Bad Behavior
Does Not Doom Pupils, Studies Say
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: November 13, 2007
Educators and psychologists have long feared that children entering school with
behavior problems were doomed to fall behind in the upper grades. But two new
studies suggest that those fears are exaggerated.
One concluded that kindergartners who are identified as troubled do as well
academically as their peers in elementary school. The other found that children
with attention deficit disorders suffer primarily from a delay in brain
development, not from a deficit or flaw.
Experts say the findings of the two studies, being published today in separate
journals, could change the way scientists, teachers and parents understand and
manage children who are disruptive or emotionally withdrawn in the early years
of school. The studies might even prompt a reassessment of the possible causes
of disruptive behavior in some children.
“I think these may become landmark findings, forcing us to ask whether these
acting-out kinds of problems are secondary to the inappropriate maturity
expectations that some educators place on young children as soon as they enter
classrooms,” said Sharon Landesman Ramey, director of the Georgetown University
Center on Health and Education, who was not connected with either study.
In one study, an international team of researchers analyzed measures of social
and intellectual development from over 16,000 children and found that disruptive
or antisocial behaviors in kindergarten did not correlate with academic results
at the end of elementary school.
Kindergartners who interrupted the teacher, defied instructions and even picked
fights were performing as well in reading and math as well-behaved children of
the same abilities when they both reached fifth grade, the study found.
Other researchers cautioned that the findings, being reported in the journal
Developmental Psychology, did not imply that emotional problems were trivial or
could not derail academic success in the years before or after elementary
school.
In the other study, researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health and
McGill University, using imaging techniques, found that the brains of children
with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder developed normally but more slowly
in some areas than the brains of children without the disorder.
The disorder, also known as A.D.H.D., is by far the most common psychiatric
diagnosis given to disruptive young children; 3 percent to 5 percent of
school-age children are thought to be affected. Researchers have long debated
whether it was due to a brain deficit or to a delay in development.
Doctors said that the report, being published in The Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, helps to explain why so many children grow out of the
diagnosis in middle school or later, often after taking stimulant medications to
improve concentration in earlier grades.
The findings in the first study grew out of a collaboration among a dozen
leading researchers to reassess data from six large child-development studies
performed since 1970. Each of these six studies tracked hundreds of children
from an early age through elementary school on a number of measures, including
reading and math skills, emotional stability and concentration, or attention.
Most of the studies used teacher reports to gauge students’ emotional and social
progress and their ability to pay attention when asked.
The researchers adjusted the findings to eliminate the influence of factors like
family income and family structure.
While there was little correlation between behavior problems in kindergarten and
later academic success, the researchers did find that scores on math tests at
ages 5 or 6 were highly correlated with academic success in fifth grade.
Kindergarten reading skills and scores on attention measures — where youngsters
with A.D.H.D. falter — also predicted later academic success, but less strongly
than math scores did. The pattern was about the same in girls as in boys, and
for children from affluent families as well as those from lower-income groups.
The authors of the study suggested that preschool programs might consider
developing more effective math training. The findings should also put to rest
concerns that boys and girls who are restless, disruptive or withdrawn in
kindergarten are bound to suffer academically.
“For kindergarten, it appears teachers are able to work around these behavior
problems in a way that enables kids to learn just as much as other kids with
equal levels of ability,” said the lead author, Greg J. Duncan, a professor of
human development and social policy at Northwestern University.
The findings, Dr. Duncan said, have been “very controversial among developmental
psychologists who have seen the paper.”
One who is concerned, Ross Thompson, a professor of psychology at the University
of California, Davis, said it would be a mistake to conclude from the results
that programs to guide preschoolers’ emotional development were not helpful.
“That would be a double whammy for really difficult kids,” Dr. Thompson said,
“to have no help managing their behavior and then — wham! — to get labeled as
problem kids as soon as they enter school.”
In the second study, government psychiatric researchers compared brain scans
from two groups of children: one with attention deficit disorder, the other
without. The scientists had tracked the children — 223 in each group — from ages
6 to 16, taking multiple scans on each child.
In a normally developing brain, the cerebral cortex — the outer wrapping, where
circuits involved in conscious thought are concentrated — thickens during early
childhood. It then reverses course and thins out, losing neurons as the brain
matures through adolescence. The study found that, on average, the brains of
children with A.D.H.D. began this “pruning” process at age 10 ˝, about three
years later than their peers.
About 80 percent of those with attention problems were taking or had taken
stimulant drugs, and the researchers did not know the effect of the medications
on brain development. Doctors consider stimulant drugs a reliable way to improve
attention in the short term; the new study is not likely to change that
attitude.
But the greatest delays in brain maturation were found in precisely those areas
of the cortex most involved in attention and motor control, said the lead author
of the study, Dr. Philip Shaw, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of
Mental Health.
“Those are exactly the areas where we would expect to find differences,” Dr.
Shaw said.
Doctors cannot diagnose attention deficit or any other psychiatric disorder with
imaging technology, in part because brains vary so much that a single series of
images can seldom reveal who has a disorder. The new findings suggest that
searching for a clear abnormality or flaw is the wrong approach, at least for
attention problems.
“The basic sequence of development in the brains of these kids with A.D.H.D. was
intact, absolutely normal,” Dr. Shaw said. “I think this is pretty strong
evidence we’re talking about a delay, and not an abnormal brain.”
About three in four children do grow out of the problem by early adulthood, he
said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/health/13kids.html?_r=1&oref=slogin