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  Show Posts
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1  EARLY LEARNING / Early Learning - General Discussions / Re: iPhone Apps? on: January 18, 2010, 02:38:18 AM
My daughter just turned 18 months old.  I have an Ipod Touch 3g. I sometimes let her use my Ipod when we are both on the couch or bed.  She is going through a throwing stage so I don't let her use it often LOL.

Even though these videos are available on YouTube, I bought Weet Woo! and like it very much.  It gives access to prescreened YouTube videos for children, categorizes them, and then puts them in the classic apple "cover flow" format where the child can easily flip through the selections.

I have also bought Voice Toddler Cards.  I have let her play with this one a few times.  I bought it because it has a feature where you can record your own voice for the flashcards but I haven't tried that yet.

I also have the Signing Time app.  It has signing flash cards and a few videos which were a lifesaver during my doctors appointment the other week.  Even though we don't sign extensively, we enjoy the Signing Time videos!  I think they are educational just for learning simple words and concepts like please and thank you.

Also, on a complete not educational note, I let her play with my Koi Pond app.  You can interact with the fish and hear the water splash.  You can also use the options for different sound effects (rain, wind, etc.).  We both like it!

Hope this helps.  I have a problem with her accidentily hitting the red button and getting out of an app that I have brought up for her.  Let me know if you come up with a solution to that one.
2  Products Marketplace / Product Partners / Re: Wink and Tweedle Wink Program on: September 03, 2009, 06:32:28 PM
Wennie,

When are more Tweedlewink DVDs being released?  I was thinking I would send these back and get the upgraded versions along with my purchase of new DVDs in the series!

Thanks!
3  Parents' Lounge / General Parenting / Re: For Crying Out Loud -- Pick Up Your Baby on: April 29, 2009, 03:33:23 AM
Nikita,

I just read this article http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25107821-23289,00.html.  That is horrifying!!!!
4  Parents' Lounge / General Pregnancy / Baby's First Dreams: Sleep Cycles Of The Fetus on: April 22, 2009, 03:40:28 AM
Baby's First Dreams: Sleep Cycles Of The Fetus

After about seven months growing in the womb, a human fetus spends most of its time asleep. Its brain cycles back and forth between the frenzied activity of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and the quiet resting state of non-REM sleep. But whether the brains of younger, immature fetuses cycle with sleep or are simply inactive has remained a mystery, until now.

Mathematician Karin Schwab and a team of neuroscientists at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, have discovered that very immature sheep fetuses can enter a dreaming sleep-like state weeks before the first rapid eye movements are seen. Their mathematical analysis could lead to a better of understanding of the purpose of sleep. It also provides a tool to study how the brain develops and to identify vulnerable periods in brain development when damage could lead to disease later in life.

The research appears in a special focus issue of the journal Chaos, which is published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP). The special issue is focused on nonlinear dynamics in cognitive and neural systems. It asks how chaos affects certain brain areas and presents interdisciplinary approaches to various problems in neuroscience -- including sleep.

Directly measuring the brain activity of a human fetus in the womb is impossible. What we know about our early sleep habits comes mostly from watching eye movements. Around the seventh month of a fetus' development, the first rapid eye movements are seen. The brain of the developing embryo appears to cycle every 20 to 40 minutes between REM sleep, in which brain activity rivals that of consciousness, and non-REM sleep, in which the brain rests. The functions of these sleep cycles are still a hotly debated topic in the world of sleep research.

Some have tried to measure the brain activity of premature babies by hooking them up to an electroencephogram (EEG) after they are born early. These measurements, according to Schwab, are technically difficult and fraught with errors. So neurologists who study the development of the fetal brain do not know whether sleep cycles simply appear one day, or whether they develop slowly from other forms of brain activity.

To fill this gap in knowledge, Schwab studied sheep, an animal that typically carries one or two fetuses similar in size and weight to a human fetus. The course of brain development is also fairly similar in humans and sheep, lasting about 280 days in humans and 150 days in sheep. They recorded electrical activity in the brain of a 106-day-old developing sheep fetus directly -- something that had never been done before.

