Concentrating in kindergarten is vital
As thousands of students nationwide prepare to leave high school, a UC Davis study shows a clear link between attention problems early in school – as early as kindergarten – and lower high school test scores.
“In our study, a child’s inability to pay attention when they start school had the strongest negative effect on how they performed at the end of high school, regardless of their IQ (intelligence quotient),” says lead study author Joshua Breslau, an assistant professor of internal medicine at the UC Davis School of Medicine and a researcher with the UC Davis Center for Reducing Health Disparities.
He says that addressing attention problems early in life could keep some children from entering “a downward spiral of failure.”
The study analyzes data on approximately 700 children who were followed from kindergarten (ages 5 through 6) through the end of high school (ages 17 through 18). It examines the relationship between aggressive, inattentive and depressive behaviors and children’s later performance on standardized high school achievement tests.
The researchers found that inattentiveness in kindergarten was the only behavior that consistently predicted lower scores on reading and math achievement tests administered more than a decade later.
“Our study shows that early attention problems predict poor performance later in math and reading,” Breslau says.
The UC Davis researchers focused on three categories of behavior as scored by their teachers: “internalizing” behaviors that included anxiety and depression; “externalizing” behaviors that included acting out and breaking rules; and attention problems that included restlessness and inability to focus on a single activity.
The analysis controlled for a variety of potentially confounding factors, including IQ and the fact that children who may have one psychiatric disorder often have other ones, as well.
“Many children have behavioral problems of the types we examined in this study, but we don’t know which types of problems have the most serious long-term consequences,” Breslau says. “By identifying attention problems as the most consequential for academic achievement over the long term, this study helps us decide where to put our clinical resources.”
The message for parents and teachers is to not ignore signs of inattentiveness in young children, says study co-author Julie Schweitzer, a UC Davis associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and an attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) researcher at the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute.
“These data really suggest that, if there are attention problems at age 6, parents should not wait to see if the problems go away, but should seek an evaluation from a trained professional,” Schweitzer says. Such evaluations would look for signs of learning disorders, as well as for clinical disorders like ADHD.
In addition to ADHD, inattentiveness can also be caused by poor nutrition, anxiety or lack of sleep, she says. “Parents should start by talking with their child’s pediatrician and determine the need to seek an evaluation by a psychologist.”
The study adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests that attention problems can inhibit learning and that early onset psychiatric disorders are in part to blame for later failure in high school. “Our study, along with others, shows that if children are going to harness their potential, they need to be able to focus and organize their thoughts,” Schweitzer adds.
The study appears online in the June issue of the medical journal
Pediatrics.