Askwith Education Forum

Translating Science for Public Understanding

How do you change the pictures inside their heads?

By Ruth Walker

This is an exciting time in the field of early childhood development. The discoveries being made about the way young minds grow and work have profound implications in public policy, education, economics, public health, and even juvenile justice.

But it is a challenging time for those seeking to translate these discoveries into language that the news media, the public, and policymakers truly understand.

The problem, according to Susan Nall Bales, president of the FrameWorks Institute in Washington, is “the pictures in people’s heads.” It’s a phrase she appropriated from Walter Lippmann’s book Public Opinion, in which he wrote that those pictures would determine how people see the world.

Those pictures — set ways of looking at things — enable people to process the almost overwhelming flood of images and ideas coming at them constantly. But those pictures can also keep people from taking in paradigm-shifting new information, Bales said at The Child Development Challenge: Translating Science for Public Understanding, an Askwith Education Forum held in October. Bales was joined on the panel by Franklin Gilliam, a senior fellow at the FrameWorks Institute, and Ed School Professors Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child, which sponsored the event.

“An important part of the mission of the center is to address the issue of knowledge transfer as a scholarly endeavor in itself,” Shonkoff says. “We don’t take as a given that science speaks for itself in the policy world.”

As its name suggests, the FrameWorks approach starts by considering the “frame” that the public puts around a given issue. Frames are “organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world,” Bales says.

Reframing can recast the complex four-way conversation among scientists, the media, the public, and policymakers. Essential to this reframing are what Bales calls “simplifying models”— typically simple metaphors, such as the warming earth being seen as a greenhouse, for instance.

Within the academy, the new science of child development is widely seen as a strong argument for early childhood education. Getting little ones into preK classes that will foster their cognitive, emotional, and social development is a can’t-lose proposition, in this view. To put it in bumper-sticker terms: “PreK is the new K.”

FrameWorks found that the popular view is very different. For one thing, the media coverage of children is heavily skewed to safety issues, so any program that takes young children out of the safety of the home may be looked at askance. Many parents also see early childhood education as a form of government intrusion in the private sphere of the family. Others see early childhood education as another instance of children being pressured to grow up too fast.

When it was explained that a child’s first years are like the foundation of a building upon which everything else rests, parents stopped seeing early childhood education as intrusive. “Parents found that a much more compelling argument,” Bales says.

Yoshikawa confesses to being a longtime fan of the work Bales and Gilliam have done for the Center on the Developing Child and elsewhere. He says he was amazed at “the actual policy influence that phrases like ‘brain architecture’ have.” He was also surprised by the degree to which “simplifying models that explain causal mechanisms in early development can alter the investment behavior and policies put forth by legislators, in places where you wouldn’t expect,” he says, “like some of the red states that Jack [Shonkoff] is working with.”

— Ruth Walker is a freelance writer and former reporter at The Christian Science Monitor.

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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