Using sophisticated mathematical techniques for detecting patterns, Schwab discovered cycles in the complexity of immature brain activity. Unlike sleep patterns in later stages of development, these cycles fluctuate every 5 to 10 minutes and change slowly as the fetus grows.

While it is difficult to imagine what the fetus experiences during these cycles in terms familiar to adults, the patterns shed new light on the origins of sleep. "Sleep does not suddenly evolve from a resting brain. Sleep and sleep state changes are active regulated processes," says Schwab. The finding fits with other data showing that the brain cells (neurons) that generate sleep states mature long before the rest of the brain is developed enough to fall into REM sleep.

A better understanding of brain development could provide clues about diseases later in life, like neurological disorders or crib death. The research may also shed light on fundamental questions about how the brain develops. Cyclic changes in the activity of neurons, for instance, may stimulate the other nerve cells to find and connect with each other to set up complex networks in the brain. Sophisticated analyses of brain activity could help detect vulnerable phases during this brain development. Other avenues of Schwab's research look at the impact of environmental stimuli such as noise or stress on the developing fetus and whether they can lead to an increased susceptibility to disease in adults.
5  Parents' Lounge / General Parenting / For Crying Out Loud -- Pick Up Your Baby on: April 22, 2009, 02:45:53 AM
For Crying Out Loud -- Pick Up Your Baby

Parents should listen to their instincts and pick up their newborn babies when they cry, Queensland University of Technology researcher Professor Karen Thorpe said.

A joint study with QUT and the Riverton Early Parenting Centre has found many parents of infants up to 12 weeks, were uncertain about how best to settle their crying baby and whether or not it was "right" to pick them up.

"A lot of parents are unsure if they should pick up their baby when their baby cries," Professor Thorpe from QUT's Faculty of Education said.

"The answer is: you should. Babies in the first 12 weeks of their life need highly responsive parents. They want and need a parent that is responsive to their cries."

Professor Thorpe said the study was initiated by concerns by clinical nurses from the Riverton centre that parents were choosing to ignore their crying newborn for fear it would "spoil" their baby to pick them up.

Riverton clinical nurse and co-researcher Claire Halle said parents felt picking up their crying baby would create "bad habits" which would impact negatively on their child's behaviour in the future.

"Parent's felt torn between what they thought and what they felt was the right thing to do, and this uncertainty seemed to heighten their stress levels," Ms Halle said.

The study found about 20 per cent of first time parents and 30 per cent of experienced parents admitted they were uncertain about picking up their crying baby. It also revealed that almost 25 per cent of first time parents and just over 10 per cent of experienced parents believed picking up a crying baby would spoil them.

"One parent said 'I feel guilty for not picking him up when he cries'," Ms Halle said. "Another said 'frequent and sudden changes in baby's behaviour make it hard to judge...too much attention may spoil them'."

But Professor Thorpe said in the first three month's of a baby's life, having responsive parents was very important to the child's emotional and neurological development.

She said the study highlighted there was a problem because parents were getting mixed messages about how best to settle their newborn baby.

"We need to ensure nurses, educators and health professionals are providing parents with consistent and appropriate guidelines for caring for their baby," Professor Thorpe said.

"It is also important for parents to have the confidence to trust their instincts when it comes to caring for their baby."

The study, funded by the Royal Children's Hospital Foundation, is a joint collaboration between Dr Toni Dowd from QUT's School of Nursing, Professor Karen Thorpe and the Settling Team at the Riverton Early Parenting Centre.

The study was a unique experience for clinical nurses to work as co-researchers and demonstrated the value of engaging clinical staff, academics and parents in research.
6  Parents' Lounge / General Parenting / Only A Small Minority Of Children Are Carefree And Many Are Bored, UK Study Find on: April 22, 2009, 02:31:28 AM
Only A Small Minority Of Children Are Carefree And Many Are Bored, UK Study Finds

A UK study into children’s happiness and safety co-authored by a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire just released has revealed that only 11 per cent of children surveyed are carefree and free from worry.

