Case studies of cognitive precocity: The role of exogenous and endogenous stimulation in early...

JOURNAL OF APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAl. PSYCHOLOGY 2, 319-367

Case Studies of Cognitive Precocity: The Role of Exogenous and Endogenous

Stimulation in Early Mental Development

WILLIAM FOWLER

Harvard University Laboratory of Human Development

Graduate School of Education Larsen Hall, Appian Way

Cambridge, MA 02138

Case studies of the highly successful socialization commonly evident in the development of mentally precocious children may furnish an excellent source of heuristic information on how early experience contributes to development, without down- grading our understanding of how phenotypical development is jointly determined by the cumulative interactions of genotypical and experiential processes. Both the investigative and case study literature on bright children suggest that exceptional early abilities typically flourish in highly intellectual families who early involve their children in rational communication with adults and who intensively stimulate them cognitlvely during early development. Two general parental strategies emerge from the case studies, one following deliberate, systematic instruction, commonly involving play, and the other applying stimulation incidentally to intensive, continuing interaction between caregiver and child. Both strategies appear to be highly f lexible, interactive, and child-orlented, however, and both overlap in many ways, drawing on combinations of similar specific techniques and following a similar sequence in which interactions become increasingly, but never totally, endogenously regulated, as the child masters in exceptional ways high level sybmbollc ski|ls~especially reading but often writing and math), complex problem solving skills, and vast bodies of knowledge. Much of the difference between the strategies can be attributed to differences in parental belief systems that alterna- tively stress hereditarian or environmental bases for development.

The idea of early experience as a special force in human development is a recurrent theme in the history of Western thought that can be traced at least as far back as the ancient Greeks. Because of their malleability, Plato (Book V)

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advocated removing young children from the home to the special care of trained nurses, and Chrysippus and others even favored teaching children to read as early as age three (Davies, 1973; Rayrnont, 1937).

It is a theme that has taken root and flourished in the modern history ot developmental psychology as a science. Around the turn of the century, Freud (1925) astonished the world by his claim that the form and intensity of human passions and conflicts are forged in infancy. In successive generations, psychoanalytic theory became a movement that continues to influence theoretical outlooks in the social sciences, developmental psychology, and education, as well as those of practitioners in therapy, early education, and child care. Unfortunately, there has been more clinical enthusiasm than hard proof on the mechanisms and permanence of the influence of early emotional experience on later development (Clarke & Clarke, 1976; Orlansky, 1949).

Not long after, the new doctrine of behaviorism spread the view that all behavior could be traced to the cumulative effects of stimulation exerc ised on the child beginning in earliest infancy. Watson (1930), the chief propagandist of early behavoirism, in his famous statement cried:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own speci fled world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random, and train him to become any type of specialist I might select---doctor, lawyer, artist, mer- chant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocation, and raceof his ancestors. Cp. I04)

Behaviorism, too, became the faith of numerous psychologists and educators and grew to have enormous influence on the fields of social science and education. Descended from the seventeenth century l_/ockean view of the mind at birth as a tabula rasa, the view became an outlook and a method of work that generated a great deal of fruitful research on functional relations between the organism and the envii'onment, but little effective inquiry into the developmental effects of stimulation over time (Fowler, 1980).

In the post-World War II world, several strands of research and theory converged to create widespread attention to the theme. The effects of early stimulus deprivation and injury on the development of sensory systems and mental functions in both animals and humans were summarized in the classic book of Hebb (1949). In 1961, Hunt published his book "Intelligence and Experience", his comprehensive review and analysis of the cognitive developmental effects of both early enrichment and early deprivtion, casting off the constraints of traditional beliefs in fixed intelligence and predetermined development. Bloom (1964) performed a statistical analysis of mental test data in which he suggested that half of all mental ability was in place by age four. In an extensive review of studies on early cognitive learning, this writer (1962) synthesized evidence that suggested widely neglected cognitive learning capa. bilities in infants and young children. The work of Spitz (1945) and others,

CASE STUDIES OF COGNITIVE PRECOCITY 321

notwithstanding methodological attacks by their critics (e.g., Pinneau, 1955), further contributed to a social climate in which research, public clamor over poverty and civil rights, and politics combined to launch a decade or more of Head Start programs and research on early intervention intended to remediate the problems of poverty in a generation through early education (Ziegler & Valen- tine, 1979). The issue of early experience had now permanently entered the public domain, apparently, in the form of assigning to research and educational institutions social responsibility for manipulating the quality of early experience of increasingly larger segments of the population, to improve the quality of children's development and social life. Head Start programs, early intervention programs, infants at risk, and early child care itself (Chandler, Lourie, & Peters, 1968) all became integral to this perspective.

The outcome of the enormous Head Start and research efforts tells us that it takes surprisingly little educational intervention in early life, not more than a year or two, to produce important cognitive changes, some of which can persist in some form even into the high school years (Brown, 1978; Lazar, Hubbell, Murray, Rosche, & Rosche, 1977; Palmer & Anderson, 1979). Common experience itself suggests that the skills, interests, and personality of the adult are all usually in some way traceable to certain beginnings early in life. But with all common observation and the massive early intervention projects of recent decades, our knowledge of the relations between early and later development remains extremely limited. It is no longer enough to show that what happens in early childhood is likely to shape the future in some way. Nor even to demonstrate that many of the effects of early experience are reversible; that the individual's development, however poorly or well launched at the start, is not a course of destiny, rigidly fixed for a life time (Clarke & Clarke, 1976); or that many, if not all, the damaging effects resulting from neglect, conflict, or cognitive deprivation, on the one hand, and salutary care and cognitive enrichment, on the other, can be turned to better or ill through subsequent improve- ments or declines in circumstances. What we must now look toward is how and to what degree different experiences may influence later development. And, as a corollary, what kind of intervening circumstances are needed to maintain or alter patterns established during early development. We are in much the same status with respect to the influence of early experience on development as we were (and still are) with respect to the " h o w " of heredity and environmental factors in development to which Anastasi (1958) drew our attention more than two decades ago.

SOURCES: CASE STUDIES AND INVESTIGATIONS OF PRECOCIOUS DEVELOPMENT

Experimental-longitudinal studies of early learning and later development are ultimately needed to prove the various mechanisms responsible for change and

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stability in development. The writer has undertaken a series of such studies on infants, varying the form, starting age, and other parameters of stimulation, that have yielded short term effects on cognitive development of considerable magnitude (Fowler, 1981; Fowler & Swenson, 1979). Mean quotient gains in language, general IQ, or gross motor skills, according to program focus, of 20 to 40 or more points to 130-150 IQ levels over treatment periods of 6 to 12 months have been characteristic, compared to typically minimal controlgroup changes. Studies have been conducted on infants from a variety of ethnic-linguistic communities (English, Jewish, Chinese, Italian, Black Carribean) and educational levels (less than high school to college). Follow-up data, while showing substantial maintenance of early gains, are restricted to date to no more than five pilot cases and only through age five. It is in the nature of prospective longitudinal-developmental studies to take years for critical data to accumulate.

For these reasons, it is useful to explore alternative sources which, while short on definitive answers, may yet teach us many of the right questions to ask. One particularly rich source of information on early experience are case studies of precocious children, whose cognitive skills and attendant experiences are by definition recorded early in life.

There is a respectable body of investigative and case studies on early brightness, in most of which only retrospective and current, cross-sectional data were collected during the primary (or sometimes high school) years, but in some of which children were followed up over a period of years. In Terman's (Goleman, 1980; Oden, 1968; Sears, 1977; Sears & Barbee, 1977; Terman, 1925; Burks, Jensen, & Terman, 1930; Terman & Ogden, 1947, 1959) famous series, children were followed well into later life. Curiously, except for the continuing Terman study, most studies were carried out during the first half of this century, apparently the result of a gradual shift in focus from a concern for origins and tracing the course of development to a preoccupation with creativity, personality, learning characteristics, individual differences, and cognitive differentiation (Anastasi, 1975; Gowan, 1978; Newland, 1976; Passow, 1979). Defining and arranging for educational needs at school age has been a concern thronghout, but is today more of a central preoccupation. Actually, interest in precocity has waxed and waned (Passow, 1979), but the controversy over origins was certainly livelier in the earlier years (cf. Dolbear, 1912; Terman, 1905) despite the strong hereditarian stress of the dominant investigators of the era, such as Hollingworth (1926, 1942) and Terman (e.g., 1905, 1919, 1925).

The earlier decades, then, constituted a formation period, in which a large pool of case study and variously quantified research material was amassed. This pool furnishes a rich lode of developmental profiles on precocity to mine for working hypotheses on the nature and origins of precocious development. The case data reported in this article are a representative sampling of the major body of precocity studies and case study collections of the era. The data themselves are mixed with respect to the degree of system and control with which they were


collected and organized. Few studies made use of experimental controls, which in any case were necessarily quasi-experimental sampling of children used as comparison groups for the bright children under scrutiny (e.g., Yates, 1920, 1922), and thus are typically comparisons using normative tests and other developmental base line information. In a sense, all studies, both the longitudinal investigations and the individual case studies, are in fact case studies, the formerly merely distinguished by systematizing summary data on a body of cases. Thus, much of the data is both qualitative and quantitative in form, few investigations even correlating events or antecedent-consequent relations statis- tically. Often the investigations combine quantitative analysis with concrete descriptive information of individual children, as the major investigations of Hollingworth (1942), Root (I 921), and Terman (1925) did.

This body of material will be employed in two ways in this article. Selected summaries of quantitative information on relevant developmental trends and background will be reported along with an analysis of individual case study material itself. Selected passages will be cited and analyzed with regard to issues of early experience and socialization. Data will also be grouped quantitatively across collections of studies, in some cases pointing up omissions and reinter- preting analy~s made by the original investigators, where overlooked case information or data appears to support alternative interpretations.

Such a pool of developmental information is of course a highly biased source, describing an exceptional population of children selected on the basis of extraordinary developmental "success." We have no way of knowing, for example, how many cases of similar biological potential "fa i led" developmentally because of lack of equivalent nurture, or how many cases provided with similar nurture remains unnoticed because of lesser biological potential. We shall have occasion to refer again to this problem. Despite these limitations, it is the very success of the development of precocious children which can provide important insights into circumstances that. lead to favorable ~tevelopmental outcomes. For example, the types of parent-child interaction found to be characteristic in precocious children's development may in some senses serve as developmental models of child rearing and socialization to be explored in detail. It may be assumed that phenotypic development is always some complex and cumulative function of the history of genotypic-environmental relations. This principle still leaves plenty of room for the range (or norm) of phenotypic reaction of any genotypic potential to vary widely as a function of differences in the quality of the developmental ecology the child experiences (Hunt, 1975). It is further assumed that the nature of the cognitive operations and knowledge precocious children are biologically capable of assimilating does not differ in kind from that in the general population. That is, because differences in mental complexity between bright and normal children are a matter of degree, socialization modes successfully employed with bright children may be applicable in various ways to ordinary children.

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These case studies and longitudinal investigations are being examined with the following purposes in mind. Patterns of child-environmental relations are being explored in the light of contemporary cognitive developmental and interaction concepts that were not available in the descriptive, empirical framework of earlier developmental theory. While the principal focus is on early experience, the concern is also on how precocious modes established during early childhood interact with later experiences to affect subsequent development. It is expected, on the one hand, that a variety of interaction modes may be found to lead to different combinations of outcomes--in other words, a typology of precocious intellective development. Precocious development may, on the other hand, be governed by certain common factors, mechanisms, and cognitive processes which collectively contribute to the typically accelerated rates of development.

PATTERNS OF DEVELOPMENTAL STIMULATION

Earliness and Intensity

The principal question to examine would seem to be whether early experience plays a serious role in the development of precocity. Precocity, after all, could appear as a startling development that surfaces suddenly, say after school age or even not until adolescence. Brilliance in calculus or competence in writing novels, for example, are not ordinarily expected of 8- or even 15-year-olds. How extensive then is the role of stimulation and how early does precocity typically appear?

