ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses theoretical issues related to schooling, and begins with an overview of evidence from correlational, cross-cultural, extended year, and "school cutoff" studies that suggests schooling uniquely enhances children's intellectual and academic skills. The chapter reviews the nature and sources of early individual differences in cognitive and literacy skills are presented. It focuses on schooling and cognitive development during the early elementary grades. The chapter integrates basic and applied work on schooling and cognitive growth, in the belief that each perspective could enlighten the other and together they could provide a fuller, more accurate and insightful account of how schooling shapes intellectual development. Investigations of changes in performance on intelligence and academic achievement tests across the summer months have revealed a small but consistent negative association between IQ scores and time spent out of school. A number of sociocultural factors outside the family have been hypothesized to affect children's cognitive development.