Professor Karen Pine, Research Leader at the University of Hertfordshire’s School of Psychology worked with Intuitive Media Research Services to conduct research among 200,000 UK children aged 6-14 years and over 18,000 of their teachers in their social learning networks: http://www.SuperClubsPLUS.com and http://www.GoldStarCafe.net.

The study, entitled Happy and Safe, which asked children how safe and happy they felt and what the Government could do to make their lives better, revealed that although 82 per cent of children said that they felt happy most of the time, with girls a little happier than boys and younger children happier than older ones, only 11 per cent are completely carefree and free from worry.

Over half of those surveyed (51 per cent) worried about their parents divorcing or arguing, with over half also worrying about violence and street crime.

It also emerged that 72 per cent of those surveyed cited boredom as the cause of their unhappiness – more so for girls (68 per cent) than for boys (58 per cent).

“Children’s well being should be the top concern of any society, and a good measure of well being is how safe children feel and how happy and fulfilled they feel,” said Professor Pine. “I find it surprising that over half of the children surveyed worry about their parents arguing or divorcing. This shows how, when marriages are going through difficulties, children are more often aware than many parents might think they are. A rather worrying finding is that such a large proportion of children said that boredom is the biggest cause of unhappiness – given that kids have such a vast range of multimedia entertainment and extra-curricular activities available to them nowadays.”

Robert Hart from Intuitive Media added: “The children have told us that boredom is the biggest downer, along with adults who expect too much of them and having to work too hard. Children want more freedom to play, relax, pursue their hobbies and be creative.  Catriona, a 13-year old in GoldStarCafe,  spoke for her generation when she said, ‘The Prime Minister needs to seriously think about the amount of homework given in school. I've been really stressed about all the work I have to do, and one week I didn't even have any time to do anything fun at all.’”

7  EARLY LEARNING / Early Learning - General Discussions / Psychologists Test Effects of Household Noise on Children's Verbal Development on: April 17, 2009, 02:18:44 AM
Psychologists Test Effects of Household Noise on Children's Verbal Development

Psychologists think that children who grow up in noisy homes may have lower verbal skills. New studies aim to test whether the constant background noise of a TV set or of other children playing learn to speak later and with poorer vocabulary.

LAFAYETTE, Ind.--Can the noise level inside your house actually make it harder for your baby to learn to talk? Researchers now say turning down the TV can actually help your child find their voice faster.

From the TV, to noises in the next room, a home can be full of distractions. But how much is too much? That's what psychologist George Hollich, from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., is trying to figure out. He is putting babies to the test to see if all that noise delays their ability to learn to speak.

Hollich says, "It seems to be the case that in noisy households, kids have lower vocabulary skills." As part of the test, the child watches a film of a woman talking, while a distracting man's voice competes for his attention. In the video, the woman keeps repeating the word feet.

"One of the things they can do is use what they see to hear a little bit better," Hollich says. Even with a distracting voice in the background, the child can pick out the right word.

Amanda Seidl, mother of the 10-month-old test child, practices infant-directed speech. Although her son is more interested in destroying the books than reading them, his mom knows how important it is for him to see and hear her speaking. Seidl says, "He's been babbling for a really long time."

To practice infant-directed speech, talk louder, minimize distractions and make sure your child can see your face or your hands when you talk to them. This can result in your child learning to speak sooner and have a larger vocabulary later.

Background noise in the average household, such as other children playing or watching television, can pose the same problem for children that an older adult with hearing loss encounters at a cocktail party.

BACKGROUND: Studies have shown that infants learn language faster when what they see is synchronized to the sound that they hear. The visual clues also help infants cope with learning a language in noisy environments.