In his sample of "supemormal" 6- to 13-year-olds whose 1916 Binet IQ reached 140 or more (x = 158.7), Root (1921) rated the extent of home education and/or educational play as follows:

Rating

Percentage of High Abi l i t y (/> 140 IQ) Chi ldren With Di f fer ing Amounts of Home Education

Percentage °

Superior(A, A+) 87 Average (N, N +) 9 Below Average (B) 4

an=23 100

As may be seen, only three cases (13%) fell below the superior level, and since all three were older children (at least age 9), problems of parental recall may have reduced the amount of information on early home education reported. In


any case, regarding the 87% with rated superior training (the percentage is 75% for Root's extended sample of 53 high ability children--at least 120 IQ or special talent), Root comments that "in a large number of cases, conspicuously high scores were concomitant with definite home training" (p. 129) in which the mother "devoted her time to preschool education" (p. 130). (Most of Root's children with less than 140 IQ were over age 10, the age at which ceiling effects begin to reduce the 1916 Binet scores.)

An early investigation of 41 "superior" children (IQ = 130 or more) by Terman (1919)--which, unlike his later longitudinal studies of "g i f ted" children (Terman, 1925), provides some case data on every child--reveals parallel findings. Taking a selected subsample equivalent to Root's children (1) of 139 IQ or more (the 140 IQ level was stretched to 139 because of two cases with extensive early data) where early data are reported, in 87% of the cases exceptional amounts of early home stimulation was the rule. (Both the subsam- pie size, N= 23, and the stimulation percentage, 87%, are coincidentally values identical to those reported for the Root subsample). No explicit mention of early stimulation from external sources is made in the remaining case (3 or 13%), who were described as having taught themselves to read--a point to which I shall return.

Thus it is seen that unusual attention to cognitive stimulation early in life appears to have been the norm in these historical samples of very bright children. There is also evidence, as we shall see, that the few apparent exceptions were in fact stimulated as much as the others. This would suggest that exceptional early stimulation is a universal requirement for precocious intellecual development.

As to the earliness of precocity, the evidence is unambiguous. Virtually all systematic investigations and case studies cite clear evidence of advanced intellectual development during early childhood and often during infancy. Age of beginning speech, for example, is typically 3 to 6 months in advance of norms (Hollingworth, 1926; Terman, 1919, 1925; Witty, 1930; Yates, 1920, 1922) though a few children are delayed beyond the norms. In the Root and Terman samples discussed above, details of language development are not always reported, but there is abundant information of some form of precocity, if not always as early as infancy, at least during the preschool years. Though he furnishes few details, it is clear that precocious development, particulary in reading, was a concomitant of the preschool education reported by Root (1921) for so many of his cases. All three of the 23 140-or-more IQ children whose cases are detailed learned to read at 2 or 3 years of age. Terman's 1919 investigation furnished sufficient detail to establish that every child of the 139 or more IQ sample was intellectually advanced in early childhood. Fifteen (65%) of the 23 children could read running text by age 5 or earlier, while the remaining eight (along with all except three of the others) were all precocious

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by the same period in various combinations of arithmetic, writing, language, music, reasoning processes, memory, and drawing.

Setting

Stimulation during early development almost invariably takes place in the home. In the selectecd sample (N= 23) from Terman's (1919) cases, the early educational experiences of all except two children were centered in the home, even when family efforts were supplemented by professional tutors (4 cases). One brother arid sister attended a Montessori preschool, but the records suggest that much of the children's early intellectual guidance actually took place in the context of family relations. Only one of Root's (1921) extended sample of 53 is reported to have had any early schooling, and she participated in a small neighborhood class of early primary-preschool children that her mother established in her home, apparently after she had already taught her daughter to read at 2½ as an example of her methods. Among other studies with data available, none of Yates (1920, 1922) 40 superior children (IQ = 140 or more) had any schooling prior to entering primary school, and only two entered as young as age 5. Terman (1925) fails to provide precise data on early school attendance. It can be inferred that, of 167 children who entered first grade ahead of age norms (13 between 4-0 and 4-11 and 154 between 5-0 and 5-11), about 60% were probably enrolled in kindergarten for at least a few months, suggesting that less than 2% of the children (of 541 parents of his 1,000 gifted children answering this portion of Terman's Home Information Blank questionnaire) experienced any schooling outside the home as young as age three, and only about 17% by age four. Among Hollingworth's (1942) 23 extremely bright children (greater than 180 IQ) on whom home data are comparatively detailed, only two apparently attended any school as young as age 4. One of these was given extra work in kindergarten (French and dancing) and the other learned to read in 4 months through "sitting in" on a first grade class. Given the infrequency of any early school attendance among precocious children, it can be safely concluded that the predominant source and setting for early cognitive stimulation, certainly prior to age 4, is in the home---even if it can be inferred that the two Montessori siblings noted above, two of Hollingworth's children, and a few of Terman's 1,000 precocious children may also have begun to profit from early school attendance by age 3 or 4.

Cultural-Intellectual Ambiance

Precocious children, with few exceptions, develop in professional-academic milieux enjoying a remarkable intellectual ambiance, in which the child (or children) is often personally included from earliest infancy (Cox, 1926; Fowler, 1971a, 1971b; McCurdy, 1957; Miles, 1954). Although neither


occupational status, formal education, nor tradition appear to be essential for precocity, as we shall see, precocity emerges characteristically in a cultural- familial atmosphere of intellect and learning of some kind, most typically of a professional intellectual sort. Among Terman 's (1925) 1,000 " g i f t e d " children, 81.4% of the father 's occupations were professional or semi-professional, which is virtually identical with the 82.6% in our selected sample of 23 from Root 's (1921) study. Gowan (1977) in his evaluation of the Terman series, notes:

One is surprised at the neglect of the socio-economic factor. Of course, SES was not well understood in Terman's time, but it is obvious upon rereading the material that it is a prime interacting variable . . . . [cities several references to passages in the Terman series] fairly reek with SES influence. (p. 14)

Data on social status and home atmosphere are omitted from many of Terman 's earlier (1919) case studies, but scrutiny of the records of the selected sample (IQ = 139 or more, N = 23) indicates something of the nature of the processess involved. His case descriptions indicate that high intellectual standards and expectations for the child's intellectual development were pervasive in all except two cases. In his conclusions from his study of precocious children, Root (1921) mentions the ' 'unbounded ambitions and hopes and persistence" of certain mothers of their child 's intellectual attainments. He elaborates this point in his second and third conclusion:

2. In more cultured homes bragging and pride are, at least, more elegantly concealed, but family ambitions, definite plans for higher education and numerous social stimulations are brought to bear. Family success and traditions are thoroughly incorporated into immediate as well as remote motivations.

3. In the majority of cases, school marks, making grades in school, etc,, are of the greatest moment to the mothers, (p. 132; emphasis in orignial)

The theme of close intellectual relations with adults from early childhood appears repeatedly in the records of precocious children. Children are typically first born (>50%) , and quite often only children (>30%).

In the case of Hollingworth's (1942) exceptionaly bright children (greater than 180 IQ), more than 90% were either only children or first born. Such circumstances tend to concentrate the child's associations with adults (Fowler, 1975). Hollingworth's (1942) cases abound with descriptions of extensive intellectual association with adults in the family from an early age. The mean rating for Terman 's (1925) bright children (N = 288) on the extent of parental supervision was 4.60 (0 to 6 scale) compared to a mean of 3.70 for a comparison group of unselected homes (N = 50). Root (192 I) comments in his

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study of "supernormals ," " In a large majority of cases, parents have treated their children as rational beings, and have used the same arguments and attitudes as would be used with adults" (p. 130; emphasis in original).

In Gesell's (1922) Case of 180 IQ identical twins, for example, "Their mother [who was brilliant herself] was a very constant companion" (p. 312). Stedman's (1924) Case No. 4 illustrates the kind of relaxed and mature communication modes that develop from such intimacy of association and rational involvement with adults:

Perhaps K. D.'s most noticeable characteristic [age 12, IQ 140] is the abandon and intimacy with which she converses with adults. No doubt this attitude is partly due to continued association with older people and especially to the constant companionship of her mother, who has always made of her a confidant and chum. The mother's policy has been to respect the child's opinions as she would those of a superior adult and to talk to her as if she could understand and reason. Consequently the child possesses a remarkably extensive vocabulary. (p. 53)

But even when precocity emerges in large families, a highly charged intellectual atmosphere of discussion and interests among all family members typically prevails, contributing to the cognitive acceleration of all children in the family. Terman (1919) describes no less than 5 of the 23 selected sample cases who are part of 4 families of 7 children each in which all children shared such a matrix of precocity.

Precocious children growing up in non-professional, even working class families, such as Terman's (1919) two case exceptions whose parents had no more than a "common school education," are not without an intellectual milieu. These and similar cases from Root (1921) and elsewhere, in which parents are modestly educated and follow blue collar occupations, involve special circumstances, such as cultural or religious values, that influence parents to stimulate their children intellectually. Root (1921) observes, for example,

The correctly appointed home, with superficial conformity to every leisure class dictate and punctilio, gives an atmosphere of culture that is hard to compare with an artistic, philosophical, keenly critical, economically inferior home of a Russian Jew. (p. 102)

B arbe (1958) describes one such family with 8 very bright children, the father a tile setter, in which another kind of moral-religious, but nevertheless highly intellectual atmosphere prevails:

Each morning the family holds a devotional period before breakfast. They are members of a small Southern Presbyterian church, of a fundamentalist


nature. At this devotional period, they first read a selection from the Bible (King James' Version) and discuss it. Each child and adult is then allowed to talk for a few minutes about anything he chooses. Even the youngest child who only barely talks is given this period to talk about something of his own choosing . . . . Until the generosity of a local citizen was prevailed upon, this family was operating surprisingly well with a 1917 edition of an encyclopedia. Each morning they now go over one question and answer for each child, totalling ten in all each morning, (p. 46)

Terman (1919) reports a similar family with "seven children, all of whom are superior" (p. 220), but provides few details. The father was a carpenter, though the mother had been a teacher (common in the background of precocious children).

Thus, neither middle class occupational status, nor formal education, nor traditional intellectual culture is essential for the creation of the kind of intellectual ambiance, values, aspirations, and child rearing that contributes to the development of precocity. Such working class cases form a distinct minority, as the statistical trends show, but they do underscore the fact that an intellectual ambiance of some kind, whether middle class or otherwise, provides the framework within which precocity is generated and nourished.

Domains of Stimulation

The context of early stimulation apparent from the case studies is generally broad and general, often embracing a wide range of knowledge and reasoning processes, but concentrated especially on school-related verbal skills. The chief criterion for selecting bright children, the IQ test, tends to guarantee samples that reflect this pattern of abilities, of course. Such measures are designed to assess general ability as reflected in academic competence, providing a coherent picture of this sort through their high item intercorrelation and age graded method of construction (Meyers & Dingman, 1960).

It is the degree to which interest has centered on verbal skills that draws our attention, nevertheless. Early reading and, especially, accelerated language communication skills, were almost constant factors in the children's development, as we have seen. At least 25 (63%) of Yates' 40 bright children in her two studies (1920, 1922) were reading to some degree upon entering school, and she reports (1922) that other parents held back their preschoolers who were anxious to learn for fear it would conflict with school practices and the children's motivations (a somewhat questionable claim, as the discussion of strategies will show). Thirty-eight per cent of Witty's (1930) high IQ children (IQ = 140 or more, x = 152) learned to read before entering school and, given the pattern for other studies, many others probably could at least read letters and words, though Witty provides no details. Ninty-seven per cent of these third and fourth graders identified reading as their most preferred

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recreational activity, indicating the generality of the early orientation toward reading. Forty-five per cent of 552 children whose parents answered this portion of the questionnaire from Terman's (1925) 1,000 high IQ children read before attending school, and 92% of 246 children for whom precise age data was provided read prior to age 6, again pointing up the early reading orientation. The 65% rate for Terman's (1919) earlier sample has been noted, but at leas two additional cases (8%) could read letters or words before school. Nearly 80 per cent of Hildreth's (1958) 100 high ability children (IQ between 145 and 203) read before grade one. Those with the highest abilities are especially likely to be early readers. Of 29 cases whose IQ exceeded 180, collected by Hollingworth (1942) and Jones (1923), and on whom I have checked all original sources cited by Hollingworth, all except two (on whom data was limited) read well by at least age 4, and 13 (45%) read fluently by age 3 or earlier.

