The Science of Learning and Development

Enhancing the Lives of All Young People

Pamela Cantor, David Osher, Pamela Cantor, David Osher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000399776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This essential text unpacks major transformations in the study of learning and human development and provides evidence for how science can inform innovation in the design of settings, policies, practice, and research to enhance the life path, opportunity and prosperity of every child. The ideas presented provide researchers and educators with a rationale for focusing on the specific pathways and developmental patterns that may lead a specific child, with a specific family, school, and community, to prosper in school and in life.

Expanding key published articles and expert commentary, the book explores a profound evolution in thinking that integrates findings from psychology with biology through sociology, education, law, and history with an emphasis on institutionalized inequities and disparate outcomes and how to address them. It points toward possible solutions through an understanding of and addressing the dynamic relations between a child and the contexts within which he or she lives, offering all researchers of human development and education a new way to understand and promote healthy development and learning for diverse, specific youth regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or history of adversity, challenge, or trauma.

The book brings together scholars and practitioners from the biological/medical sciences, the social and behavioral sciences, educational science, and fields of law and social and educational policy. It provides an invaluable and unique resource for understanding the bases and status of the new science, and presents a roadmap for progress that will frame progress for at least the next decade and perhaps beyond.

PART 1
Features and Implications of the Science of Learning and Development

1
MALLEABILITY, PLASTICITY, AND INDIVIDUALITY

How Children Learn and Develop in Context ¹

Pamela Cantor, David Osher, Juliette Berg, Lily Steyer, and Todd Rose

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of knowledge about how children develop into whole individuals, how they become learners, and how contextual factors nourish or hinder their development. This knowledge comes from diverse fields, including neuroscience, developmental science, epigenetics, early childhood, psychology, adversity science, resilience science, the learning sciences, and the social sciences. To date, such knowledge has existed largely in separate fields of research, and has not been integrated such that its profound relevance to developmental processes becomes both visible and directly applicable to the settings in which children grow and learn. As a result, important knowledge remains underutilized, contributing to persistent disparities, challenges, and inadequacies in our education systems, other child-serving systems, and the supports that we provide to families, practitioners, and communities.

The ability to realize the fullest potential of this knowledge is limited, paradoxically, by both the richness of the knowledge itself as well as the particular disciplinary structures, paradigms, and traditional incentives that have supported its creation (e.g., Kuhn, 1970). On the one hand, recent scientific advances include the accumulation of research, theory, and practice-based knowledge about the constructive, socially, and culturally embedded nature of development (e.g., Osher et al., 2016; Overton, 2015); advances in our ability to model idiographic, nonergodic biological, human, and social factors (e.g., Lerner, 2015; Rose, Rouhani, & Fischer, 2013), and advances in the array of methods and measurement tools now available (e.g., Entwisle, Hofferth, & Moran, 2017; van der Maas & Molenaar, 1992). On the other hand, prevailing disciplinary paradigms often reflect and beget delimited questions, measures, epistemes, and frameworks; research teams often lack disciplinary and/or cultural diversity; publishing in one’s own disciplinary journal is often most highly rewarded; and funders often have narrow priorities. As such, there exists a great need to align and synthesize this increasingly vast, field-specific body of knowledge from biology, neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences (e.g., Fedyk, 2015; Wilson, 1999) within a dynamic, holistic, contextualized framework. This integration can be accomplished in a manner that resolves apparent dichotomies, offers additional perspectives on existing research findings (Fischer & Bidell, 2006) and supports further research and development (R&D) efforts to better understand and support the healthy development and learning of all children.

Developmental systems theories (DST; e.g., Ford & Lerner, 1992; Overton, 2015), and associated dynamic systems mathematical models and methods, provide a rich architecture to do so (e.g., Cairns, Elder, & Costello, 1996; Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Mortimer & Shanahan, 2006; Overton, 2015). At its heart, DST is a general theoretical perspective on development, heredity, and evolution that departs from dichotomous views of development (Oyama, Griffiths, & Gray, 2001). It goes beyond “conventional interactionism” between genes and environment, producing a “truly epigenetic view of development” as an ongoing, constructive enterprise between the individual and multiple biological, psychological, and sociocultural systems and agents over time (Griffiths & Hochman, 2015, p. 2; Lickliter & Witherington, 2017). DST draws from numerous diverse fields and the work of many researchers, including those synthesized in this article.

DST enables an understanding of the rich complexity and “pervasive variability” in human development and activity that previous stage-based theories could not, and is a response to the need for a developmental theory that could explain patterns of both stability and variability in children’s performance across diverse contexts (Fischer & Bidell, 2006, p. 314). It is built around two basic principles grounded in relational dynamic systems theory: (a) multiple characteristics of individuals and context collaborate to produce all aspects of behavior and (b) variability as well as stability in performance provide important information for understanding human development (Rose & Fischer, 2009). To generate meaningful, applicable data about patterns of human stability and variability, DST informs and makes use of mathematical methods and models from dynamical systems theory that allow for the study of mutually influential individual-context relations across the life span, with “context,” including all levels of organization ranging from the inter-biological through the designed and natural environment, culture, and history (Overton, 2015).

Woven throughout this article and its companion article, DST provides a useful, flexible framework for seeing how multiple factors—both within an individual and his/her micro- and macro-environments—act together to shape how children learn, change, and systematically grow across the developmental continuum. It enables us to view, as information to study and act upon, the variability in behavior and performance that manifests daily in children and adults. DST underscores such variability as both the norm of human developmental processes and a source of valuable insight about the nature of development itself. It also helps us to better understand the drivers of that variability, explain observed variability in developmental range and the sequencing and pacing of skill acquisition, and identify stable patterns in variability that emerge and generalize over time. Ultimately, DST offers a means to organize and explain how complex relations involving our biological and physiological systems, social environments, and appraisals, interpretations, and internalizations of our experiences shape pathways across life and provide opportunities to optimize development.