HOW WE LEARN LANGUAGE: Babies start to babble in strings of words at around six or seven months, but even before that, infants are busy sorting out the sounds and shapes of words and sentences. Unlike the printed word, speech doesn't use commas, spaces or periods to separate words and concepts. So if there is background noise, it's harder for the infant to known when one word ends and another begins.

THE RESEARCH: Four studies involving 116 infants were conducted at Johns Hopkins University in 2002 analyzed how noise nearby affects 7-month-old infants during this early stage of language development. The babies were shown different videos of a woman talking while emphasizing a specific word, such as "cup." In one version, the audio matched what the woman was saying; in another, it didn't; in a third, the audio was matched with a still frame of the speaker.

THE FINDINGS: The researchers found that even moderate background noise can affect how infants learn language, reaffirming how important it is for a child to see the face of a person while hearing him or her speak. Infants who watched the first version of the video, where they could see the woman's face while she spoke, focused on the emphasized word an average of two seconds longer than on the surrounding words. That's a long time in an infant's limited attention span. Background noise -- such as other children playing or watching TV -- poses the same problem for children that an older adult with hearing loss might encounter at a crowded cocktail party.

PARENT PRIMER: So-called "parentese" -- the undulating baby talk most parents employ when speaking to infants -- is actually one of the best ways to help your baby learn language. It highlights the boundaries between words, phrases and clauses, which helps children learn the structure of the language.
8  EARLY LEARNING / Early Learning - General Discussions / Way Mothers Interact With Babies In First Year Predicts Child Behavior To Age 13 on: April 17, 2009, 02:15:14 AM
The Way Mothers Interact With Babies In First Year Predicts Child Behavior To Age 13


The way mothers interact with their babies in the first year of life is strongly related to how children behave later on. Both a mother’s parenting style and an infant’s temperament reliably predict challenging behavior in later childhood, according to Benjamin Lahey and his team from the University of Chicago in the US.

The researchers looked at whether an infant’s temperament and his mother’s parenting skills during the first year of life might predict behavioral problems, in just over 1,800 children aged 4-13 years. Measures of infant temperament included activity levels, how fearful, predictable and fussy the babies were, as well as whether they had a generally happy disposition.

The researchers looked at how much mothers stimulated their baby intellectually, how responsive they were to the child’s demands, and the use of spanking or physical restraint. Child conduct problems in later childhood included cheating, telling lies, trouble getting on with teachers, being disobedient at home and/or at school, bullying and showing no remorse after misbehaving.

The results indicate that both maternal ratings of their infants' temperament and parenting styles during the first year are surprisingly good predictors of maternal ratings of child conduct problems through age 13 years. Less fussy, more predictable infants, as well as those who were more intellectually stimulated by their mothers in their first year of life, were at low risk of later childhood conduct problems. Early spanking also predicted challenging behavior in Non-Hispanic European American families, but not in Hispanic families.

According to the authors, these findings support the hypothesis that “interventions focusing on parenting during the first year of life would be beneficial in preventing future child conduct problems…Greater emphasis should be placed on increasing maternal cognitive stimulation of infants in such early intervention programs, taking child temperament into consideration.”
9  Parents' Lounge / General Parenting / Baby's Smile Is A Natural High on: April 17, 2009, 02:06:16 AM
Baby's Smile Is A Natural High


The baby's smile that gladdens a mother's heart also lights up the reward centers of her brain, said Baylor College of Medicine researchers in a report that recently appeared in the journal Pediatrics.

The finding could help scientists figure out the special mother-infant bond and how it sometimes go wrong, said Dr. Lane Strathearn, assistant professor of pediatrics at BCM and Texas Children's Hospital and a research associate in BCM's Human Neuroimaging Laboratory.

"The relationship between mothers and infants is critical for child development," said Strathearn. "For whatever reason, in some cases, that relationship doesn't develop normally. Neglect and abuse can result, with devastating effects on a child's development."