While "The nucleus of home teaching seems to be early reading" (his emphasis), as Root (1921) concluded from his study of 53 bright children, a broad interest in verbal skills and literature, with early reading a common focus, would appear to characterize the prevalent pattern more accurately. How extensively verbal skills dominate early activities, and the relative importance of early reading, may be seen in Terman's (1925) tabulations of 595 parents responding (of the total of 1,000) to this portion of his questionnaire (p. 277):

Percentage of Parent Responses on Types of Ear ly S t imu la t i on Employed

(Ages 2-3 to 6-7) Percentage °

Tell ing stories or reading to child 63.9 Teaching child to read or write 25.4

Number work with child 24.5 Nature study work with child 16.5

I

ON = 595. Since parents often responded to more than one category percentages add up to more than 100.

As with so many of the Terman and other studies of the period, these are minimum figures: they are based only on responses to the narrow conception then held of stimulation as formal teaching (i.e., "kinds of instruction") in the home. In any case, even if the 25% figure admitting to teaching reading or writing is low, as suggested by the 45% early readers reported by Terman in the same general study (1925) above (of 552 whose parents responded), the stress on verbal activities in evident in the 64% story group.

A similar percentage (24.5%) report working with their child on math, and as many as 16.5% on nature study, but nothing is reported for other


domains. The pattern is not dissimilar in the selected sample from the 1919 study, in which there is only a sprinkling of competencies reported that reflect stimulation in other domains, such as music, drawing, history, and other special topics. Compared to the high concentration on early reading (65% +) and math (35%) in the latter sample, only music amounted to as much as 9%.

Strategies

Much of the material about strategies and techniques of early stimulation can be found only in case studies, aneccdotal records, and bioghraphical material. Few investigators have systematically explored home methods used with bright children, classical investigators because of their genetic bias (e.g., Terman, 1905, 1919, 1925; Hollingworth, 1926, 1942), later investigators for these and other reasons, notably the shift away from an interest in origins earlier referred to (Gowan, 1977). Until recently, moreover, oversimplified definitions of what constituted home education by all except a few early investigators, such as Root (1921), resulted in investigators failing to analyze how the ecological history of child-environmental relations might contribute to these unusually accelerated forms of cognitive socialization. Decades of recent research on child-home environmental processes at all ages, from infancy (e.g., Clarke-Stewart & Apfel, 1978; Uzgiris, 1979) to middle childhood (e.g., Walberg & Marjoribanks, 1979) and beyond, together with the rapid growth of cognitive developmental theory, have equipped us with more sophisticated tools for analysis. If the form and intensity of interactions between children and their environments prove so influential on cognitive outcomes in normal population, shouldn't they be equally influential on precocious children? Indeed, perhaps cognitive precocity in part reflects the effectiveness of'strategies employed, and possibly even the utilization of ~pecial strategies. We have seen just how characteristic cognitive stimulation is of the early experience of precocious children, and which cognitive skills are most prominently developed. But what of the strategies and methods employed?

In the special sample (IQ = 139 or more) drawn from Terman's (1919) ,.arly case studies, two major types and a variety of subtypes of home stimulation strategies are apparent, as may be seen in Table 1. Looking at the 3 ,~ 5 age period (which also includes children whose stimulation began in ~nfancy), approximately half the families (48%) deliberately and systematically taught their children, while at least the same percentage stimulated their , hildren without employing any plan, through using one or another or a , ~mbination of informal techniques, such as carefully and thoroughly answer- ~f~g the child's many questions, providing constant encouragement, and giving life child many and varied experiences, as tabulated in Table 1. Reading to the c hildis a similar informal or incidental technique, but it is classed together

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with play as a dramatic technique to point up its imaginal, motivating qualities. While play might also be considered an incidental strategy, it is actually among the families who adopted systematic instruction that the greatest number of users of play are well documented (5 of the 7 cases).

TABLE 1 Percentage of Types of Home Stimulation in

Terman's (1919) High Abil i ty Children (IQ = 139 or more) (N = 23)

Strategies and Techniques Eady Middle Infancy Childhood ChildhoocP (0-2) (3-5) (6-13)

Percentage Percentage Percentage

Systematic (Intentional) instruction 9 48 27

Incidental stimulation Answering child's questions

endlessly 35 48 41 Encouraging child extensively 17 48 .50

Arranging highly varied experiences 30 78 100

Dramatization Reading many stories/poems

to child 4 3.5 14 Using play techniques

extensively with child 17 30 23 Child's own activity (Endogenous

stimulation) 43 87 100

aN = 22 because one child less than age 5 at time of study.

It is obvious that, because the sum of all percentages greatly exceeds 100, many families employed more than one approach. In fact, in only 4 cases (17%) did families appear to restrict themselves to a single method of exogenous stimulation (i.e., excluding the child's own activity), and the incompleteness of information for these four suggests that other methods may well also have been used. 1 All I 1 families pursuing early education systematically also used various combinations of informal or incidental techniques. Some of them may in fact have begun teaching systematically partly in response to a newly perceived need of their child: parental awareness of a child's emerging precocity was frequently delayed past infancy, despite the obvious intensity of their incidental stimulation strategies, but, once recognized, parents might then apply stimulation

'The terms exogeneous and endogenous stimulation will be used in this article to indicate stimulation that originates in sources external to and internal to the child, respectively, that is from initiatives of agents other than the child and from initiatives of the child him/herself.


systematically, now justified because of the child's precocity (which they might assume was innate). One child (Case 30), for example, was taught letter sounds, evidently because (at age 2) he became "persistent in effort to understand meaning of words and characters" (p. 231-232). Not all parents made such a transformation, however, apparently because, having little experience with other children, they perceived their child's development as normal (Terman, 1919; and see below case of Bush, 1914).

What can we make of this seeming clutter and overlap? What is most evident is that the boundries between consciously planned and informal methods of teaching were neither distinct as to method nor apparently consequential as to results. Informality of method was characteristic, even in that half of the cases where instruction was intentional and systematic. The distinctions may be worth preserving, nonetheless, first, because they furnish heuristically valuable information on how seemingly different belief systems and intended strategies and methods may in fact produce considerable convergence in the actual cognitive stimulation processes and results. Second, the analysis throws into relief the lack of foundation for the claims of early investigators that comparatively few families actually " taught" their young children cognitive skills. Finally, defining the various techniques not only enables us to see how the use of multiple techniques was the rule but also that all techniques served a common purpose of advancing intellectual development however fdrmally or informally conceived.

From Terman's own tabulation of home stimulation, cited above from his later (1925) large scale study, the large figure of 65% of story telling/reading parents further suggests that informality usually prevailed. Because this percentage from this much larger sample (N = 595) is almost double the 35% figure for the basically similar 1919 sample, it is easy to believe that the less systematic quality of his case study data greatly underestimated the role of this highly effective stimulating technique. Familiarity with text through being read to is an important basis for developing reading interests and skills (Gibson & Levin, 1975; Ilg & Ames, 1950), sometimes well before school (Durkin, 1966). Davidson (1931) found that the brighter children in her preschool reading experiment, who made the most progress, were children who had been read to frequently. Terman's (1919), Hollingworth's (1942), and Durkin's (1966) cases are replete With evidence that repeated exposure to books leads to awareness of letters and sounds, word labels, and even whole sentences. Children begin to experiment with and ask questions about the various units, which not infrequently leads to reading itself. As Ilg and Ames (1950), put it from their observations of developmental trends of the process leading to successful reading in bright children:

The child's ability to read does not develop suddenly at or about the time of school entrance. The roots of reading ability lie far back in the preschool years, at least as far back as 15 months when the child is able to pat identified pictures in a picture book. From then on, reading ability develops by slow stages through the time when the child can name objects printed in a book, recognize

334 FOWLER

salient printed capitals, recognize salient printed words in a familiar book until the time when he can read sentences, recognizing unfamiliar words accurately and rapidly. (p. 291)

Another course children follow is committing to memory whole sentences, at times even passages and poems, developing memory as well as eventually learning to read. Keen mnemonic skill is a frequent by-product ofbeing read to or told stories, particularly where the same story is repeated many times.

Root (1921) stresses several times the use of incidental methods by parents. The "high scores are concomitant with definite home training, sometimes incidental [emphasis added], but nonetheless definite." And "In certain cases a fortunate incidental stimulation [original emphasis] has seemed to be very effective in securing general information, language, verbal fluency, foreign language (especially), and vocabulary." And again, "Reading, writing and arithmetic have been secured by very definite methods [original emphasis], however incidental the acquirement may appear on the surface" (Emphasis added; all quotes from p. 129). Root's observations, including the fact that in 87% of the 23 high ability cases (IQ = 140 or more) a superior amount of play and games was used in stimulation, provide strong support for the notion that informal interaction approaches have dominated parent efforts to stimulate intellectual precocity. His remark on the "surface" quality of incidental techniques challenges further the dichotomy between those who "taught" their preschool children and those who only responded to children's budding interests, as Terman would have it. It is tempting to believe that the many parents whom Terman and others cite as denying intent to advance cognitive skills may have held a rather narrow definition of education and teaching as a formal, highly didactic process, rather than as a broad process of stimulating concept acquisition through arranging manifold forms of informal verbal interaction and opportunities for experimentation. This phenomenon appears most striking among Hollingworth's 23 greater-than- 180-IQ cases, in which highly intensive stimulation from early infancy was the rule (well documented in 20 cases). Families typically employed multiple methods, though only a third (8) of the 23 cases were described as intentionally educating their children intensively.

Forms of Later Stimulation: The Energence of Endogenous Stimulation

Families do not abruptly terminate stimulation once their child enters school or begins to read well on her or his own. It is true that the school removes the child from the home much of the day, and places new activity, learning, and social demands on the child. But much of the child's center of psychological gravity and time continues to be in the home for some years, sharing, stimulated, and supported by the same rich intellectual milieu. Indeed, numerous investigators of the precocious have over many decades regularly decried the inadequate intellec-


tual challengesand support schools provide bright children compared to the home (Dvorak, 1923; Hollingworth, 1942; Newland, 1976; Robinson, 1979; Terman, 1915).

Turning again to the selected high ability samples (IQ - 139 or more) from Terman (1919), it is immediately evident from Table 1 that significant proportions of families maintained various combinationsof intensive stimulation, at least through the ages the children were studies (x = 9-5). More than half (6 of 11 cases or 55%) of those who employed planned teaching before school age continued to do so during the elementary years, and one of the remaining 5 cases had not attained school age when studied. Nine (82%) of the 11 families who reported question-answering as a major early technique apparently continued their pattern, while all 11 families who relied heavily on encouragement continued to encourage their child.

Some types of stimulation appeared to increase or emerged for the first time at school age. All families reported that their child encountered more variation in experience, while taking responsibility for practical tasks (generally intellectually demanding tasks, such as keeping family accounts) is reported for the first time in about a quarter (27%) of the sample. Reading to the child dropped off, however, (from 8 to only 3 cases) as might be expected in children who were by now all reading regularly with great ease.

The changing pattern described reflects certain shifts in the characteristics of family-child communication, in which parents, older siblings, and other family members (if any) appear to serve increasingly as resource persons, in place of their roles as teacher, learning guide, and informant (of knowledge and skills). They now become intellectually challenging participants in complex discussions, and facilitators and supporters of the child's own interests and initiatives in collecting and classifying things (e.g., stamps, coins, plants), encyclopedic reading, story writing, experimentation, and various other projects. The drop-off of reading to the child, the appearance of practical but symbolically governed tasks, and especially the total uniformity (100%) with which children were reported to generate learning through there own activity, are strong markers of this shifting pattern toward cognitive autonomy. Playing with the child drops off slightly, but, when continued, the practice assumes new forms, such as playing games with rules (e.g., dominoes) or using complex devices (e.g., a typewriter). Answering questions moves into the context of the child's systematic inquiries (e.g., history, science, problems) or is transformed into the give-and-take of family discussions on general problems and social issues.

This precocious developmental pattern marks a shift that may be described as moving from relatively exogenously regulated to relatively endogenously regulated motivational systems for learning. The shift occurs at different points and to different degrees in different children, apparently depending on the intensity of the original exogenous stimulation and the quality of parent-child interaction, characteristically anywhere from early childhood to the earliest

336 FOWLER

elementary years. It is quite evident that home stimulation is a continuing affair for precocious children, serving as a vital matrix for accelerating cognitive development throughout childhood, but in different ways at different periods.

