The Science Behind the One Pencil Project

Financial contributions from donors goes directly to on-the-ground support, providing school supplies, providing scholarships, improving school structures, and building and repairing wells.

Additionally, members of One Pencil also seek to answer critical questions regarding learning and child development while giving back to the communities participating in our work. We do this by sharing findings directly to our partner communities, and we work to create a pipelines that can help communities disseminate research results to the NGOs and policymakers who can affect long-term change at the community, regional, and national levels.

Here are some of the academic goals set forth by One Pencil and its affiliated scientists as we continue investigations into formal education, the culture of education, and lifetime learning:

  • To better understand the learning implications (over the life course and even generationally) when schools lack fundamental resources?

  • To understand in real time how formal education affects scholastic performance, as well as professional and economic outcomes in transiting economies around the world. 

  • To contribute to education policy and reform as programs are developed and tailored to populations across diverse settings.

  • To inform academic researchers and policy makers on the impacts that the timing of education, as well as education quality and consistency can have on economic progress.

  • To understand whether the generally accepted teaching methods of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich & Democratic (WEIRD) societies are the most effective ways to transfer knowledge?

In engaging with communities around the world, One Pencil also ensures that any researcher involved is committed to:

  • Ensuring that the participant communities receive the benefits from new knowledge and continued access to education beyond the tenure of any investigative work.

  • Supporting the local communities and governments in efforts to expand access to schooling.

  • Collaborating with professors and educational researchers at universities and in governmental agencies in host countries.

  • Providing mentorship and training opportunities in host countries and the US.

  • Sharing results from the work to other operating NGOs and governmental agencies in order to better plan for equitable access to education, plan and respond to emergencies that affect education, and assist in the classification of education as a ‘life changing intervention.’

 

PUBLICATIONS

Poor School Quality Augments Differences in Children’s Abstract Reasoning Over Time: A Natural Experiment Davis, Stieglitz, Kaplan, Gurven (2020)

Brief Description: Psychologists usually measure children’s healthy development against widely agreed upon milestones. Yet, nearly all the evidence used to develop our contemporary theories of child cognition and learning are derived from less than 15% of the world’s population where schooling is nearly ubiquitous and quality co-occurs with other measures of socio-economics thought to affect cognitive development. Results from this natural experiment suggest that quality of schooling directly influences the developmental trajectory of children’s abilities to abstract problem solve, and that effective educational strategies may require a more comprehensive approach to address academic resource disparities.


Cognitive Performance Across the Life Course of Bolivian Forager-Farmers with Limited Schooling Gurven, Fuerstenberg, Trumble, Stieglitz, Beheim, Davis, Kaplan (2017)

Brief Description: Cognitive performance is characterized by at least two distinct life course trajectories. Many cognitive abilities (e.g. “effortful processing” abilities including fluid reasoning, and processing speed) improve throughout early adolescence and start declining in early adulthood, while other abilities (e.g. “crystallized” abilities like vocabulary breadth) improve throughout adult life, remaining robust even at late ages. Although schooling may impact performance and cognitive “reserve”, it has been argued that these age patterns of cognitive performance are human universals. Here we examine age patterns of cognitive performance among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Bolivia, and test whether schooling is related to differences in cognitive performance over the life course to assess models of active vs. passive cognitive reserve. We used a battery of eight tasks to assess a range of latent cognitive traits reflecting attention, processing speed, verbal declarative memory and semantic fluency (n=919 individuals, 49.9% female). Tsimane cognitive abilities show similar age-related differences as observed in industrialized populations: higher throughout adolescence and only slightly lower in later adulthood for semantic fluency, but substantially lower performance beginning in early adulthood for all other abilities. Schooling is associated with greater cognitive abilities at all ages controlling for sex, but has no attenuating effect on cognitive performance in late adulthood, consistent with models of passive cognitive reserve. We interpret the minimal attenuation of semantic fluency late in life in light of evolutionary theories of post-reproductive lifespan, which emphasize indirect fitness contributions of older adults through the transfer of information, labor and food to descendant kin

Spatial Cognition, Navigation, and Mobility among Children in a Forager-Horticulturalist Population, the Tsimane of Bolivia Davis, Cashdan Cognitive Development 52 (2019)

Brief Description: In many societies, males range farther than females, and this greater environmental experience may foster better spatial ability. Females are also reported to be more harm-avoidant, which may reduce spatial exploration. We evaluated these relationships among 6-18 year old Tsimané children, who live in a forager-horticulturalist society where both girls and boys have few constraints on spatial exploration compared to children in Western societies. Mobility was assessed through GPS tracking and interview, spatial ability through pointing accuracy, perspective-taking and mental rotation, and harm avoidance through interview. Few gender differences were found in mobility or spatial ability, although males pointed more accurately to challenging (high sinuosity) routes. Both girls and boys became more harm avoidant about travel risks as they got older, but there were few gender differences in harm avoidance. Schooling was associated with better performance on mental rotation but worse performance on regional pointing accuracy, probably because schooling limits outdoor spatial exploration.

Cultural Change Reduces Gender Differences in Mobility and Spatial Ability among Forager-Pastoralist Children, the Twa of northern Namibia Davis, Stack & Cashdan; Human Nature (Pre-Publication)

Brief Description: A fundamental cognitive function found across a wide range of species and necessary for survival is the ability to navigate complex environments. It has been suggested that mobility may play an important role in the development of spatial skills. Despite evolutionary arguments offering logical explanations for why sex/gender differences in spatial abilities and mobility might exist, thus far there has been limited sampling from non-industrialized and subsistence-based societies. This lack of sampling diversity has left many unanswered questions regarding the effects that environmental variation and cultural norms may have in shaping mobility patterns during childhood and the development of spatial competencies that may be associated with it. Here we examine variation in mobility (through GPS tracking and interview), performance on large-scale spatial skills (i.e. navigational ability), and performance on small-scale spatial skills (i.e. mental rotation task, Corsi blocks task, and water-level task) among Twa forager/pastoralists children whose daily lives have been dramatically altered since settlement and the introduction of government funded boarding schools. Unlike previous findings among Twa adults, both boys and girls (N=88; aged 6-18) show similar patterns of travel on all measures of mobility. We also find no significant differences in spatial task performance by gender for large or small-scale spatial skills. Further, children performed as well as adults did on mental rotation, and outperformed adults on the water-level task. We discuss how children’s early learning environments may influence the development of both large and small-scale spatial skills.