To study this relationship, Strathearn and his colleagues asked 28 first-time mothers with infants aged 5 to 10 months to watch photos of their own babies and other infants while they were in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The machine measures blood flow in the brain. In the scans, areas of increased blood flow "light up," giving researchers a clue as to where brain activity takes place.

In some of the photos, babies were smiling or happy. In others they were sad, and in some they had neutral expressions.

They found that when the mothers saw their own infants' faces, key areas of the brain associated with reward lit up during the scans.

The areas stimulated by the sight of their own babies were those associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine. Specifically, the areas associated included the ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra regions, the striatum, and frontal lobe regions involved in emotion processing, cognition and motor/behavioral outputs.

"These are areas that have been activated in other experiments associated with drug addiction," said Strathearn. "It may be that seeing your own baby's smiling face is like a 'natural high' ".

The strength of the reaction depended on the baby's facial expression, he said.

"The strongest activation was with smiling faces," he said. There was less effect from pictures of their babies with sad or neutral expressions.

"We were expecting a different reaction with sad faces," he said. In fact, they found little difference in the reaction of the mothers' brains to their own babies' crying face compared to that of an unknown child.

Overall, the mothers responded much more strongly to their own infants' faces than to those of an unknown baby.

"Understanding how a mother responds uniquely to her own infant, when smiling or crying, may be the first step in understanding the neural basis of mother--infant attachment," said Strathearn.

Others who took part in this study include Drs. Jian Li and P. Read Montague of BCM and Peter Fonagy of the University College London in the United Kingdom.

Funding for this research to Strathearn came from the National Institutes of Health educational and mentoring grants and to the General Clinical Research Center. Other funding came from grants to Montague from the Kane Family Foundation, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
10  EARLY LEARNING / Teaching Your Child Music / Music Training Linked To Enhanced Verbal Skills on: April 17, 2009, 02:01:03 AM
Music Training Linked To Enhanced Verbal Skills

Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system's ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics, according to a new Northwestern University study.

Musicians use all of their senses to practice and perform a musical piece. They watch other musicians, read lips, and feel, hear and perform music, thus, engaging multi-sensory skills. As it turns out, the brain's alteration from the multi-sensory process of music training enhances the same communication skills needed for speaking and reading, the study concludes.   

“Audiovisual processing was much enhanced in musicians' brains compared to non-musician counterparts, and musicians also were more sensitive to subtle changes in both speech and music sounds,” said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, where the work was performed. “Our study indicates that the high-level cognitive processing of music affects automatic processing that occurs early in the processing stream and fundamentally shapes sensory circuitry.”

The nervous system's multi-sensory processing begins in the brainstem, an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain previously thought to be relatively unmalleable.

“Musicians have a specialized neural system for processing sight and sound in the brainstem, the neural gateway to the brain,” said Northwestern doctoral student Gabriella Musacchia, lead author of the study.

For many years, scientists believed that the brainstem simply relayed sensory information from the ear to the cortex, a part of the brain known for cognitive processing.

Because the brainstem offers a common pathway that processes music and speech, the study suggests that musical training conceivably could help children develop literacy skills and combat literacy disorders.

The study, “Musicians Have Enhanced Subcortical Auditory and Audiovisual Processing of Speech and Music,” will be published online the week of Sept. 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The co-investigators are Gabriella Musacchia, Mikko Sams, Erika Skoe and Nina Kraus.

Study participants, who had varying amounts of musical training or none at all, wore scalp electrodes that measured their multi-sensory brain responses to audio and video of a cellist playing and a person speaking.

The data showed that the number of years that a person practiced music strongly correlated with enhanced basic sound encoding mechanisms that also are relevant for speech. Beyond revealing super-accurate pitch coding vital to recognizing a speaker's identity and emotional intent, the study showed enhanced transcription of timbre and timing cues common to speech and music.