This predominantly self-governed, family supported stimulation appears throughout the investigative literature and case studies on precocity (Hol- lingworth, 1926, 1942; Miles, 1954; Terman, 1919, 1925). In the first follow-up (Burks, Jensen, & Terman, 1930) of Terman's famous studies of 1000 precocious children, for example, the traits on which ratings on school age children (as synthesized by Miles, 1954, p. 1007) most exceeded ratings on average children were (besides IQ scores) desire to know and originality. But they were also rated significantly higher on leadership, desire to excel, and perseverance, among other traits, characteristics which generally suggests autonomous drives for learning and coping in complex cognitive activities. The percentages of children who equalled or exceeded control group means on teacher ratings were 90% for desire to know, 85% for originality, 84% each for perseverance and desire to excel, and 70% for leadership (Terman & Ogden, 1947). As Newland (1976) describes precocious children,

• . .the gifted basically appear more avid in seeking out learning opportunities- both in the number of things to be learned and in the discovery and understanding of relationships. The satisfaction of learning and discovering reinforces this avid 'drive for knowledge' and enhances motivation. (p. 16)

It is apparently the more intensely stimulated, or at least those who develop extremely high abilities (IQ = 155 or more), who are reported as most autonomous in later skill development. As Albert (1971) notes, "the exceptionally gifted child is often noted as self-sufficient and very persistent in pursuing highly abstract interests" (p. 22; original emphasis).

Despite this relative motivational independence in reading, project activity, and symbolic learning, however, the family as a facilitative agent and resource base remains paramount. Like Terman's (1919) cases, Root's (1921) detailed sample case descriptions contain frequent statements showing continuing parental involvement at school age (e.g., working with teachers to accelerate their child, making freely available and discussing classical literature, showing interest in and discussing science projects). Already noted above in the discussion on the intellectual ambiance of the home are Root's conclusions regarding the high prevalence of continuing family concerns for and efforts to promote school acceleration, achievement, and high grades and to encourage higher education (which was far from common prior to World War II).

Precocious children also often benefit from a source of exogenous stimulation throughout development that js totally unavailable to the average or retarded child, the frequent reinforcement that accompanies what might be defined as the social role of child prodigy. Such stimulation takes place on several levels and is for the most part, though not always, positively reinforcing intellectually. In the


first place, it is clear that numerous investigators of precocity over the years, of whom Terman is a prime example, are not merely studying the phenomenon of exceptional ability. Terman (1925), Hollingworth (1942) and others are celebrat- ing precocity and attempting to promote conditions that facilitate its development. Because professional attention rarely enters much before school age until a child is identified as "gif ted," their interest becomes part of the facilitative efforts that support the bright child's later development. Wherever scientists come onto the scene then, the bright child's exceptional intellectual strivings are bathed in rewarding attention and support. The social stimulation of scientists, moreover, appears to reflect and influence similar reinforcing attentions of teachers, parents, and the public at large. Periodically, public attention in the newspapers and magazines tells the exceptionally precocious child that his or her strivings are worthy of merit (e.g., Bruce, 1911; Dolbear, 1912; Haitch, 1977; Menuhin & Ricci, 1979). Statements reflecting the pqsitive appraisals of teachers are common in case study records, such as in Terman (1919), " 'amazes one [a teacher] with his knowledge of historical events' " (Case 34, p. 238), and, " 'No matter what E. has to do it is always well done . . . . Her examination papers are a wonder to her teachers' "(Case 35, p. 239). Although teachers and schools sometimes take a dislike to precocious children, setting up obstacles and failing to provide challenging curricula, because they are bright and threatening to school staff of less outstanding abilities and because the school regime is not sufficiently adaptable to handle them (Dvorak, 1923; Hollingsworth, 1942; Miles, 1954), the more usual social pattern is one of high social acceptance and adaptabilitiy. Since the age of systematic investigations, launched in its largest terms by Terman and his associates (1919, 1925), much better than average adaptation and positive social reinforcement have both been the rule (Miles, 1954).

But more particularly, the home milieu itself, including family friends and neighbors, quite clearly singles out the accelerated skills of the precocious child with high interest and encouragement. In the case records one frequently sees, for example, "K has always been recognized as a very prodigious youngster. Some persons have assured Mrs. K. that he is a genius" (Goldberg, 1934, p. 551); "An ex-professor of John H o p k i n s . . . was deeply impressed by her precocity . . . . she attracted the attention of strangers by her remarkable alertness and intelligence" (Langenbeck, 1915, who was evidently both the psychological investigator and mother; p. 69); and "One notices that the child is often successfully shown off to relatives and friends and that she is aware of her superiority compared to other children" (Schorn, 1928, p. 314). Clearly, the life of the precocious child is supported as much by stimulation of external origin as by internal origin throughout childhood, even if it may assume different forms during different stages of development.

There is of course a certain proportion of precocious children whose high abilities apparently decline from early to later childhood, though few studies measure the child on more than one occasion. The average change at different ages

338 FOWLER

at the high levels is generally small and the average IQ generally remains high even into college (Miles, 1954).

In Terman's (1925) longitudinal study, which is perhaps the best example, the mean Binet IQ of 73 children tested first between the ages of 2 and 6 years and later retested between 8 and 12 fell only 8 points (148 to 140), leaving them still at a very high level. Only 6 (11%) of the 54 cases tested in Terman's project (data on the others were omitted) fell below an IQ of 124. In his earlier (1919) study of 59 children, he reports that 19 (35%) were tested at least twice. The mean change was a gain of two points, the greatest loss for any child being a loss of 10 points.

Educational achievement throughout school and college has reflected the same consistently high abilities. Thus 94% of Terman's graduated high school seniors (N = 77) recorded grades of A or B. In a later follow-up, Terman, Lewis, and Oden (1940) reported that only one fifth of the least successful high school seniors (N = 146) fell below the 95th percentile in a test of educational achievement (the Iowa High School Content Examination).

There is, unfortunately, very little evidence reported on why children's scores decline when they do. The only other study noted that reports early to later developmental IQ patterns in bright children is a recent one by Willerman and Fiedler (1977). In this study the IQ scores of 100 children (part of the National Collaborative Study) declined from a Binet mean of 148 at age 4 to a WISC mean of 123 at age 7. There are no developmental process data reported, however, and a substantial part of this larger mean decline of 25 points (compared to Terman's 8 points) is easily attributable to differences in test standardization. The WlSC series scores are typically lower than Binet scores, particularly at the higher levels (Buros, 1975). Perhaps we are also faced with changing cohort histories: early stimulation shows no signs of historical diminution, but the abstract symbolic development of the school age child of the first half of this century was not eroded by the hours of TV viewing of the latter-day school age child, as studies on TV-viewing and poor school achievement (Hornik, 1978; Law, 1980) and declining SAT scores suggests (Beaton, Hilton, & Schrader, 1977).

In Terman's study (Burks, Jensen, & Terman, 1930) there were no mean differences between children losing or remaining stable in IQ level on changes in ratings of family circumstances, but the scales were very broad and global, encompassing economic, cultural, and famly support and stimulation in a single measure. There were also no differences in personality ratings between the two groups. The only clue appears in the much greater mean IQ decline of girls (- 13) than boys (-3), which is in line with the historically prevalent much lower intellectual and career expectations for girls (Hollingworth, 1942; Miles, 1954). Why this should affect their IQ scores but not their school grades, which were consistently higher than those of boys, is not clear. It may be related to the greater interest of girls compared with boys in the humanities as compared to math and science, which may be reflected in ability tests. In any case, the stability of scores for precocious children is apparently relatively high.


TYPOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENTAL STIMULATION STRATEGIES

A Model of Cognitive Development

The general picture that emerges of the developmental course of precocious children is thus one of intensive and extensive experience in interaction with intellectually oriented adults using symbolic materials, beginning early in life and continuing throughout childhood and the school years. From this pattern of developmental experience two overall strategies of cognitive socialization employed by parents, one leaning toward deliberate but play oriented instruction and the other stressing the child's interests and responsive techniques, stand out in sufficient detail to permit these parallel but converging strategies to be conceptualized and presented in systematic form. We shall first diagram developmental sequences of how the respective planned and incidental stimulation strategies appear to evolve in ideal form, then discuss a number of cases that appear to fit each type. The framework for analysis is drawn from prior conceptualizations of the author in which cognitive processes and development are assumed to be organized in an integrated system of three basic types (Fowler, 1971a, 1977, 1980), all of which assume characteristic forms early in the development of precocious children. Each basic type consists of concept networks and hierarchies defined by general rules for identifying and manipulating phenomena. One type consists of knowledge, the set of concepts and rules through which we apprehend the world, such as basic concepts of the physical world defined by Piaget (space, time, motion, causality, animate) and the endless array of information and social concepts generated by the cultural world (transportation, clothes, mores, history, ideology). A second type consists of codes, the concepts and rules through which we condense and render knowledge in simplified and repeatable forms (regularized action systems--sensory motor codes, language, math). The third type defines the strategies for reasoning, problem-solving, and learning with which we come to understand and make use of concepts and phenomena from all domains (analyzing and interrelating, reflecting, ordering, etc.)

Development is considered to follow a multilinear course, forming increasingly differentiated and complex but'varying combinations of concrete and abstract, and specialized and general types of knowledge, codes, and strategies according to the cumulative history of organismic-environmental interactions. The dynamics of human functioning and environmental adaptation require that everyone acquires concepts of some kind at some minimum level in each of the basic domains. Universals in human functioning arise from species characteristics (e.g., sensory motor action and language) and human and cultural common- alities faced in environmental adaptation, while specialized and unique characteristics in concepts acquired in any domain arise from experiences specific to culturally adaptive modes or unique to the history of given individuals. Branches

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342 FOWLER

of concepts and rules in the three domains overlap in obvious ways, drawing on common concepts (e.g., painting develops through both fine sensory motor and visual-perceptual rules), as is evident from the condensed outline of subtypes shown in Table 2.

TABLE 2 Domains of Cog nitive Processes and Development

Styles and Strategies Codes Knowledge

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Cultu ral-lnformational Physical Biological Social

Models of Planned and Incidental Socialization Strategies

Taking this framework as a guide, the socialization sequences for planned and incidental strategies for precocious development are diagrammed in Figures 1 and 2, respectively. Each of the diagrams is represented in terms of a model of the basic dynamics of developmental interaction between the child and the social environment, followed by the major stages through which the course of development appears to evolve.

The basic dynamics between the environment (of the family) and the child are framed in terms of the three types of cognitive processes defined in the model for cognitive development abbve. Styles and strategies for planned and incidental parental modes of socialization (in the main upper box to the left), for example, are respectively deliberate and systematic for the former and intuitive for the latter, though both are generally equally intensive. Both approaches center on symbolic codes, but the former often sets out to teach early reading and math, while the latter may fall into the same course simply through the high symbolic, graphic orientation employed. Similar parallels and differences are indicated for the area of knowledge as well. The children's contribution to the dynamics of the interaction equation are shown in the set of characteristics outlined in the main box at the bottom left, clustered again in terms of styles and strategies, codes and knowledge. Because there is no evidence in the case studies to suggest consistent initial ability differences between children later socialized


in the different modes, the set of characteristics at birth for the two are listed as identical. Family-child interaction is indicated by the reciprocal arrows drawn between the respective sets of characteristics.

" Looking at the sequence, development in both socialzation modes pro- gresses through a series of stages of interaction between caregivers (sometimes stimulating older siblings) and child, in which the actions of each are at least partly reactions to or contingent upon the action of the other. The age ranges indicate the earliest and latest'ages during which the major modes and child acquisitions generally seem to occur in these precocious children. Parallelling each flow diagram, the ages at which the child of average general ability (100 IQ) attains selected developmental milestones are indicated along a normative baseline for reference purposes.

