What is "Normal"?

The lead article in yesterday's New York Times ("Bad Behavior Does Not Doom Pupils, Studies Say") covered two new scientific studies that may have profound implications for early childhood education. You can connect to the story through this "Articles" post. The story was picked up by numerous other news sources by the evening.

The first study determined that kindergartners who behaved badly were found to do just as well academically in their school careers as those students who did not appear "troubled."

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.

The full article, "School Readiness and Later Achievement" (Developmental Psychology 2007, Vol. 43, No. 6, 1428–1446), is available here.

The second study reported on yesterday presents the case that ADHD has a basis in a slower than the normal development of certain characteristics of the child's brain.

...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.

We'll link to this study when it becomes available.

The implications, of both studies, have yet to be sorted out, but are sure to be much discussed among educators and psychologists.

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.

Once again, we see demonstrated that there's a wide range of "normal."

Your thoughts?