Volley ball, architecture and toxic stress – what’s the link? You are unlikely to know unless you have been following the work of the US National Scientific Council on the Developing Child and its endeavors to give policy makers and the public a more sophisticated understanding of child development.

The terms are all metaphors which have been carefully crafted to help the council’s dissemination efforts and are just a few of the concepts that have been assembled and tested by an unusual collaboration of scientists, communication experts and US politicians.

The work began seven years ago, after the publication of From Neurons to Neighborhoods, a seminal report on child development. By carefully studying the way information is communicated and understood, the Council hoped it would be possible to close the gap between what we know and what we do to advance the healthy development of young children.

This pressing need was highlighted by the report’s authors who observed that while the scientific base for child development was rich and growing rapidly, public understanding was not shifting at the same pace. They were also concerned that policy makers were spending considerable amounts of public money without fully understanding the consequences for the economy and for society of not investing adequately in children.

Disseminating research findings is a tricky business. Most academics have a horror story or two about unsuccessful encounters with journalists. In fact, there is little incentive for scholars to enter the fray since academic careers are built more on academic publication and grants raised than on successful engagement with the media.

The council established the project with these concerns in mind and formed a partnership with the FrameWorks Institute, an organization dedicated to improving the communication of science. Together they have taken a systematic, empirical look at whether science can be credibly served and the public better informed without losing the meaning of complex concepts as they are simplified for a lay audience.

The work began with the scientists selecting the main principles they believed were important for informed citizens and policy makers. This was the beginning of what they call the core story - the DNA of all efforts to communicate the ideas. The communication researchers then worked with these points to make the core story understandable to a lay audience without compromising the quality of the science.

The new version of the story was then shared with representative samples of lay people to see how they understood the material and responded to different ways of framing the ideas. In so doing they identified “cognitive holes” – areas where there were major differences between lay and expert understanding.

One way of plugging a cognitive hole is by developing a simple concrete analogy or metaphor. These devices make it easier for people to organize information into a clear picture in their heads. The communications researchers developed and tested a number of these devices by way of interviews and in quantitative experiments until they arrived at a set of analogies and metaphors that proved their worth by consistently aiding understanding. The product of this iterative process was an agreed core story.

'Brain architecture' is probably the most intuitive example of a simplifying model. It focuses attention on how the brain is built and strengthened as well as how it might be weakened structurally. Less obvious is how serve and return (as in volley ball) and toxic stress help us to understand child development.

The serve and return metaphor is concerned with the interaction of genes and experience and the way those interactions shape the brain's 'wiring'. The scientists wanted a simplifying model that captured the two-way nature of the process. This is how the 'serve and return' model is explained.

'Scientists now know that the interactive influences of genes and experience literally shape the architecture of the developing brain. The active ingredient, in what we refer to as ‘experience’, is the ‘’serve and return’’ nature of the relationships that children have with their parents and other caregivers in their family or community. Like the process of serve and return in games such as tennis and volleyball, very young children naturally reach out for interaction through vocalizing, facial expressions, and gestures. If adults do not respond by getting in sync and engaging in responsive, complementary behaviors, the child’s learning process is disrupted and there can be negative implications for later development.'

The toxic stress metaphor conveys the idea that some stress is normal and essential to healthy development but that certain stresses can be detrimental. This is how the 'toxic stress' model is explained.

'Scientists talk about distinguishing among three kinds of stress experience, characterized by differing intensity and duration of elevations in heart rate, blood pressure, and a range of stress hormones (such as cortisol) that can damage organ systems when they are activated for prolonged periods of time. Positive stress, such as a physiological response to the first day in a new preschool setting, is normative and short-lived. Tolerable stress, which is associated with potentially serious threats such as significant family illness or a natural disaster, could be damaging to young children but they are buffered from long-term, adverse effects by the presence of supportive relationships, like a strong family when a loved one dies. In contrast, toxic stress lasts longer, lacks consistent supportive relationships, and can cause damage to the developing brain and other organ systems that leads to lifelong problems in learning, behavior, and both physical and mental health. Toxic stress in early childhood can be precipitated by extreme poverty, physical abuse, chronic neglect, or severe maternal depression or parental substance abuse, among other risk factors'.

The acid test of these models was whether or not they could influence the thinking of state legislators. A 15-minute video presentation of the core story was shown to small groups of legislators. When interviewed afterwards, they reported that listening to the core story encouraged them to talk with other legislators including those from opposing parties.

By monitoring the media, the Frameworks Institute have found evidence that the simplifying models are being used widely, not only in the US in editorials, news articles and opinion columns, but also abroad in Australia, the UK, Germany and China.

More significant are the very powerful examples of the core story directly influencing policy-making. In Nebraska members of the legislature were briefed using an overview of the core story shortly before a vote on early childhood program. The legislation was approved by a vote of 42-0, with a doubled investment.

This partnership of scientists and communication researchers has shown that child development researchers can be “credible knowledge brokers” who can influence the thinking and actions of politicians by teaching about science. This work is now hosted at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University where they see the next steps being about putting more energy into better understanding and studying the process of how knowledge is translated. This should lead to common understanding of effective practices for transferring knowledge from research to policy and service delivery.

It would appear that this is one effective strategy for narrowing the gap between what we know and what we do.

References:
Shonkoff, J.P. and Bales, S.N. (2011) Science does not speak for itself: translating child development research for the public and its policymakers, Child Development, 82 (1) pp17-32

Links
Center for Developing Child: www.developingchild.harvard.edu
FrameWorks Institute: www.frameworksinstitute.org