Tens of millions of children around the United States are going back to school. For those starting first grade, things are about to get serious. First grade brings new demands: sit still longer, pay closer attention, follow more rules, and so on. That may not sound like fun, but it’s not all bad. Between the ages of 5 and 7, kids show remarkable improvements in their ability to control their attention and behavior. This is a necessary part of developing the executive functioning needed to master reading, writing, and arithmetic. Until now, it wasn’t clear whether these executive functioning skills came naturally with age or were due to being in school. A recent study in Psychological Science revealed that school gets a good bit of the credit: First grade helps shape the brain processes that allow kids to pay attention and stay on task.
To tease out cause and effect, Garvin Brod and Yee Lee Shing from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany and Silvia Bunge of the University of California, Berkeley, followed 62 5-year-old children in Berlin for a year. The kids all had birthdays near the official cutoff date for starting first grade, so they were close in age, however, some went into first grade and some into kindergarten. (“Kindergarten” is what Germans call preschool.) The school environments were very different. Kindergarten was more play-based and first grade was more structured and goal-oriented. Every first grader, regardless of school, followed the same federal curriculum.