The Abecedarian Lifespan Approach to Learning and Functional Intelligence

Abstract

In this summation of the Abecedarian Project (1971-2025) we present our lifespan biosocial model of learning that emphasizes the development of Functional Intelligence. Functional Intelligence is what an individual, at each age period and in dominant environmental contexts, accomplishes in socially-valued domains of living through thinking and behavior. The Abecedarian Project is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to prevent intellectual and social subnormality in children born into extremely high-risk social and economic circumstances. A full-day, year-round early education program for the first 5 years of life was the core of the early intervention. The control group received nutritional supplements, pediatric care, and family social work services, as did the intervention group, but not the early education intervention. Teacher-child transactions were construed as Developmental Priming Mechanisms. The model specifies 5 cumulative learning and cognitive processes. Central features include recognizing culturally powerful ecological contexts and relevant domains of knowledge within those contexts. The initial goal of the early educational program was to promote cognitive and language development and ensure high levels of school preparedness at kindergarten entry. Evidence is provided that supports the conclusion that the Abecedarian Early Education Program positively affected assessed intelligence and developmental competence from 18 months through school entry, followed by consistently higher achievement in academic areas of reading and mathematics at all tested ages through early adulthood. Rates of retention in grade and placement in special education also were markedly reduced. Longer-term outcomes in adulthood, from their early 20s through middle age in their 30s and 40s, demonstrated significant benefits related to health, especially cardiovascular biomarkers, and increased functional intelligence (i.e., effective real-world thinking and acting) including attaining more years of education and degrees post-high school, having higher rates of full-time employment, greater self-sufficiency, closer positive relationships with both their mothers and fathers, displaying longer future planning horizons, adopting better decision-making strategies, and having evidence of structural brain differences in both overall cortex size and in 4 of 5 hypothesized brain regions theoretically linked to the early education intervention and active learning and language processes.

We conclude that future early education interventions might usefully focus on understanding changes in developmental trajectories during and after the intervention and the forces that regulate both individual stability and change. Characterizations of impact might also seek to capture more fully the multiple experiential contexts where study participants spend time, both during and after the planned educational intervention, and identifying the types of functional intelligence skills that optimize success in those contexts. A joint focus on changes in developmental trajectories and the specification of important and facilitative (versus thwarting) contexts is consistent with a dynamic biosocial systems and its probabilistic, multi-domain perspective on human development. This conceptual framework puts the focus of scientific efforts relating to learning, health, educational achievement, personal life satisfaction, and becoming an engaged and contributory adult citizen on further specifying the effective (and sometimes alternative or compensatory) components to support developmental advances within and across the various functional domains as well as periods in the lifespan.