“The study underscores the extreme malleability of auditory function by music training and the potential of music to tune our neural response to the world around us, ” Kraus said.

Previous research has shown brainstem transcription errors in some children with literacy disorders.

Since music is inherently more accessible to children than phonics, the new research suggests, music training may have considerable benefits for engendering literacy skills.
11  EARLY LEARNING / Teaching Your Child Music / Music Education Can Help Children Improve Reading Skills on: April 17, 2009, 01:57:14 AM
Music Education Can Help Children Improve Reading Skills

Children exposed to a multi-year programme of music tuition involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published in the journal Psychology of Music.

According to authors Joseph M Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University, USA, data from this study will help to clarify the role of music study on cognition and shed light on the question of the potential of music to enhance school performance in language and literacy.

Studying children the two US elementary schools, one of which routinely trained children in music and one that did not, Piro and Ortiz aimed to investigate the hypothesis that children who have received keyboard instruction as part of a music curriculum increasing in difficulty over successive years would demonstrate significantly better performance on measures of vocabulary and verbal sequencing than students who did not receive keyboard instruction.

Several studies have reported positive associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical (eg, linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children. The authors say there are similarities in the way that individuals interpret music and language and “because neural response to music is a widely distributed system within the brain…. it would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing networks for music and language behaviors, namely reading, located in both hemispheres of the brain would overlap.”

The aim of this study was to look at two specific reading subskills – vocabulary and verbal sequencing – which, according to the authors, are “are cornerstone components in the continuum of literacy development and a window into the subsequent successful acquisition of proficient reading and language skills such as decoding and reading comprehension.”

Using a quasi-experimental design, the investigators selected second-grade children from two school sites located in the same geographic vicinity and with similar demographic characteristics, to ensure the two groups of children were as similar as possible apart from their music experience.

Children in the intervention school (n=46) studied piano formally for a period of three consecutive years as part of a comprehensive instructional intervention program. Children attending the control school (n=57) received no formal musical training on any musical instrument and had never taken music lessons as part of their general school curriculum or in private study. Both schools followed comprehensive balanced literacy programmes that integrate skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening.

All participants were individually tested to assess their reading skills at the start and close of a standard 10-month school year using the Structure of Intellect (SOI) measure.

Results analysed at the end of the year showed that the music-learning group had significantly better vocabulary and verbal sequencing scores than did the non-music-learning control group. This finding, conclude the authors, provides evidence to support the increasingly common practice of “educators incorporating a variety of approaches, including music, in their teaching practice in continuing efforts to improve reading achievement in children”.

However, further interpretation of the results revealed some complexity within the overall outcomes. An interesting observation was that when the study began, the music-learning group had already experienced two years of piano lessons yet their reading scores were nearly identical to the control group at the start of the experiment.

So, ask the authors, “If the children receiving piano instruction already had two years of music involvement, why did they not significantly outscore the musically naïve students on both measures at the outset?” Addressing previous findings showing that music instruction has been demonstrated to exert cortical changes in certain cognitive areas such as spatial-temporal performance fairly quickly, Piro and Ortiz propose three factors to explain the lack of evidence of early benefit for music in the present study.

First, children were tested for their baseline reading skills at the beginning of the school year, after an extended holiday period. Perhaps the absence of any music instruction during a lengthy summer recess may have reversed any earlier temporary cortical reorganization experienced by students in the music group, a finding reported in other related research. Another explanation could be that the duration of music study required to improve reading and associated skills is fairly long, so the initial two years were not sufficient.

A third explanation involves the specific developmental time period during which children were receiving the tuition. During the course of their third year of music lessons, the music-learning group was in second grade and approaching the age of seven. There is evidence that there are significant spurts of brain growth and gray matter distribution around this developmental period and, coupled with the increased complexity of the study matter in this year, brain changes that promote reading skills may have been more likely to accrue at this time than in the earlier two years.

