School Influences on Children's Development

Schooling has direct effects on children's educational achievement, their acquisition of literacy, numeracy and scientific knowledge. These basic skills provide the foundation for later "subjects" such as geography, physics and foreign languages. Formal educational qualifications are the key to a child's entry into higher education or training and also employment. The learning of specific knowledge and skills is a direct effect of classroom teaching (Good & Brophy, 1986b). However, social cognitions and feelings are also influenced by school and these may be just as powerful in predicting later outcome as intelligence or school curriculum. Such indirect effects of school are more elusive because they are mediated by children's motivation to learn or avoid learning, their conception of themselves as pupils, and the attributions they create for explaining success and failure. Cognitive and motivational mediators of indirect effects continue to exert influence on individual development outside and beyond school. This selective review considers the evidence concerning direct and indirect effects of school on children's development. Section 1 examines the evidence on the effect of pre-school education on children's academic attainment, social behaviour and cognitions. There are several well designed experimental studies of the impact of preschool education which have included follow-up through young adulthood. These landmark studies employed randomised designs which contrasted the development of children who had and had not experienced pre-school education, thus allowing causal models to be devised which suggest lasting benefits of pre-school education, especially for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Section 2 outlines a few of the major studies on the effect of primary schooling. Research on the effects of primary and secondary education does not withhold education from children, thereby necessitating either natural experiments or correlational designs employing sophisticated statistical techniques, over time, to