Unlocking Potential: Insights from the Science of Learning on Creating Optimal Home Learning Environments

Executive summary:

• The Home Learning Environment (HLE) has been found to make a larger contribution to educational outcomes than the school environment.
• Evidence from the science of learning shows that parents and caregivers can help their child learn through creating less noisy environments, providing structures and routines, being sensitive to their child’s attention, actively engaging with the child through play, providing feedback and positive role models, as well as encouraging good sleep and access to green spaces.
• Given the importance of HLE for learning outcomes, it is important for policy makers to integrate family engagement in education policies.

Introduction

Learning happens well before children step into a classroom and even when children have the age to attend school, they would only spend a small percentage of their time inside a classroom. From the earliest moments of infancy, caregivers play a pivotal role in shaping children’s learning experiences through everyday interactions, routines, and activities. The home learning environment (HLE) serves as the foundational setting where children first encounter language, engage in social interactions, and develop foundational cognitive skills that lay the groundwork for their future academic success and foster a lifelong love of learning. The HLE includes factors such as parental involvement, family routines, access to books and educational materials, opportunities for play and exploration, exposure to language and literacy experiences, and the quality of parent-child interactions.

Numerous studies across the globe have shown that the quality of the HLE during the early years has an impact on educational outcomes, especially for reading and mathematics, later in life (Daucourt et al., 2021; Sammons et al., 2015). Parents who initially offer their children a positive, diverse, and engaging HLE during their early years are more inclined to sustain this stimulating environment as their children grow older (Toth et al., 2019). Moreover, parental involvement, encompassing active participation in all facets of their children’s social, emotional, and academic progress, influences all phases of education (Castro et al., 2015).

Evidence from meta-analyses suggest that the home learning environment has an effect size of .52 on learning outcomes and parental involvement contributes .50, according to Hattie (2017). In contrast, studies (e.g., Chevalier et al., 2005; Byrne et al., 2010) have shown that the effect of being in a particular classroom or school is much lower, and often explains only .10 of the variation between student outcomes. This shows that the HLE has a significant impact on children’s learning outcomes, at least in western societies.

The HLE is shaped by different factors, including the family’s socio-economic status (SES) that allows them to access resources and technology, the family’s cultural values and beliefs, the wider community and neighbourhood context, the family structure and dynamics, and parental education and knowledge. Indeed, parents who are worried about paying rent, food or amenities typically have less time and energy to invest in their child’s HLE and have less access to resources (Easterbrook et al., 2022). Although it is important to address issues related to SES in the first instance, it is not clear that negating the presence of negative factors will provide optimal positive outcomes. Dehaene (2021) outlines four fundamental pillars crucial for effective learning: attention, active engagement, feedback, and consolidation. Drawing upon insights from educational neuroscience, a deeper understanding emerges regarding how the Home Learning Environment (HLE) can be enhanced to benefit all students.

Home environments for healthy brains for learning: attention

Attention is understood to be an essential prerequisite for learning and includes selecting, filtering, and amplifying information (Dehaene, 2021). Without selective focus on relevant information while filtering out distractions, it is difficult for children to learn new things. Within the HLE, attention can be optimised in a number of ways. First, HLE that are busy and noisy have been found to affect the development of children’s attention, infants’ sleep (Chere, 2022), and adolescents’ executive function abilities (Chere & Kirkham, 2021) and long-term noise pollution has been linked to cognitive impairments in middle to older adults (Thompson et al., 2022). So, creating quieter times can help children to learn and thrive.

Secondly, attention can be optimised by providing routines and structure. The brain thrives on patterns and familiarity, and when tasks follow a structured routine, it reduces uncertainty and anxiety, creating an optimal environment for learning. This predictability allows the brain to focus more attention on absorbing new information rather than on processing unfamiliar situations. Routines can be particularly useful for children and adolescents because the areas of the brain responsible for attention and self-regulation are still developing (Blakemore, 2018). In addition, when learning follows a predictable structure, it becomes easier for the brain to make connections between different concepts and to retain information over the long term (Tabibian et al., 2019). Finally, through routines and thus repetitions the pathways in the brain can be made stronger, which makes execution of certain tasks more efficient and automatic.

Finally, attention can be improved through parental sensitivity. Through social attention sharing, children’s attention is guided by adult signals. Studies have shown that social attention sharing starts very early on in infancy (Csibra & Gergely, 2006). In addition, higher caregiver sensitivity in infancy is related to higher frontal resting EEG power, which is associated with a state of relaxed alertness and optimal attentional functioning (Bernier et al., 2016). Indeed, numerous studies have shown that through parental sensitivity and parental signals children pay attention to the right place at the right time, which improves children’s vocabulary and language abilities (Elsabbagh et al., 2013), their mathematical abilities (Van Herwegen, 2015), and overall academic outcomes (DePasquale & Gunnar, 2020).

