School of Education, University of California, Irvine.
Morgridge College of Education, University of Denver.
Am Psychol. 2018 Jan;73(1):81-94. doi: 10.1037/amp0000146.
Developmental theories often posit that changes in children's early psychological characteristics will affect much later psychological, social, and economic outcomes. However, tests of these theories frequently yield results that are consistent with plausible alternative theories that posit a much smaller causal role for earlier levels of these psychological characteristics. Our article explores this issue with empirical tests of skill-building theories, which predict that early boosts to simpler skills (e.g., numeracy or literacy) or behaviors (e.g., antisocial behavior or executive functions) support the long-term development of more sophisticated skills or behaviors. Substantial longitudinal associations between academic or socioemotional skills measured early and then later in childhood or adolescence are often taken as support of these skill-building processes. Using the example of skill-building in mathematics, we argue that longitudinal correlations, even if adjusted for an extensive set of baseline covariates, constitute an insufficiently risky test of skill-building theories. We first show that experimental manipulation of early math skills generates much smaller effects on later math achievement than the nonexperimental literature has suggested. We then conduct falsification tests that show puzzlingly high cross-domain associations between early math and later literacy achievement. Finally, we show that a skill-building model positing a combination of unmeasured stable factors and skill-building processes can reproduce the pattern of experimental impacts on children's mathematics achievement. Implications for developmental theories, methods, and practice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record
发展理论通常假定儿童早期心理特征的变化将影响以后的心理、社会和经济结果。然而，这些理论的检验结果常常与其他可能的理论一致，这些理论认为这些心理特征的早期水平对因果关系的作用要小得多。我们的文章通过实证检验技能形成理论来探讨这个问题，该理论预测早期对简单技能（如算术或读写能力）或行为（如反社会行为或执行功能）的促进有助于更复杂技能或行为的长期发展。在儿童或青少年时期早期和后期测量的学术或社会情感技能之间存在大量的纵向关联，通常被认为是对这些技能形成过程的支持。以数学技能的培养为例，我们认为，即使对一整套基线协变量进行了调整，纵向相关性也只是对技能形成理论的一个检验不足够的测试。我们首先表明，早期数学技能的实验操纵对后期数学成绩的影响远小于非实验文献所表明的影响。然后，我们进行了错误推断检验，结果显示早期数学和后期读写能力之间存在令人费解的高跨领域关联。最后，我们表明，一个假设存在未测量的稳定因素和技能形成过程相结合的技能形成模型可以再现实验对儿童数学成绩的影响模式。讨论了对发展理论、方法和实践的影响。