It should be quickly evident that while there are differences between the two developmental strategies, the patterns of interaction and, especially, the cognitive developmental acquisitions and shift from exogenous to endogenous control in successive stages, are surprisingly similar, including the hypothesized four stage sequence. The differences appear to originate to an important degree in different belief systems about the sources of precocity, which then lead to different intentions and strategies. Thus, planned strategies and deliberate tutoring, often many times daily, seems to arise logically from the view that abilities are determined primarily by experience and that intellectual brilliance can be brought about through the exercise of intensive education early in life. This strategy leads to an emphasis on planning and consciously devised programs of instruction, most pominently at Stages II and III, once beginning language is established (Stage I) and until the child's high competence in reading (and often writing and sometimes arithmetic and foreign languages) and self- directed stimulation are thoroughly grounded (Stage IV).

In contrast, the incidental approach apparently arises out of a belief system that views "giftedness" as essentially biological in origin, as the term implies, yet is in fact an approach that intuitively follows a program of intensive stimulation that accelerates cognitive development. Once precocity is "discovered ," typically during infancy with the early acceleration of language skills (Stage I), intensification of effort becomes justified at least in part by the emergence of precocious skills that are attributed to maturational processes. Differences also appear in the methods employed by the two approaches. In addition to the conscious system of planning by one and the intuitive rationale of the other, the former typically embeds instruction in sensory motor and sociodra- matic play, while the latter uses a contingent responsiveness to the young child's intensifying curiosity. Both methods serve to produce much the same high levels of motivation, however, and in fact under both regimens the child develops a cognitive processing system by schoo 1 age that is at once extremely competent in mastering symbolic material and extraordinary autonomous in both seeking and assimilating new material.

344 FOWLER

Thus in many essentials, there are significant parallels between the two strategies. In basic dynamics, despite the divergence in beliefs and strategies, developmental acceleration emerges in large part from the intensely intellectual ambiance of the milieu, which is peopled with highly skilled models and an environment rich in books. The prevelent forms of activity in the home are engagement in complex intellectual dialogue and the pursuit of problem solving in symbolic modes. Such an ambiance, rich in language, communication, and inquiry, appears to accelerate language competence and curiosity during infancy, which leads to the intensive responsiveness of the incidental strategy but serves to promote similar curiosity and learning drives when planned strategies are adopted. The basic dynamics and Stage I language interaction (and probably labeling) are thus very similar for both approaches. In addition, the sensory motor orientation of both is probably rooted in the rational, problem centered modes of the way of life, which appears to intuitively recognize the child's characteristic forms of manipulation, despite the general symbolic orientation. The interactive inquiry styles further promote relating the symbolic activities (e.g., language and math) to object manipulation, which takes the form of play involvement in planned strategies and responding to the action focus of the child's questions in incidental strategies.

But we have already seen how incidental techniques, such as reading stories and information books and highly responsive question-answering, are frequent in families who employ deliverate instruction, indicating further how stress on symbolic learning and inquiry are integral to the subcultural value systems of the professional-intellecual milieu, regardless of differences in beliefs, strategies, and methods. In the same way, families employing incidental strategies are often drawn into systematic teaching, not only in the form of answering endless questions of offspring, but also into deliberately instructing the child in learning the alphabet, letter sounds, or even reading itself, as a result of perceiving the child's readiness (high interest in) and accelerating rates of symbolic development. In the latter case, the early responsive stimulation has become a technique for self-fulfilling prophecy, in that the emerging brightness is in fact fed by the intensity of the incidental stimulation.

The two strategies are very similar in the characteristics of children at successive stages as well. In both cases children move from advanced oral language competence in infancy (Stage I), to competence in processing single units ot textual symbols (letters, words, numerals--Stage II), followed by fluency in reading and sometimes competency in counting and other arithmetic processes and writing (Stage III), which in turn leads to accelerating complexity and high self-regulation in information processing and learning (Stage IV). The entire process for both, moreover, engages rapidly accelerating cognitive skill mastery as well. In final outcome, perhaps the only differences are the more comprehensive effort in families who stress deliberate strategies to embrace early multiple academic skill competence and, in some families, continued


planned instruction past the preschool period, as in foreign languages or advanced math.

Otherwise, the final outcomes by school age and in later childhood appear to be very similar, that is, exceptional symbolic and cognitive skill mastery, usually centering on reading and language, but typically encompassing broad and complex knowledge of many topics, and complex and abstract problem solving strategies. By school age, this complex skill foundation has become a guiding framework and resource system that fuels the child's activity as a relatively self propelled system for cognitive learning and project activities. In this framework, exogenous sources o f stimulation in the home more often become resources and maintenance systems than the initiators and guides to cognitive learning they were during early development. The family encourages and interacts, but the child has become a relatively autonomous learner whose skills enable him/her to create new categories o f resources (books and planned, self-directed experimentation) with which to inquire, accumulate knowledge and create systematically in limitless scope and depth.

Illustrative Cases

Planned Stimulation. The deliberateness and thoroughness with which some parents have undertaken to instruct their children is nicely indicated by one of Terman 's (1919) early cases (No. 39, IQ 171, age 10-4).

Father accounts for his superiority as "due to the fact that we deliberately set ourselves to the task of educating him when he was a young child. When J. was a mere baby I determined to start his education. Commencing at the age of two years I adopted artifices to make his play a source of education and kept at it persistently until he was five years old and had acquired the fundamentals of the first three years of school, after which I dropped the matter. In the case of the second boy, I had not time to take that course and did not do so." (Second boy only average; p. 245)

This same father did undertake a planned program of a third child (Martha, IQ 142 at age 6), however, who learned to read simple primers fluently by the age of 26 months (Terman, 1918; Davidson, 1931). In both cases, play techniques were central to the methods employed.

Case D of Holl ingworth 's (1942) above 180 IQ cases provides a similar example o f the personal involvement and intensity with which systematic efforts have sometimes been made:

She [the mother ]has published stories, reviews, and poems, and a book on education. She has always taken part personally in the education of D . . . . an only child . . . . could say words at 8 months and talked in sentences at 1 l months . . . . At the age of 18 months, while siring on his mother's lap as she sat before a typewriter, he learned to read by looking at the letters. The

346 FOWLER

records kept by the mother indicate that "he learned to read and count in 1911 ." (p. 120)

Terman (1919), who earlier studied this child, reports that D also "'played anagrams when a baby and learned to read as gradually and naturally as he learned to ta lk" (p. 254), and that "he learned to count, to subtract by means of playing cards, which were among his first play things" (p. 257).

The scope and variety of skills fostered in D, covering reading (including classical literature and history), writing, typing, math, mechanical skills, drawing and painting, music (including composition and mathematical applica- tions), chess and other games of intellectual skill, sports, and knowledge of many different kinds of areas (in which he classified material extensively), is common (though perhaps broader than usual), as evident in Terman's )1919) Case 39 (cited above) and case 33 (IQ 150, age t 1-3):

"While he was a small child I bought blocks with letters and numbers, maps to be put together, geographical games, alphabetical and numerical boards and other playthings with which to team. Later bought him a typewriter." (Quote from mother cited in the case record by Terman, p. 235; child could read and count by age 2. )

Similarly, Gesetl 's (1922) identical twins, A & B, were taught to speak and read several languages (English, French, Esperanto, Italian, and Russian), English. French, and Esperanto at age 3, and to learn arithmetic, along with extensive general knowledge, music, and sports. Again the thoroughness, intensity, and use of play techniques is evident: "'Their mother was a very constant companion; and stimulated this development by the aid of plays and games" (p. 312).

The strategy of deliberate early teaching appears as well in cases of precocious Black children, for example, Witty and Jenkin's (1935) case of B (IQ 200, age 9-4), w h o ' 'was taught to read by her mother at age four by the 'picture- story' method" (p. 122).

That development proceeded roughly through the four stages conceptualized in the model (Figure 1) is evident in most cases, though documentation is not always complete. Thus, case 33,

P knew his letters at 14 months [Stage i1] and could read at 2 years . . . .

"When 4 years and 3 months had read a gc~)d part of the Bible and read ~s well as a boy of thirteen. "[Stage II1] (p. 234; quotation from mother)

The Stage IV, self-propelled quality of his later learning is also clear,

Once became possessed of a desire to know the location of every town. river and mountain, and read the atlas through. Great collector of stamps, coins, foreign transfers, etc, (Tern~an, 1919, p. 234)

CASE STUDIES OF COGNI'TtVI~ PRECOCITY 347

Gesell 's (1922) twins, A and B, were both speaking in sentences at 11 rlonths (Stage I), and reading "'elementary English, French and Esperanto" (p. 312) by ages 3½ (Stage Ili). No details on Stage 1I are provided, but their later ~utonomy and, for these two, rivalry, in learning and functioning (Stage IV) is ndicated by such activities as:

They are attractive, animated, .sociable children [age 9] . . . . IX)putar . . . . can take charge of a gymnasium class in which most members are two to four years their ,seniors, and preserve excellent attention and discipline . . . . have read Genesis in Italian . . . . Book of Knowledge in its entirety in French; and a year ago embarked on Russian. They play duets on the piano . . . . They s w i m . . , ride horseback. , . write jingles, and they read by the hour, (p. 312-313)

The sequence also appears in the Black child, Case B (Witty & Jenkins, 935), who:

• . . employed short sentences when she was about sixteen months of age . . . . saying nursery rhymes at age two. [Stage I] . . . . taught to read by her mother at age four [Stage II1] . . . (she knew the alphabet long before [Stage 11] . . . . thereafter B read and has continued to read independently. [Stage IV] (p. 122).

Case D (Hollingworth, 1942) "talked in sentences" at 11 months (Stage ); learned letters, and to read words and numerals around 18 months (Stage II);

read and count by age two, reading fluently by age 3 a book for 9 years olds Stage III); and pursued avidly and persistently a host of self-generated projects tom age 4 on (Stage IV), such as drawing maps, comparing and recording the mguage, laying out roads, etc., of an imaginary land callad Borningtown; omposing music,and publishing and circulation a park newspaper. That such ,~lf-initiated learning starts even earlier in some intensely intellectually stimu- tted children is evident in the mother's diary record, "October 1 I, [age 19 ~onths] counts all day long" (p. 120).

Other cases follow similar patterns, the different stages being telescoped r prolonged in different ways, but all following the general sequence, and arents usually teaching multiple skills through play. The fourth spoken word of erman's (1918) case of Martha was the letter " B " (at 14 months) which she :cognized in capital form and used in the expression *'pretty B " (following the rst 3 words, mama, papa and pretty), thus effectively combining much of rages I and II, talking and recognizing all the capital and small letters by 20 ~onths. Word recognition followed immediately (35 words at 21 months) and uent reading progressed rapidly (23 to 26½ months) to Stage III. By age 5 she 'pically read 20 hours per week and gradually began writing children's stories :1 her own, as well as maintaining general excellence in school work (though |vanced 3 grades) and popularity with school mates (Stage IV) (The data from

348 FOWLER

age 5 through age 11-10 was reported by Davidson, 1931).

Similarly, Stedman's (1924) Case 3 (IQ 155, age 11-7),

Instructed by his mother, L. A. learned the alphabet as soon as he could talk. His education was based primarily upon play kindergarten and Montessori equipment being used constantly in all the child's activities. With the help of his mother he made letters of bread dough. Other sources used in learning the alphabet included building blocks, books, papers, magazines, billboards, and car signs . . . . Only those letters were selected which were interesting to him because of their connection with some person or object. At the same time, also through play, he was also taught to count. (p. 46)

The stages for Terman's (1919) Case 33, " w h o knew his letters at 14 months and could read at 2 years" (p. 234), and for Hollingsorth's (1942) Case D " w h o learned to read as gradually and as naturally as he learned to t a lk" (Terman, 1919, p. 257), speaking at 11 months and reading letters, numerals and apparently beginning to read text by 18 months, were obviously greatly telescoped, yet still followed the basic sequence.