Active engagement

A second important factor for learning is being exposed to rich opportunities and actively engaging in tasks and events. Active engagement triggers the release of neurotransmitters through a variety of mechanisms that involve the brain’s response to stimulation, effort, and reward. When individuals actively engage in tasks or activities, their brains become involved in processing information, making decisions, and generating responses. This heightened neural activity leads to the release of neurotransmitters that facilitate communication between neurons and boost the growth and function of neurons and their connections, the glial cells that support and feed neurons, and blood vessels within the brain (Han et al., 2022). As such, it is important that parents provide learning experiences that encourage children’s curiosity and motivates them to actively engage.

Play provides opportunities for active engagement, problem-solving, creativity, and self-expression and thus allows children to develop important social, cognitive and emotional skills. As play-based learning activities can improve mathematical outcomes (Vogt et al., 2018), executive functions (Skene et al., 2022), and social communication (O’Keeffe et al., 2023) amongst other skills parents should be encouraged to include learning opportunities in play. For example, there are now apps that provide parents with banks of ideas of how they can include maths (MathsATHome app) or learning more generally (EasyPeasy) into their child’s play environment.

Feedback

As described above, the brain relies on routines and structures to automate processes and to ensure attention is focused. This allows the brain to constantly make predictions. Learning takes place when the predicted expectation is violated, and error feedback takes place. The learner needs feedback for: correcting misconceptions and reinforcement (i.e. positive feedback to strengthen connections which will also allow motivation to be actively engaged). Indeed, research has shown that children learn better from environments that provide not only corrected feedback (feedback that only tells the child whether they are doing something correctly or not) but that explanatory feedback is important (explaining why they are correct or incorrect) (Outhwaite et al., 2023).

Parents do not only provide feedback when interacting with their children, they also act as important role models for how to cope with adverse learning experiences, how to show resilience, and how to foster positive attitude towards learning, curiosity, persistence, and problem-solving. For example, research has shown that when parents have high maths anxiety this may affect their children’s mathematical knowledge and abilities, especially their mathematical homework (Maloney et al., 2015).

Importantly, parents are important role-models to teach children self-reflection as well as developing children’s socio-emotional wellbeing and communication skills. Positive feedback from parents can boost children’s confidence, self-esteem, and motivation to learn.

Consolidation

Finally, learning requires individuals to form new memories, to integrate this new information with existing knowledge and, to reorganise memories to aid retrieval. Consolidation is particularly important for the learning of procedural skills and motor habits. Within the HLE, consolidation of knowledge can be improved through sufficient and good quality sleep. During slow-wave sleep (SWS) stages, the brain engages in spontaneous neural activity that replays and reactivates the neural patterns associated with recent learning experiences. This replay process helps consolidate and strengthen memory traces by reinforcing the connections between neurons during the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stages. Sleep allows for the reorganization of memory networks, leading to more robust and interconnected memory representations. During wakefulness, incoming sensory information and cognitive demands can interfere with memory consolidation processes, leading to memory decay or disruption. Sleep provides a state of relative sensory isolation, allowing the brain to focus on consolidating memories without interference from external stimuli. Although sleep is not the only time during which memory consolidation takes place (Dastgheib et al., 2022), good quality sleep also has a positive impact on wellbeing and health in general (Ramar et al., 2021), both of which impact on learning.

Another way in which the HLE can improve consolidation of knowledge is by providing access to green spaces. Research has shown that access to green spaces can reduce stress and reduced stress and increased relaxation facilitate optimal cognitive functioning, including attention, memory consolidation, and learning (Shields et al., 2019). In addition, trees and plants can reduce air pollution, absorb heat, and can reduce exposure to distractive noise through destructive interference or cancelling of the sound waves (van den Bogerd et al., 2020). Although the research on the effects of nature on academic outcomes is still in its infancy, access to green space has been found to improve mental well-being, overall health, and cognitive development of children (McCormick, 2017) and these factors have been found to relate to improved learning outcomes (Dadvand et al., 2015).

Conclusion

Evidence from the science of learning shows that parents and caregivers can help their child learn through improving noise reduction, providing structures and routines, being sensitive to their child’s attention, actively engaging with through child through play, providing feedback and positive role models, as well as encouraging good sleep and accessing green spaces.

Seeing the importance of HLE for learning outcomes, it is important for policy makers to integrate family engagement in education policies that are sensitive to culture differences regarding parenting practices. This would include investing in the HLE but also to work with parents and caregivers to ensure parents have the tools to engage with their child. Parents and caregivers require access to learning resources but also support and information about how and why children learn (see educational apps that provide parents with banks of ideas or The Family Connect programme from Save the Children). In addition, access to green spaces and encouraging schools to work with parents and caregivers to encourage parental engagement would ensure parents and children can promote healthy brains from birth onwards.

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