A recent Education Week article reports that the National Institutes of Health has awarded 30 million dollars over the next five years to research centers that will, in part, try to answer the question of why so many students seem to show a “slump” in their learning and achievement at 4th grade. (Education Week, September 12, 2007.)

Brain research, learning disabilities research, reading research, and the development of interventions to address student needs will be undertaken by the University of Colorado, Florida State University, Kennedy Krieger Institute and the University of Texas, among others. No mention of measuring or assessing developmental milestones and norms in relationships to the demands of today’s curriculum even hinted at in the article. No, this problem will be solvable using what sounds on the surface like a largely medical model.

It seems like educational researchers have forgotten the careful research into developmental norms established through careful observational and clinical research and theory undertaken ¾ of a century ago by such theorists as Jean Piaget, Arnold Gesell, Marie Montessori and Erik Erikson.

These researchers looked at children at different ages and came to convergent conclusions from the fields of pediatric medicine, psychology, education and epistemology. They spoke of children at different ages, not the grades they were in (studying, as they were, children in different countries). They taught us that nine-year-olds (the bulk of our 4th graders) were just tentatively making the cognitive shift between concrete operations to more abstract thinking, were seeking their identity in the struggle between industry and inferiority, and were not usually strong risk takers at this age, either physically or socially.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if some of the research money being given to many prestigious institutions could be spent to consider what so many teachers and parents have observed in nine-year-old behavior in 4th grade for so many years?  Perhaps we are just asking too much of our 4th graders during a stage of developmental disequilibrium. Perhaps re-norming some of the bedrock foundational theory could be instructive too. Perhaps something could be learned without completely throwing out the baby with the bath water.

What do you think?