Growth and academic achievement in inner-city kindergarten children. The relationship of height, weight, cognitive ability, and neurodevelopmental level.
Measures of height, weight, nonverbal cognitive ability (Ravens progressive matrix), visual-motor-perceptual ability (Beery-Buktenica test of Visual Motor Integration [VMI]), the imitation-of-gestures technique, and academic achievement (Stanford Early Achievement) were obtained for a sample of 82 children from a poor inner-city community. In contrast to prior reports from the United States and about other developed countries, anthropometric measures were related both to academic achievement and to these measures of neurodevelopment. They were not consistently related to measures of nonverbal cognitive ability. Regression analyses revealed that general cognitive ability contributed more variance (39%) to predictions of achievement than all other variables, including weight for age (13%) and VMI (6%). Children with reduced somatic growth were likely to do poorly in school, but the data do not show that undernutrition causes learning failure. Rather, they suggest that environmental problems affecting the development of thought processes and nutrient intake precede both growth and learning failure.
Karp
Robert J
RJ
Children's Medical Center/SUNY, Brooklyn 11208.
Martin
R
R
Sewell
T
T
Manni
J
J
Heller
A
A
D000124:Achievement; D001827:Body Height; D001835:Body Weight; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002664:Child Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004521:Educational Measurement; D005260:Female; D006128:Growth; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D015143:Philadelphia; D011203:Poverty; D011340:Problem Solving; D002666:Psychology, Child; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D014505:Urban Population