Education and cognitive development: A natural experiment

Using an arbitrary cutoff date, school districts regulate which children will begin school. This "nat-ural experiment " was used to examine effects of age- and schooling-related influences on memory and 3 levels of phonological segmentation in children who just made vs. missed the cutoff. Group comparisons over time permitted assessment of schooling influences and Age X Experience interac-tions. Short-term memory was enhanced by grade one schooling, with no evidence of an Age X Schooling interaction. For phonological segmentation, both schooling- and age-related influences appeared, with unique patterns for each level of segmentation. The cutoff method proved sensitive to important changes in cognitive skills during this age period. In many Western societies, the period from late preschool through early elementary school is characterized by wide-spread, perhaps qualitative, shifts in children's cognitive, social, and moral functioning. Collectively, the changes have been re-ferred to as the 5-7 shift (White, 1965). In the intellectual realm, children's thinking has been described as becoming more logical (Piaget, 1960) and more abstract (Rogoff, 1981)