PATHWAYS TO LITERACY

该申请建议在更大的NICHD早期儿童保育研究中进行特定的子研究。这项拟议的研究将考察儿童中期识字和认知发展的性质和来源。利用从生态学角度采用的复杂、多层次、互动的框架，该研究将专门关注儿童、家庭和学校教育因素在塑造一至五年级认知和识字技能发展方面的独立和联合影响。拟议研究的一个独特特点是努力开发分析和方法战略，以便在线捕捉多种来源对认知结果的影响的相互作用。发展“路径”或“轨迹”的概念被详细阐述，并被用作描述发展变化的错综复杂的性质以及在早期学校岁月中塑造它的力量的框架。此外，该提案试图利用路径概念来阐明认知发展中当前的三个重要主题：领域专一性、稳定性和变化以及风险弹性。在每一种情况下，绘制随时间推移的发展轨迹将有助于理解哪些认知和识字技能作为上学经历的函数而发展而不是(领域特异性)，哪些技能表现出从学年初到学年后期的相对稳定性(稳定性与变化性)，以及风险和保护因素的复杂相互作用如何产生有害或有益的结果(风险-复原力)。总体而言，拟议的研究将促进对小学阶段认知和识字增长的性质和来源的理解和研究。

The application proposes a specific substudy within the larger, NICHD Study of Early Child Care. The proposed research will examine the nature and sources of literacy and cognitive development during the middle childhood years. Utilizing a complex, multi-level, interactive framework adopted from ecological perspectives, the research will focus specifically on the independent and combined influences of child, family and schooling factors in shaping growth of cognitive and literacy skills from first to fifth grade. A unique feature of the proposed research is the effort to develop analytic and methodological strategies for capturing on-line the interplay of multiple sources of influence on cognitive outcomes. The concept of a developmental 'pathway' or 'trajectory' is elaborated and utilized as a framework for describing the intricate nature of developmental change and the forces shaping it over the early school years. In addition, the proposal seeks to utilize the pathway notion to illuminate three currently important topics in cognitive development: domain-specificity, stability and change and risk-resilience. In each case, it will be argued that charting developmental pathways over time will help to understand which cognitive and literacy skills develop and which do not as a function of schooling experiences (domain-specificity), which skills show relative stability over time (stability vs. change) from the early to later school years and how harmful or beneficial outcomes are produced by the complex interactions of risk and protective factors (risk-resilience). Overall, the proposed research will advance understanding and study of the nature and sources of cognitive and literacy growth during the elementary school years.