The Promise Foundation’s research has shown that both privilege and disadvantage tend to accumulate over the person’s growth and development. Disadvantage, particularly, could have a cumulative impact as the child’s maturation progresses.
Deprivation in cognitive stimulation in the early childhood years can create a disadvantage in learning foundations almost at the outset.
Given impoverished learning environments in school, the learning skills disadvantage the child carries up from earlier years can worsen in the primary and middle school years and manifest as educational underachievement.
Later in the developmental sequence these deprivations could be further accentuated during the high school years, with the additional influence on motivational and attributional factors.
The graphs shown on this page are extracted from one of our studies of adolescents and young adults that covered 13 different regions in India. While this is does not provide evidence of causal linkages, the remarkable differences between the low and middle socioecomic status groups could indicate that disadvantage accumulates as the individual moves from one developmental stage to another.
Hence, another of our guiding principles is to take a developmental approach, keeping in view that the economically disadvantaged could suffer
