Raising and Levelling the Bar: A Collaborative Research Initiative on Children’s Learning, Behavioural, and Health Outcomes

This collaborative research program will bring together a multi-disciplinary team of researchers to concentrate their efforts on a single question: “How can we raise and level the bar?”, or specifically, “How can we improve children’s cognitive, behavioural and health outcomes, while reducing inequalities associated with family background?” The research will be carried out by a research team comprised of five senior scholars and 21 new scholars who are members of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s New Investigators Network (CIAR-NIN). ... Read more


This section of the proposal describes the key issues underlying each of the five strategies pertaining to raising and leveling the learning bar.

• Safeguard the Healthy Development of Infants (Team Leader: Richard Tremblay).
• Strengthen Early Childhood Education (Team leader: Clyde Hertzman).
• Improve Schools and Local Communities (Team leader: Douglas Willms).
• Reduce Socioeconomic Segregation and the Effects of Poverty (Team leader: Noralou Roos).
• Create a family-enabling society (Team leader: Anne H. Gauthier).

Learning to read is the most significant academic achievement of early schooling and the foundational skill for all future scholastic endeavours. Yet 20% of students encounter great difficulty in learning to read and another 20% do not read well or quickly enough to enjoy reading, or to engage in independent reading.

The Canadian Research Institute for Social Policy, the New Brunswick Department of Education, school districts and teachers across New Brunswick propose to stop the cycle of reading failure by designing and implementing a research-oriented, longitudinal, and sustainable preventive early intervention reading model... Read more

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Safeguard the Healthy Development of Infants (Team Leader: Richard Tremblay)

Recent evidence from neurobiology has shown that brain development from conception to age one is rapid and extensive, much more so than previously believed, and is heavily influenced by the infant’s environment. A newborn has billions of neurons, which, during the course of development, form connections called synapses. These synapses are formed in response to environmental stimuli, and while this is occurring, many of the neurons that are not being used are pruned away. This process of synapse formation and neuron pruning is often referred to as the “sculpting” or “wiring” of the brain. These recent findings from neurobiological research provide a powerful argument for intervening early, because they suggest that care and stimulation during the early years are critical to establishing a foundation for learning, behaviour, and health over the life cycle. Moreover, there is mounting evidence that population interventions, such as home visitation programs, combined with parent training and support have long-lasting effects on a wide range of children’s outcomes

The research under this program will focus on two questions:

1. What risk and protective factors during pregnancy and infancy best predict the developmental trajectories that lead to good performance at school entry?
2. What kinds of interventions are successful in improving the developmental health of infants?

Strengthen Early Childhood Education (Team leader: Clyde Hertzman).

Most children say their first few words at around 12 months of age. It is an exciting time, as it is soon followed with more words, and then an exponential growth in vocabulary. However, the pace of development differs among children, and depends on their environment. In Canada, the number of children being cared for outside the home in various types of care arrangements has been increasing steadily for the past 25 years. Research on the quality of early childcare provision has emphasized three factors: low child-to-adult ratios, highly educated staff with specialized training, and the availability of facilities and equipment to provide stimulating activities. It is these dimensions of quality that distinguish “day-cares” with a custodial function from early childhood development (ECD) centres that emphasize growth in children’s development.

The research on early childhood has not adequately explicated what “quality care” is, or determined the critical elements of quality learning environments for pre-school children. We do not know the extent to which we can alter growth trajectories: for example, is it feasible to identify children who are growing at a rather slow pace and intervene in a significant way to increase their rate of growth?

The work under this theme has three guiding questions:

1. What is the earliest age at which one can reliably detect differences in the developmental trajectories of pre-school children’s language and cognitive skills, and their behavioural development?
2. What are the critical elements of a quality learning environment during the early years?
3. Can we alter growth trajectories by altering environments?

Improve Schools and Local Communities (Team leader: Douglas Willms).

The influential 1966 report on educational inequality in the United States (Coleman et al., 1966) suggested that “schools do not make a difference”: the researchers found that there was relatively little variation in schooling outcomes that was attributable to the schools children attended, after account had been taken of the socioeconomic background of the children’s parents. Their report spawned numerous studies of school effectiveness aimed at uncovering whether schools did indeed differ in their “added value”. During the 1970s and 1980s, researchers made marked improvements in the quality of educational achievement tests, sampling methods, and the statistical models used to study school achievement.

During the 1990s researchers placed greater emphasis on understanding why schools differed in their added value. The research showed that some of the differences among schools were attributable to measurable aspects of "school climate" such as teacher-student relations and the disciplinary climate of the school, which can be influenced by teachers' and principals' policies and practices. It also indicated that student performance was higher in schools that practiced heterogeneous grouping and team teaching and in schools where there was a higher level of parental involvement.

