Education: Levelling the playing field >> Equity and learning outcomes BOx 2.1 THE DEvELOPING BRAIN: AN EARLY WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY FOR LEARNING Long before a child enters the classroom, inequities can violence, can affect children by damaging neurons in create a lasting imprint on the architecture of the brain. areas involved in learning and emotional development. In other words, these deprivations affect how the brain Recent research on brain development casts new light develops. Negative experiences in a child’s life often on the formative influence of early childhood experience. manifest themselves later as difficulties with learning, In the first few years of life, a child’s brain creates 700 emotional development and management of anxieties. to 1,000 new neural connections every second, a pace that later diminishes. These early connections set the Because the first years of a child’s life affect brain foundation on which later connections are built. development so significantly, early childhood offers a critical window of opportunity to break intergenerational The new research shows that nutrition, health care and cycles of inequity. Early childhood care, protection and interaction between children and their caregivers can help stimulation can jumpstart brain development, strengthen with brain development in early childhood. Conversation, children’s ability to learn, help them develop psychological repeating and connecting words in meaningful contexts, resilience and allow them to adapt to change. and early exposure to literacy through reading and play are all positively associated with language skills. Early interventions can even affect future earnings. Research has shown, for example, that preventing Conversely, frequent exposure to chronically stressful undernutrition in early childhood leads to an increase in events in infancy, including nutritional deprivation and hourly earnings of at least 20 per cent later in a child’s life. Source: The World Bank, World development report 2015: Mind, society, and behavior, Washington, d.C., 2015, Chapter 5. Center on the developing Child at harvard Univer- sity, ‘Brain architecture’, , accessed 15 March 2016. lake, anthony, and Margaret Chan, ‘Putting science into practice for early child development’, The lancet, vol. 385, no. 9980, 2014, pp. 1816–1817. international food Policy research institute, Global nutrition report 2014: actions and accountability to accelerate the world’s progress on nutrition, Washington, d.C., 2014. although evidence is still limited and fragmented, a growing body of research appears to validate this pattern of substantial differences in key learning indicators between children from the poorest and richest households. research from five countries in latin america finds large wealth-related gaps on children’s standardized test scores for language development. The gaps are evident by 148 age 3, and there is no evidence of recovery once children enter school. The deficits continue as children progress through school. in latin america, a region-wide assessment showed that more than one quarter of third-grade students were unable to recognize basic phrases or locate information in a simple text.149 in india’s rural schools, a 2014 study showed that just under half of children in fifth grade were able to read a basic second-grade text. in arithmetic, half of fifth graders could not subtract two-digit numbers, and only about one quarter could do basic division.150 The same issues arise in other countries. in Uganda, an enrolment success story, just over half of the children in Grade 5 were able to read a story at Grade 2 level, according to the results of a 2012 assessment.151 in Kenya, a third of children in Grade 5 could not perform Grade 2 numeracy tasks. about 10 per cent of students in Grade 8 were unable to perform these tasks, according to a 2012 assessment.152 The STaTe of The World’S Children 2016 50