Mediation of Feelings of Competence is considered when the mediator encourages the child by using words such as "good" or "bravo" in an appropriate timing, by explaining to the child the reasons for her success, and by changing and organizing the task so that the child will experience success. For example, the mediator can organize a task in a graduated way to ensure mastery of task-components and feelings of success (e) Regulation of Behavior is recorded when the mediator tries to regulate the child's behavior by either inhibiting impulsivity or sequencing and organizing events and planning their order before acting upon them. The OMI, originally developed for use with mothers and infants, was adapted in this study for professional teachers and 5-year-old children, by changing the type of stimuli presented and prolonging the interaction time to allow better sampling of the interaction (see Procedure). All teacher-group interactions were videotaped


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Table 1 Reliability Coefficient of MLE and MLE-Total Scores MLE Criteria

Tzuriel & Ernst Tzuriel 6f Weiss Tzuriel & Weitz Tzuriel &f Gerafi Present Study (in press) (1990) (1998) (1998)

Intentionality & Reciprocity Meaning Transcendence Feelings of Competence Regulation of Behavior MLE -Total

.54 .85** .80** .87** .55

.93**

.42 .73* .83** .94*** .85** .93***

.95** .86** .86** .86** .95** .85**

.90*** .85*** .53

.58* .83** .72**

.75*** .78*** .98*** .80*** .81*** .94***

*p