Along with its companion article, this article synthesizes salient research regarding learning and development from individual fields, emphasizing where there is a convergence of evidence across multiple disciplines and lines of inquiry as well as where sufficient convergence does not exist. The findings presented in the article come from a variety of correlational, longitudinal, and causal studies; our approach was not to rely solely on causal evidence, but rather to triangulate across multiple sources. First, we solicited and reviewed recommendations for critical works from experts in the identified scientific fields. Next, we systematically and comprehensively identified and reviewed meta-analyses, peer-reviewed literature reviews, and handbook chapters that synthesized research over the last two decades. In some cases, we supplemented these sources with empirical and/or theoretical studies to nuance and validate our findings. Our sources either integrated an area of research with an established body of knowledge or presented findings that have been reproduced in multiple studies. We tempered our language where the literature shows less consistency because the science is more nascent and/or pronounced disagreements remain. To vet our source selections and validate our findings, we sent multiple drafts to experts in relevant fields and conducted two face-to-face invitational meetings (in October 2016 and June 2017) at which we presented the final research report and the companion manuscripts (Berg, Osher, Cantor, Steyer, & Rose, 2016; Osher, Cantor, Berg, Steyer, & Rose, 2017a, 2017b). This article and its companion piece update our findings and situate them within a powerful, unifying framework that integrates bioecological, relational, and contextual factors.

In this article, we first summarize the key findings of our study. We then synthesize and integrate a broad and deep literature of how human beings develop, situating this knowledge within a DST frame. We include the role of multilevel adaptive processes in shaping brain and complex skill development, with specific attention to the integration of affective, cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions; the progressive, holistic, individualized processes of learning, including critical foundational skills ² such as self-regulation; the impact of adversity; and the opportunities suggested by research on attachment, relationships, and resilience. This article concludes with an integrated summary across these lines of research and introduces its companion article.

The companion article, “Drivers of Human Development: How Relationships and Context Shape Learning and Development,” provides a still deeper exploration of context-individual relations within a dynamic developmental systems frame. It focuses on the role that relationships and micro- and macro-contextual relational, cultural, and structural factors play in supporting or undermining the healthy development of children and youth. Specifically, the companion article examines important contexts (e.g., families, schools) and actors (e.g., teachers, peers), the characteristics of such contexts and actors that affect development, social factors that undermine development (e.g., institutionalized racism, poverty, lack of support for adult caregivers), and strategies and contextual supports that can prevent or buffer the effects of those undermining factors. We believe that greater visibility into and understanding of these dynamic, integrated processes, coupled with the availability of new methods and measurement tools, can pave the way for substantial innovations in practice; for the supports we provide to teachers, families, and communities; and for the design of our education and child-serving systems more broadly.

Key Findings

In synthesizing foundational knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines regarding how human beings develop in context, several overarching themes emerge. These themes are captured in Table 1.1.

TABLE 1.1 Summary of key findings.

Scitnce of Learning and Development — Key Findings
I.	Human development depends upon the ongoing, reciprocal relations between individuals’ genetics, biology, relationships, and cultural and contextual influences. Human development occurs within nested, interlinked micro- and macro-ecological systems that provide both risks and assets to development and affect development both directly and indirectly. Epigenetic adaptation is the biological process through which these reciprocal individual-context relations create qualitative changes to the expression of our genetic makeup over time, both within and across generations. Genes are chemical “followers,” not the prime movers, in developmental processes; their expression at the biological level is determined by contextual influences. The development of the brain begins prenatally and continues in one developmental continuum well into young adulthood. Opportunities for change, intervention, and growth exist across the developmental continuum, with particularly sensitive periods in both early childhood and adolescence. Developmental systems theory and associated dynamic systems mathematical models provide a holistic, contextualized framework within which to integrate diverse, field-specific scientific knowledge, enabling a deeper understanding of the developing brain and whole child in context. Intergenerational transmission is rooted in biological and social processes that begin before a child is born. Preventing the negative impacts of adversity can prevent the transmission of adversity and its many risks to development to future generations. Conversely, building individual and environmental assets can promote the intergenerational transfer of adaptive systems and opportunities.
II.	Each individual’s development is a dynamic progression over time. The human brain is a complex, self-organizing system, Neural plasticity and malleability enable the brain to continually adapt in response to experience, which serves as a “stressor” to brain growth across development, Each individual’s development is nonlinear; has its own unique pacing and range; features multiple diverse developmental pathways; moves from simplicity to complexity over time; and includes patterns of performance that are both variable and stable, Whole child development requires the integration and interconnectivity—both anatomically and functionally—of affective, cognitive, social, and emotional processes. Though these processes—particularly cognition and emotion—have historically been dichotomized, they are inextricably linked, co-organizing and fueling all human thought and behavior. The development of complex dynamic skills does not occur in isolation; it requires the layering and integration of prerequisite skills and domain-specific knowledge, as well as the influence of contextual factors, Inter- and intra-individual variability in skill construction and performance— both of which are highly responsive to contextual influences and supports—is the norm. The optimization of development requires an understanding of both stability and variability in growth and performance.
III.	The human relationship is a primary process through which biological and contextual factors mutually reinforce each other. The hu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword I: The Science of Learning and Development: Entering a New Frontier of Human Development Theory, Research, and Application
• Foreword II: We Should Treat Students as Whole People: Brain Science Proves It
• Preface
• Part 1 Features and Implications of the Science of Learning and Development
• Part 2 Implications for Educational Practice of the Science of Learning and Development
• Part 3 Focusing on Equity
• Part 4 Toward the Future of the Science of Learning and Development
• Index