Stedman's (1924) Case 3 is also interesting because it shows that, despite telescoping the early Stages(I and II), learning to read fluently (Stages II to III) may become a relatively protracted process. "At four years of age he began to read; at six he could read quite independently" (p. 46). This case also illustrated some continued teaching past the preschool period:

Shortly before his sixth birthday L. S. 's mother died and he went to live with his aunt, who continued to teach him in accordance with his mother's policy. The aunt greatly facilited his progress in reading by sending him typewritten letters. (p. 46)

This boy soon moved into Stage IV, however, though he had long been "intellectually eager and aler t ," as suggested by the following:

Of his own initiative, at seven, he began using the dictionary. As early as six and a half years of age he began reading newspapers and magazines. (p. 46)

By the age of nine years he had read a majority of the books commonly recommended by librarians for children in the seventh and eighth grades. Since then [age 11 + ] his reading has included much adult literature. (p. 47)

deriving keen pleasure in solving intricate arithmetical problems and employing much of his leisure time in this way . . . . . Much time was spent in originating block prints of conventional book-cover designs similar to those worked out in school. (p. 49)

Patient and persistent responsiveness to endless question-asking may also be frequently integral to the planned strategy of early teaching, as has been earlier observed. This practice is evident in Terman's (1919) Case 33, "Always


insisted until told what he wanted to k n o w " (p. 234), and in Hol l ingwor th ' s (1942) Case D, " A n example of the quality o f questions asked by D [ 19 months]: 'Has every door two knobs? ' ' W h y ? ' His Mother reports: 'He was always asking unexpected ques t ions ' " ( p . 120), and in Gese l l ' s (1922) twins, A and B, one of whom he indicates asked " a searching ques t ion" ( implied as typical) at age 4. The interactive orientat ion o f the teaching style is often as pronounced when del iberately planned strategies are employed as when incidental strategies are used.

In some cases, (e .g . , Case 34 of Terman, 1919), a parent ' s t ireless reading to the child may become the bulwark of a deliberate strategy (IQ 147, age 8-9):

Was specially instructed in early childhood by the mother, who early began reading to him such literature asHiawatha, Julius Ceasar, Bible Stories, etc. Learned to read at 4. At 6 was able to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers as far as the millions, to keep the family accounts, make up bills, etc. Mastered the number combinations by playing dominoes, and learned a great deal of geography by playing post office and writing addresses on envelopes which he gave to his mother. Has accumulated a rich store of knowledge about nature. All his work is play to him. Plays the piano quite remarkably for a child of his age [6-0]. (p. 237-238)

Al though certain details are omit ted from the record, it is evident that extensive reading o f complex literature to the boy (which presumably was introduced gradual ly , if demandingly) was ' a cco mpa n ie d by a host of other st imulating activit ies, which as is typical were presented through play and games, that generated a wide range of precocious skills.

In most cases o f systematic education, reading to the child has been one of several techniques employed , including planned teaching sessions, (usually based on play and games) and responding freely to questions, as il lustrated by S tedman ' s (1924) Case 2 (IQ 166, age 10-8):

At fourteen months R. P. walked and first spoke intelligibly. From this time until he entered school his mother directed his education, basing it wholly upon the play instinct. She read to him and gave him systematic lessons daily, at first of about fifteen minutes duration. Later the multiplication tables were taught through games which the mother originated and which the child played with zest until the response became instantaneous and automatic • . . Her guiding principles were, first, that children's questions should be answered with consideration and frankness; secondly, that the child's environment should stimulate a desire to learn. The child was keenly interested in pictures and stories and learned to read easily. Instruction (in reading) was informal and incidental and was given whenever the boy presented a book and requested another story. (pp. 32-33)

It would seem that the divergence between planned and incidental strategies rests as much on difference in intention as on anything else.

350 F(7~LEI~

The foregoing sample of cases appears to form part of a long historical pattern, The deliberate and systematic stimulation of children during the earliest years is a phenomenon recurring for centuries throughout the Western world (Dolhear, 1912; Fowler, 1962). Many of Cox's (1926) biographies of 300 historical "geniuses" document the significant role played by special, planned early stimulation in this development of their talents, ranging over many fields from literature to math. John Stuart Mill is probably the most widely cited of such cases, being educated by his philosopher father, James Mill, beginning with reading history and Greek classics at three to four years of age, but Swift, Diokens, Pascal, and numerous others are among the documented cases. There is 'also a variety of minor historical figures (Dolbear, 1912), most notably Karl Witte (Witte, 1914), whose infancy and early childhood were the focus of planned intensive stimulation that was accompanied by the precocious development of exceptional abilities and later intellectual success. The great musicians have "almost invariably" been giyen an "early start ," typicaUy intentionally (Fowler, 1971b; Scheinfield, 1965).

Around the turn of this century, something of a movement appeared among selected academics and professionals who intensively instructed their children from infancy with elaborate programs of early reading, reasoning, languages, and other cognitive skills (Berle, 1913; Dolbear, 1912; Stoner, 1914; Witte, 1914). A number of these cbJ/dren were specially admitted to and graduated from Harvard and Radcliff m thetr teens (Dolbear, 1912; Wiener, 1953), at least one of whom later became a brilliant scholar, Norbet VCiener, one of the founders of cybernetics. Like the parents (often the fathers) of Mill, Witte, and others a century or more earlier, ~ of these parents shared a belief in the potential of intensive early education to generate high ability, and set out to prove it. The earlier Pastor Witte proceeded in direct challenge to tim local educational establisbJnent, while the later Professor Olerich attempted to make a stronger case by adopting a child named Viola, in both cases with equal success, though only in Witte's case is the history past childhood known. Both children were deliberately and systematically taught multiple skills, including math and foreign languages, through play beginning in infancy.

Incidental Stimulation. The same pattern of succession through stages of mastery, appears repeatedly in case studies where families follow a strategy of incidental stimulation. The example of Elizabeth (Hirt, 1922), whose 1916 Binet- Simon IQ was 189 at 7-5, illustrates this sequence very well--f~m fluent language (Stage I) to graphic units-letters (Stage [I) to fluent reading (Stage iii) to the independent pursuit of knowledge (Stage IV). It also illuswates the apparent spontaneous and incidental character of the family-child interaction, teaching- learning process through play.

She was not quite a year old when she began repeating words. Her first sentence, at the age of seventeen months, was "Open the door, daddy. " . . . . the child seemed to plunge suddenly from her one word communications into ~nteace expression.


Among Elizabeth's fhst toys was a set of blocks with letters and numbers on four sides, and animal pictures on the two other sides. One of the baby's favorite amusements was to hold up a block and point to one side after the other for her entertainer to tell what was on the sides of the block indicated. Gradually the game changed and the baby held up the block and pointed to the picture called for by the entertainer. At the age of fifteen months she made no mistakes in finding the animals called for, and very soon afterwards she could find the letters in the same way.

One her second birthday the little girl was given a book of rhymes which she learned very quickly to repeat. One of her first books . . . . "The Story of The Naughty Piggies." The child seemed never to tire of hearing the story read . . . .

At three and a h a l f . . , spelling everything she saw printed and asking what the letters spelled, and she could recognize many words. At four years she read the advertisements in the street cars, as well as everything in all the books she possessed. During all this time there was no attempt on the part of the parents to make their daughter precocious. They were pleased with her readiness to leam, but they did not look upon her as an unusual child.

Elizabeth was enrolled in first grade . . . six years eight months old. On the second day in school her teacher discovered that she could read anything that was placed before her . . . .

She spends much of her time buried in the "Book of Knowledge." (pp. 49-52)

This case is valuable in a number o f other ways. It furnishes a striking illustration of graphic labeling through play with an infant, and it hints at the variety of techniques parents may use. It also illustrates the disclaimer commonly made by parents using incidental strategies, that they were not attempting to accelerate development, despite the intensity o f intellectual attention paid to symbolic matters. Added to the block labeling play was reading the same rhymes and stories repeatedly which promoted both mnemonic skills and familiarity with graphic material and early reading, and freely responding to the chi ld 's inquiries. The latter technique is implicit in the early stages of the block labeling game and implied later in her "asking what the letters spel led" as she was "spell ing everything she saw printed."

The use of blocks in particular as a device that leads to interactive symbolic learning often crops up in incidental strategy cases, much as in cases of deliberate teaching (cf. Terman's , 1919, Case 33 above). Typewriters too are mentioned occasionally (see case of Betty cited below), but toys, games, and learning through play in general do not enjoy the same prominence in the incidental strategy case descriptions as they do in the descriptions of planned teaching, where they are deliberately employed as "ar t i f ices" (Case 39 o f Terman, 1919), " a i d s " to stimulation (Gesell 's , 1922, twin A and B), or "playthings with which to learn" (Terman's, 1919, Case 33, p. 125, including a typewriter). It might be said that multiple devices are seldom employed, just as multiple skills appear less frequently, because the philosophy of incidental strategies is not to produce deliberately and systematically, but to encourage and facilitate intuitively by displaying sensitive and pervasive readiness to respond and interest the child. The point of departure is the

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child's "spontaneous" and developing interests, which less often embrace numbers the way they do reading (and writing), and seldom extend to foreign languages except by the "accident" of having a German nurse (see below, case of Elizabeth, Langenbeck, 1915), the way planned strategies do---and even then are not pursued. The approach may well involve child experimentation in play, as Hirt's case indicates. Play and other informal, interaction modes of symbolic learning are at least as likely to involve apparently child-initiated activities around books, as for instance when reading to the child:

Became interested in books at the age of 2 years. Was persistent in effort to understand meaning of words and characters. (Terman, 1919, CAse 30, IQ 142, age 8-3, p. 231-232).

or asking about various printed ads and signs:

She taught her self her letters from street-signs and could print them all before she was three, and during the next several months would write letters of several pages of her own composition, having the words of course spelled for her. (Langen- beck, 1915, Case of Elizabeth, IQ 220, age 5-0, p. 68)

and

Was given no instruction, but learned to read by her own efforts at three years. Was permitted to use a typewriter and with it learned her letters, figures, reading, and spelling. (Terman, 1919, Case 32, IQ 174, age 7-10, p. 233-234)

and

When E. B. was three years old her parents discovered she knew the alphabet, which she seemed to heave learned by asking questions about printed signs. (Stedman, 1924, Case 5, IQ 214, age 8-I 1, p. 60)

This stress on the child's initiatives and interests is striking in Hirt's case. But what is particularly interesting in Hirt's case and other incidental strategy cases is the appearance of endogenous forces or self-regulation as a major impetus for learning, almost from the beginning, during infancy. While the endogenous factors often appear early with planned strategies, they are less frequently mentioned and, when they are, are usually given less prominence. As noted above, Hollingworth's (1942) Child Da t 19 months was recorded in the mother's diary as "counts all day long" and this child, along with other cases, such as Terman's Case 33 and Geseil's (1922) twins, apparently asked questions repeatedly from infancy. Others are described as early showing an "unusual aptitude for intellectual games of all kinds" (Stedman, 1924, Case 2, p. 32) and from age 4½ on an "eagerness to learn" (p. 33), or as "so intellectually eager and alert" (Stedman, 1924, Case 3, p. 46). Yet just how early question-asking or intellectual eagerness started is not always clear, nor is eagerness to learn equivalent to child-initiated action, which is so frequently evident at an early stage when incidental strategies are described.


The emphasis in such cases is on endogenous factors, despite the evident (though sometimes implicit) use of incidental stimulation, graphic unit labeling, question-answering, and frequent reading to the child, and which are occasionally combined with selected systematic teaching. Case 30 above of Terman's (1919) illustrates the stress on incidental strategies with selected systematic efforts:

• . . Little instruction at home beyong the teaching of sounds of letters. Have also wied to answer all his questions and point the way to further investigation. (p. 232)

Many cases reporting deliberate teaching strategies contain no mention at all of the child's motivations, moreover, especially the extent of the child's own initiatives in seeking to learn (or inducing parents to teach) until the child's reading and other cognitive skills are well advanced, usually from age 4 on, at later Stages 11I and IV of the developmental sequences described. Much of this difference in emphasis may probably be attributed to differences in the way in which the parents and the case study investigators state the problem. When planned strategies are used, the focus appears to be centered on the initiatives and techniques used by theparents or other family members as educators. But when incidental strategies are employed, the focus is on the child's initiatives and types of actions as learner, perhaps quite naturally" in light of these parents' beliefs in and the prevalent investigator bias toward precocity as basically a biologically governed, developmentally emergent phenomenon. Only when parents claim the role of educator, then, is the investigator bias necessarily tempered and the role of exogenous factors highlighted.