At this juncture, we need a much better understanding of the nature of children’s growth trajectories in academic achievement. The research also needs to be broadened to include other schooling outcomes, such as student engagement in school, behavioural disorders, and physical and mental health. We also need analyses that describe variation among jurisdictions in their growth trajectories: for example, do students in provinces that have consistently scored lower in studies like PISA fall behind gradually year to year, or are there particular stages in the schooling career when they fall behind. Also, relatively few of the programs aimed at restructuring schools have been subject to careful evaluation, and we do not know the extent to which children’s growth trajectories can be deflected through efforts to change school structure and teacher practice.

Three of the guiding questions of this program of research are:

1. To what extent do schools and provinces differ in their growth trajectories of schooling outcomes in academic achievement, student engagement, and behaviour?
2. What are the critical elements of school reform that alter children’s growth trajectories?
3. When, and for how long, should one intervene to alter children’s growth trajectories?

Reduce Socioeconomic Segregation and the Effects of Poverty (Team leader: Noralou Roos).

One of the core findings of the PISA study is that in every country studied there was a “contextual effect” on student performance associated with the average socioeconomic status of the school, over and above the effects associated with students’ individual family socioeconomic status. Schools with higher average socioeconomic status tend to have several advantages associated with their context.

In Canada, as in many countries, children are segregated along socioeconomic lines within cities due to residential segregation. Also, in many school districts, children are assigned to particular schools according the school “catchment area” in which they live. However, the geographical boundaries of these areas are not necessarily drawn with a view to achieving a heterogeneous mix of students across schools. Some school districts have “open enrollment” policies that allow parents to choose schools outside their designated catchment area. Other types of school choice programs, such as language-immersion programs, or the promotion of magnet schools and charter schools, may also contribute to socioeconomic segregation. Also, relatively little work has examined the contextual effects associated with behavioural or health outcomes, such as conduct disorders or depression, and we do not have a good understanding of the schooling processes that give rise to contextual effects. If schooling processes such as the disciplinary climate of the school or teacher-student relations are the primary mediating factors, then contextual effects may be even stronger for health and behavioural outcomes. Moreover, we do not know the extent to which the segregation of children within communities affects schooling outcomes or other kinds of skill development. For example, research based on the NLSCY indicates that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to participate in arts and recreation programs.

Our work under this theme will examine the effects of socioeconomic segregation versus integration, and more broadly, the effects of social inclusion. The guiding questions for this theme are:

1. To what extent does the average ability or socioeconomic status of the school or classroom a child attends affect his or her growth trajectories in cognitive, behavioural, and health outcomes?
2. What are the mechanisms by which poverty and welfare status in particular become markers of inferior outcomes of children and youth?
3. To what extent and under what conditions do mainline arts and recreation programs attempt to include marginalized children into their programs?
4. What are the critical life skills that help youth cope with segregated environments?

Create a family-enabling society (Team leader: Anne H. Gauthier).

The primary message of the NLSCY research on vulnerable children is that the quality of children’s environments within their families, their schools, and their local communities, has a very strong effect on children’s cognitive and behavioral development, and on the prevalence of childhood vulnerability.

At the outset of the research on childhood vulnerability, we hypothesized that low socioeconomic status would be strongly related to childhood outcomes, and that most of its effects would be mediated by family environmental factors such as parental depression, family functioning, parenting style, and the extent to which parents engaged with their children. However, the findings clearly indicated that the relationships between SES and these environmental factors were relatively weak; SES and environment acted almost independently of each other in their effects on childhood outcomes. These findings raise several questions relevant to the overall question, “How do we raise and level the bar?” At the macro level, we want to understand how these family factors vary among provinces and among communities. Thus, an important question to begin research in this area is:

• Can these factors explain some of the geographic variation in childhood outcomes observed in PISA and the NLSCY?

At a micro level, we need a better understanding of the factors that shape family life. One way into questions about family life is through a detailed study of how parents and children spend their time. Time use is related to each of the family environmental factors, and there is considerable evidence that parents’ time use is related to children’s developmental outcomes. Moreover, time use is a construct that can be measured reliably, and is amenable to intervention. Therefore, the defining questions for this strategy also include:

• What is the amount and the nature of time spent with children by mothers and fathers?
• What are the determinants of children’s structured and unstructured time?
• What roles do income, parental education, parenting style, and neighborhood environment play in shaping the time use of mothers and fathers?