Despite the greater importance that parents assign to the chi!d's motivational initiatives earlier in the developmental process, it is nonetheless clear that exogenous factors, such as parental teaching, serve an equally important function in the early course of incidental strategy approaches. If these parents disavow the role of intending to teach, they nevertheless furnish extraordinary amounts of stimulation through their exceptional intellectually oriented interest in and responsiveness to the child's attentional overtures, which they channel into symbolic and cognitive activities of language, reading, math, and logical analysis. Are not parents who spend numberless hours weekly over periods of months and years in responsive labeling, question-answering, and reading to the child (which the records cited indicate were required for the child to become a fluent reader and self propelled learner) in fact as intensive early stimulators as are parents who claim the role?

It will be recalled that Terman (1919) would have us believe that in certain cases (3 or 13% of the selected sample) children developed precociously, even learned to read at age three with qno instruction" at all, as for example in Case 32 cited above. It seems evident, however, that learning "her letters, figures, reading and spelling" (Terman, 1919, p. 233) with the aid of a typewriter must have required hours of attention over long periods by a competent tutor(s) in repeated labeling of units (letters, figures) and explanations of the complex mechanics of spelling and reading, along with typewriter operations. Symbol systems and processes that have

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required millenia for human cultures to develop are not ones that three-year-olds-- even brilliant ones--invent on their own. Terman's bias is well illustrated by his comment on Case 33 (cited above):

There is no question about this boy's unusual ability. Some would perhaps account for it on the ground of his early instruction, but we would doubt the value of such an explanation. (p. 236)

Aside from the hereditarian bias, what seems to be at work is mistaking methods for the child's motivations. The fact that a child is keenly responsive and displays persistent initiatives does not vitiate the vital role of parent initiatives and methods, however personalized, interactive and informal they may be. Using incidental methods and positive attitudes only makes the teaching more effective. Root (1921) concluded in his study of "supemormals"

c. Reading writing, and arithmetic have been secured by very definite methods, however incidental the acquirement may appear on the surface. (p. 129; emphasis in the original)

Three cases point up, and perhaps shed light on, the paradox in the thinking of these parents and the early investigators who downplay the importance of external stimulation. Bush (1914) originally doubted the validity of his child's binet-Simon test scores (IQ 185, age 3-3), saying:

At no time have any attempts been made to force her mental development, though there have been studied efforts at making her little games educational in character. At the age of two she was given a Montessori outfit, as an experiment. She quickly learned the simpler plays . . . . Very early with her dawning intelligence her parents reasoned with her not only as to the ~herefore of things but also as to the why of conduct. This method has greatly stimulated the child's associative faculty, and has bred a habit of weighing and comparing. (p. 250~ emphasis in original)

And later,

B-- ' s mental state is in no wise extra-normal or beyond what it should be. She has not been pushed in her work her her play; but her questions have had informative answers, her activities have had educational explanations, and her play has had discretionary guidance. (p. 257)

Despite parent disclaimers, their "studied efforts" would seem to be consid- erably beyond the practices of even most middle class families, including the fact that "she has had few playmates, losing thereby somewhat of social development but gaining greatly in comparative freedom from interfering cross-currents" (p. 250). The intensity of intellectual focus is matched only by the apparent ingenuous- ness in their own lack of awareness of what constitutes "normal" early stimulation and teaching, surprising in view of the fact that both parents were teachers and the father (an M.D.) was also the tester.

CASE STUDIES OF COGNITIVE PRECOCITY 3.55

Similar patterns of denial coupled with obviously intensive stimulation are sprinkled throughout the case record of Langenbeck's (1915) Elizabeth, who is described as teaching her self to read and write (see earlier quotation). Langenbeck (who was apparently the mother) takes pains to assure us that;

It is in no sense the record of an infant prodigy who has been taught and directed into definite channels but it deals with a purely natural development. The temptation to teach and encourage so responsive a mind has been resisted and no attempt has been made to assist in co-ordinating her accumulating ideas and impressions, so that her mental growth up to this time [age 5] has been entirely natural and spontaneous. (p. 65)

Yet many forms of stimulation are evident, despite the descriptive focus on the child's self-initiated accomplishments. Added to the undoubted labeling aid that must have accompanied learning to read, and coupled with the spelling aid (see above), are the following:

No effort has ever been made to teach Elizabeth new words, though being an only child her main association has been with adults . . . .

She is familiar with a great number of books besides the ordinary child-lore and listens eagerly to any reading, though no effort has ever been made to read her instructive or educational books, but merely to entertain her. She has never heard "baby-talk" and has always ennunciated with great precision which, in conjunction with a highly retentive memory, has been an undoubted factor in her acquisition of a vocabulary. (p. 65)

When being read to she asks the meaning of every unfamiliar word, and rarely forgets it . . . . She has rarely been asked to memorize anything.

She had a German nurse until she was two and a half and understood a good deal of Oerman. (p. 68)

She is never content until she knows the exact name for every new thing and its every part. (p. 69)

It needs only to be added that the parents kept an exact record o f the ch i ld ' s spoken vocabulary at 16 months (229 words) and at age 5, listing and classifying into parts of speech every one o f her 6,837 words over a six-month period.

The key to the paradox seems to lie in a t remendous concern for "natural - n e s s " and spontanei ty, deriving in part from strong beliefs in the predominant ly biological basis for intellectual development . An interesting illustration of this cultural stress on spontaneity appears in a later case o f T e r m a n ' s (IQ 188, age 7- 11) whose mother evident ly conceded much to the role of st imulation in advancing mental development . (Terman & Fenton, 1921; Burks, Jensen, & Terman, 1930).

Betty's education has been managed by her mother, whose guiding principle has been the conviction that a child's confidence in his own ability to think and do should be sedulously cultivated. She believes that the abilities of children often atrophy for lack of encouragement or because of the destruc-

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tive criticism of their elders. When Betty does a thing well she is com- mended. Spontaneity is cultivated. (Terman & Fenton, 1921, p. 178; emphasis added)

This child, whose 1916 Binet IQ was 188 at age 7-11, became a voracious reader and began composing stories and poems between two and four years of age. She was reading fourth grade material by age 41/2, often reading 5 or 6 hours a day from then on. She wrote many stories and poems, writing continuously and prolifically, using a typewriter from age six on, and completing her first novel (120 pages) before age 18.

There is much evidence pointing to just how intensely and continuously involved the mother was in educating her daughter and indicating the various methods used for encouragement and the cultivation of spontaneity. But the case descriptions also throw into relief this contradiction between intensity of stimulation and stress on spontaneity which is the hallmark of incidental strategies to early stimulation. The parents', and especially the mother 's, intensity of involvement is unambiguous:

Beatrice is an only child and was born twelve years after her parents' marriage; her development and training have absorbed the major portion of their attention and interest . . . .

Until the age of 11 Beatrice read and studied at home under her mother's direction. (Burks, Jensen, & Terman, 1930, p. 423)

Additional evidence on the extent of the mother's involvement is con- tained in the case description of the child's motivations and accomplishments (as always, achievement is the central preoccupation of Terman and his group), which also furnishes a few details on teaching methods. Regarding methods, reading to Betty was obviously a predominant activity, considering that Betty's:

• . . early, continuous, and intense interest, first in hearing or reading, then in producing, stories and verses, is especially noteworthy. (Burks, Jensen, & Terman, 1930, p. 423)

Recording her narrated verses and stories was another method, indicated in the Terman group's comment that "few of her compositions were preserved before she was 6 " (p. 424), but the frequent reference to Betty's many productions reveal that constantly listening to her performances, evidently with the most devoted and rewarding attention, was a highly favored parental method. The mother also kept a "baby-book ," in which she wrote a detailed account of Betty's accomplishments, in itself incidentally furnishing information on methods. Thus we see a fourth and fifth technique, a constant readiness to answer questions and learning with blocks in play so that:


At 16 months, Beatrice had learned the letters I, A, O, and T by asking what the letters on her blocks were, (p. 425)

followed by accumulating accomplishments of a Stage II type, such as knowing the entire alphabet at 19 months, counting as many as 12 birds in a picture by 22 months, and recognizing 12 primary colors by 25 months, which in turn, along with being read to frequently, prepared the ground for fluent reading (Stage III).

Here is a mother who apparently follows incidental strategies, guiding her daughter's learning well into the elementary years (age 11) and Stage IV, self- propelled activities (which consisted of reading hundreds of books and writing dozens of stories and poems, composing them herself on a typewriter--from age six on). The only "formal instruction to this age included as a rule from ten to twenty minutes of arithmetic instruction daily" (p. 424-425). How incidental or spontaneous is recording stories narrated and keeping track of progress in such detail in a baby-book, including the number of lines in poems recited, at 27 months, "one of eight lines, and two of sixteen lines each" (p. 425), and even the record of books read for some years; "At 8 years she had read approximately 750 books; at 10 years approximately 1,400" (p. 424)? How could a child, whose parents devoted such constant attention and kept such detailed records, "surprise her parents by reciting three poems ," at 27 months, as just noted, or such involved parents "first learn of her ability to read when they discovered her at the age of 41/2 years, reading Heidi, a book of about fourth grade difficulty" (Terman & Fenton, 1921, p. 164)?

Admittedly, the source of emerging reading skills was apparently informal interaction and not didactic teaching, which investigators (like Terman) and many parents of that era so strongly condemned. But regardless of method, there must have been almost daily instances of the parents expanding her skill in recognizing letters and in reading words and sentences in the many books Betty was exposed to. Betty's informally guided development followed the characteristic sequence we have found in other precocious children, moreover, a sequence similar to but more intense than the one reported by Ilg and Ames (1950) as evolving at a somewhat less advanced pace for less precocious, but still bright middle class children. Given this close involvement and monitoring, how could Betty's parents have failed to observe these signs? The answer perhaps lies in their belief in heredity and their concern for spontaneity, to avoid and to appear to avoid "pushing" and didacticism at any cost.

CONCLUSIONS

It is difficult not to conclude that incidental, spontaneous strategies and systematic, planned strategies have more in common than they do differences; that they reflect different belief systems and frameworks for interpreting development as much as they reflect actual differences in the intensity, scope,

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and forms of stimulation and interaction employed. There is variation in techniques, ranging from the highly didactic and tightly programmed strategy of James Mill, who taught his son from age 3 logic, aritlunetic, history, and to read in Greek, Latin, and English at one end of the dining room table, while he wrote the History of British India at the other, (Mill, 1924; Packe, 1954) to Terman's (1919) Case 1, who:

Learned to read by following his mother around and asking the name of letters, and soon afterward surprised his parents by reading fluently out of a primer. (p. 196)

Yet there is clearly more guided stimulation in the identical cases, including Case 1, than is typically disclosed explicity in the case descriptions by Terman and other investigators, given their bias. Part of the difficulty, of course, is that unless parents claimed or admitted to intending to teach, both parents and the early investigators lacked our later knowledge of how guided and responsive interaction amounted to the same thing, and indeed might often represent the teaching-learning process in its best form. Even Root (1921), who displayed greater awareness of the role of early stimulation, furnished few details of the mechanisms by which the "surface" incidental strategies actually worked.

But it also seems clear that, even when systematic teaching was both obvious and extensive, few investigators were prepared to concede more to stimulation than the role of agent that allows biological potential to flower. Following Comenius and Rousseau, Terman (1905) warned at length of the dangers of "over-pressure" on children in a kind of "forced culture" that prematurely accelerates mental development at the cost of attaining truncated final levels. The apparent paradox of a scholar who otherwise studied precocious intellectual brilliance in children with unrestrained enthusiasm can perhaps best be explained by the sharp dichotomy he makes between the world of biology and the world of experience. There is no reciprocal interaction between the two. Heredity produces brilliance, while experience merely furnishes the nutrition on which the biologically maturing mind feeds without itself undergoing change. These concepts of fixed intelligence and of predetermined development, as Hunt (1961) defined them, were well represented by Gesell (Gesell & Ilg, 1949):

Environmental factors support,, inflect and modify; they do not generate the progressions of development. The sequences, the progressions are within the organism. (P. 20; emphasis added)

As his followers (Gesell, Ilg, & Ames, 1974) observe, " 'Mind manifests itself' was one of Dr. Geseil's favorite saying" (p. 6). The writing of other investigators, such as Hollingworth (1926, 1942) and Witty (1930), in their research and case descriptions everywhere follow the same stress on the innate origins of ability. Such a pervasive ideological climate from the world of science


would presumably serve as a constant pressure on parents, to not only to downplay the developmental effects of their early educational efforts, but to believe that precocity develops through maturation alone. The combination of the prevalent viewpoint and social stigma attached to early cognitive stimulation probably made it easier for many parents to deny their own role. It is thus quite probable that more parents than cared to admit it intentionally stimulated their child intensively.

In any case, to a considerable degree and regardless of whether intended and systematic or intuitive and incidental, there is evidently a pattern and sequence of parent-child interactions that is indispensable for the ontogenesis of precocious, complex cognitive development. We must also assume that biological potential is an equally essential precondition. Given the enormous range of individual differences in precocity levels (i.e., roughly from 130 to 200+ IQ) often in the face of apparently equivalent patterns of intense early stimulation, there is plenty of room for attributing varying proportions of heritability and as yet unmeasured differences in technique and intensity to such a scale of differences. Hollingworth and Cobb (1928), for example, found tremendous differences in magnitude in educational achievement test scores between 146 IQ and 165 IQ level children, (N = 20 each), mean differences increasing in proportion to task complexity and reaching as much as a year or more in academic time saved according to age norms. The distinction between the "g i f ted" and the exceptionally "g i f ted ," variously defined at some level above 150 IQ, is now commonly made (Albert, 1971; Barbe, 1964; Robinson, 1979).

The evidence from both review of systematic investigations and analysis of case studies suggests, first of all, that stimulation begins early, often in infancy, and is remarkably intensive and extensive, typically taking place in planned or casual encounters several times each day over a period of years. This early exceptional stimulation has historically occurred in the personal idiom of the home, usually in professional and semi-professional or at least highly intellectually-oriented families with high standards and aspirations for their children, who involve their children in communications with adults and problem oriented (rational) thinking early in life. Instruction is thus rarely directly didactic, but is almost always highly interactive and couched in some sort of highly effective incentive system. Teaching through interaction takes one of two forms: one, introducing concepts into the child's dramatic and sensory motor play with toys and added concrete learning devices; and two, endless labeling and explaining in response to the child's question-answering. In either case, these highly reciprocal and problem centered forms of cognitive activity appear to be extremely reinforcing, building up an intensity, interest in, and persistent drive for learning that result in increasing initiative and self-regulation on the part of the child. Added stimulation through tirelessly reading (or occasionally telling stories) to the child, and frequent experience outside the home in visiting community sites, museums, and other settings for learning are extremely common.

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A typical sequence emerges following a process of developmental learning that, apart from the highly motivating sensory motor and contingent interaction framework itself, appears to force a mental transformation of the child into a highly self-propelled cognitive learner. The roots of this process seem to lie in the nature of the cognitive system established. Among the primary elements of this system are complex inquiry or problem solvJng strategies, a wide scope of knowledge for the age, and, above all, an early and sophisticated mastery of highly symbolic codes, especially language and reading, but sometimes writing, math, and foreign languages as well.

It is not only the unusual earliness with which these skills and codes are established that counts, however. It is rather the extraordinary mastery with which such skills are planted so precociously that seems to determine the outcomes. Mastered so well, so early, the codes and skills serve as an exceptional cognitive foundation, enabling the child to reach a cognitive threshold, to organize and pursue learning on its own, at a level of complexity not ordinarily attained at any age by most children. A cognitive analog of a kind of "critical mass" is formed that opens up wide vistas for self-propelled learning. Beginning with early mastery of language (Stage I), the infant is able to apprehend symbolic communication with unusual ease, which, when accompanied or soon followed by exposure to such graphic symbols as letters, words, and phrases (Stage II), along with continuing broad knowledge communication, leads to early fluent reading (and sometimes writing) (Stage III.) Skilled reading in turn makes possible a rapid and autonomous acceleration in the rate o f expansion of knowledge through access to advanced printed materials (Stage IV). Numerals, musical symbols, and foreign languages may also become involved as early as Stages I or II, leading to fluent Stage III competence that facilitates accelerated, partly self-propelled mastery learning in those fields.

Yet such a transformed "critical mass ," though constituting a prolific generative cognitive learning system, apparently does require--or at least is typically accompanied by---continuing exogeneous support of some kind throughout the school years. The family and milieu of intellectual associations surrounding the home continues to serve as a socioeconomic base and ~,s a matrix of psychological patterns and values that channelize and support the precocious child's activities toward accelerated cognitive development and exceptional intellectual interest and achievement. Reading widely in complex and diverse historical, literary, and scientific sources is encouraged (and usually modeled); independent projects, such as collecting, experimentation, and creative writing, are aided; academic honors and grade acceleration in school are often expected and facilitated through close communication with the school and monitoring of the student's school activities; and the child's social role of intellectual prodigy at school entry recruits the additional support (though occasionally the hostility) of teachers, admiring peers, and community members to reinforce further the


precocious intellectual strivings, and often thrust the child into positions of popularity and leadership.

The literature on bright children reports few exceptions to the way in which intellectual precocity breeds superior social adaptation in and out of school, through the leverage and welcome reception the multiple complex skills provide for excelling and for being admired in academic, extra-curricular, and social activities through which advancement to leadership is commonly realized (Miles, 1954; Terman, 1925; Burks, Jenson, & Terman, 1930; Passow, 1979; Witty, 1930). The few exceptions, generally among the brightest of the bright, take the form of social loneliness, unpopularity, intellectual isolation arising from various combinations of extremes in ability and superiority attitudes that may develop in the very bright, intellectual fears and intolerance among teachers and fellow students, and simply maladapted coping modes that generate social conflict and isolation (Hollingworth, 1942; Robinson, 1979)

For the main body of precocious children, however, exceptional intellectual mastery combines comfortably with" highly successful academic achievement and social adaptation to form the continuing fabric of their development. Both exogenous factors of family and school life and the generative powers of the precocious child's complex cognitive system emerge as major agents serving to perpetuate the early promise, yet no effort has been made to disentangle the two factors.

An interesting indication that the internal system, once formed, may be the more critical agent can be found in Hollingworth's (1942) classic study of 180 IQ children, a level that she estimated is found with a frequency of only one in a population of a million. In their later development, all 12 children, without exception, scored at the same extraordinary high level on equivalent ability or achievement measures and performed outstandingly and typically with originality in scholarship (though not always in school) between the ages of 9 and 20 years of age. Although, only one child was tested prior to school age, every child learned to read fluently by age 4 (8, 67%, learned by age 3) and displayed other signs of exceptional precocity linked to extraordinarily intensive early stimulation. The later records of these children are sprinkled with comments reflecting the quality of complex cognitive autonomy of their self-propelled learning system, such as:

His truant hours were spent partly in the public library, where he read continuously in technical volumes in a great variety of fields and accumulated an amazing fund of general information and esoteric lore. Law, theology, history, science, and literature were some of his favorite fields.

When not in the library, he would usually be at a chess club . . . . He rapidly developed into an expert chess and bridge player, and in Eastern chess tournaments is said to have achieved the ranking of seventh in the national list. He always managed to appear at high school to take the necessary

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examinations, and passed all his subjects with good standing and even with phenomenal records. (p. 168; Child F)

and

She was well-read, and discussed with discrimination plays, books, and radio programs. At 3 years of age she had been reading books. At 5 she learned to write her name so that she could take out a library card. At 7 years 10 months she had read six Shakespearean plays. She read all kinds of books, and used dictionaries and encyclopedias independently. She was at that time composing, with a playmate, a "Jingles Book." (p. 203; Child J)

and

"L. [age 10-0] has acquired a wealth of information. We can be sure of one thing--no matter where this boy attends school, no matter what the teaching devices are, he will always leam new facts and instruct himself. Such intellectual curiosity as this boy possesses will always be satisfied because of his own drive to acquire both information and skills." (p. 213; quoted from tester's report; Child L)

Young L's erudition was astonishing. His passion for scholarly accuracy and thoroughness set a high standard for accomplishment. He was fondly dubbed " P r o f e s s o r " . . . . He was often allowed to lecture (for as long as an hour) on some special topic, such as the history of timepieces, ancient theories of engine construction, mathematics, and history. He constructed out of foods and ends (typewriter ribbon spools, for example) a homemade clock. (p. 217)

Yet the role-of social support and continued exceptional cognit ive st imulation from home and school cannot be ruled out even in these cases. Evidence of very except ional , exogenous factors from the home continuing during later development is c lear in 5 o f the cases (evidence is unclear but not inconsistent with similar practices in the remaining 7), o f exceptional st imulation in school in all 12 (special abil i ty schools or classes, 8; extensive grade acceleration, 4), and sharply focused reinforcement from the role o f child prodigy in all cases as well. The quality o f cognit ive self-governance in later development at these intel lec- tual heights may approach perfection, but never, apparently, functions without the aid and pervasive influence of exceptional exogenous forces. Intel l igence is thus as much an expression of functional relations in the ecology of a social context as it is a quali ty o f mind.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CHILD CARE AND EDUCATION

What proport ion of chi ldren in any society now realize their full cognit ive potentials? Only a small percentage o f any populat ion, if we may judge by the


extraordinary successes of these families in developing precocious children. Although we must place matters in persepctive, presuming that these children started with biological potentials greater than average, the other side of the equation is that few children grow up with the quality of cognitive experience these children encountered. What would happen to our general population if these unusual method were widely disseminated and adopted by parents, day care centers, and other early systems of child care everywhere?

We have travelled too far since the preformationism and predeterminism of Terman's (1925) day to be longer diverted by the apparent dichotomy between heredity and environment, between maturation and learning. As Hunt (1975) observed, the range of reaction for any population, the type and variety of abilities that can actually be developed through the cumulative effects of experience interacting with biological potentials, is enormous. These precocity studies are not alone in supporting this concept. The collected early intervention studies of the past two decades underscore the regularity with which systematic application of early cognitive stimulation will advance ability levels in language and concept learning in even the most socioeconomically disadvantaged populations (Zigler & Valentine, 1979). My own investigations, encompassing infants from highly educated as well as poorly educated families and different ethnicities Chinese, Italian, Afro-Caribbean, Anglo-Canadian, Jewish) suggest that phenotypic expression of abilities can easily vary by as much as 20 to 40 or more IQ points, the type of variation (language, math, problem solving, gross motor, multiple abilities) being influenced, moreover, by the type of stimulation employed (Fowler & Swenson, 1979; Fowler, 1981a). In the precocity studies themselves, we see that variations between verbal and calculation skills, for example, appear to be similarly related to variations in the corresponding focus of stimulation.

If, as it appears, children from large proportions of the general population--including even the most economically advantaged sectors--fail to realize their cognitive potentials, current ability test norms and competence standards may grossly underestimate human potentials for mental development, and the concept of deprivation assumes a new perspective. Were methods similar to those employed by parents in these precocity studies to be widely applied, a new set of norms would inevitably emerge, norms reflecting the cognitive consequences of greatly improved modes of rearing children to acquire mastery of symbols and abstract thinking. We would be moving from socialization modes in which children are reared largely by cultural folk traditions suited for ecologically adaptive rural ways of life and simple technologies of the past (Fowler, 1981b) to socialization modes in which methods are planned adaptively to meet the complex symbol competence demands of our high technology society.

The counterpart of the perspective for raising norms for various abstract skills, poorly summarized by global IQ test measures, is that cognitive deprivation is widespread and affects all sectors of the population except the

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fortuitous few who already experience these favorable modes of stimulation. Most individuals of all social classes are deprived in some way to some degree, the distinction among populations being merely one of degree.

Although more research is certainly required to verify and establish in detail the characteristics and consequences of these socialization strategies, enough is known to begin asking how widely such strategies can transfer to parents and group programs in the general population, and, if they do, how children reared in such numbers will adapt to the schools and occupational institutions of society. Difficult questions, though the answer to the first is suggested by the early intervention studies themselves, which indicate that transfer is certainly feasible to both home and center, given the social interest. The answer to the second, however, seems to lie in the necessity for taking inventory of societal needs in relation to children's potentials. As for the school, if we are to take seriously the implications of these potentials, we must begin to ask, not only is the child ready for school, but also is the school ready for the child.

REFERENCES

Albert, R. D. Cognitive development and parental loss among the gifted, the exceptionally gifted and the creative. Psychological Reports, 1971,29, 19-26.

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