“All of this adds a compelling layer of meaning to the experimental outcomes, perhaps signalling that decisions on ‘when’ to teach are at least as important as ‘what’ to teach when probing differential neural pathways and investigating their associative cognitive substrates,” note the authors.

“Study of how music may also assist cognitive development will help education practitioners go beyond the sometimes hazy and ill-defined ‘music makes you smarter’ claims and provide careful and credible instructional approaches that use the rich and complex conceptual structure of music and its transfer to other cognitive areas,” they conclude.
12  EARLY LEARNING / Teaching Your Child Music / Music Thought To Enhance Intelligence, Mental Health And Immune System on: April 17, 2009, 01:54:41 AM
Music Thought To Enhance Intelligence, Mental Health And Immune System

A recent volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences takes a closer look at how music evolved and how we respond to it. Contributors to the volume believe that animals such as birds, dolphins and whales make sounds analogous to music out of a desire to imitate each other. This ability to learn and imitate sounds is a trait necessary to acquire language and scientists feel that many of the sounds animals make may be precursors to human music.

Another study in the volume looks at whether music training can make individuals smarter. Scientists found more grey matter in the auditory cortex of the right hemisphere in musicians compared to nonmusicians. They feel these differences are probably not genetic, but instead due to use and practice.

Listening to classical music, particularly Mozart, has recently been thought to enhance performance on cognitive tests. Contributors to this volume take a closer look at this assertion and their findings indicate that listening to any music that is personally enjoyable has positive effects on cognition. In addition, the use of music to enhance memory is explored and research suggests that musical recitation enhances the coding of information by activating neural networks in a more united and thus more optimal fashion.

Other studies in this volume look at music's positive effects on health and immunity, how music is processed in the brain, the interplay between language and music, and the relationship between our emotions and music.

The Neurosciences and Music II is volume 1060 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences .
13  EARLY LEARNING / Teaching Your Child Music / Adolescents Involved With Music Do Better In School on: April 17, 2009, 01:52:12 AM
Adolescents Involved With Music Do Better In School

A new study in the journal Social Science Quarterly reveals that music participation, defined as music lessons taken in or out of school and parents attending concerts with their children, has a positive effect on reading and mathematic achievement in early childhood and adolescence. Additionally, socioeconomic status and ethnicity affect music participation.

Darby E. Southgate, MA, and Vincent Roscigno, Ph.D., of The Ohio State University reviewed two nationally representative data sources to analyze patterns of music involvement and possible effects on math and reading performance for both elementary and high school students.

Music is positively associated with academic achievement, especially during the high school years.

However, not all adolescents participate in music equally, and certain groups are disadvantaged in access to music education. Families with high socioeconomic status participate more in music than do families with lower socioeconomic status. In addition to social class as a predictor of music participation, ethnicity is also a factor. Asians and Whites are more likely to participate in music than are Hispanics. While young Black children attended concerts with their parents, they were less likely to take music lessons.

“This topic becomes an issue of equity at both the family and school levels,” the authors conclude. “This has major policy implications for federal, state, and local agencies, as well as knowledge that can help families allocate resources that are most beneficial to children.”

14  EARLY LEARNING / Teaching Your Child to Read / Effect Of Parental Education On Heritability Of Children's Reading Disability on: April 17, 2009, 01:47:18 AM
Effect Of Parental Education On Heritability Of Children's Reading Disability

 Parental education is a strong predictor of socioeconomic status and children’s educational environment. Nevertheless, some children continue to experience reading failure in spite of high parental education and support for learning to read.

University of Colorado at Boulder psychologists Angela Friend, John C. DeFries and Richard K. Olson examined if genetic and environmental influences on reading disability, the most commonly identified learning disability, interact with level of parental education. In this study, 545 pairs of identical and fraternal twins were selected wherein at least one of the twins in each pair had a reading disability. In addition, the researchers obtained information about the parents’ years of education.

The results, described in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, showed that there was a significant interaction between parents’ years of education and the heritability of reading disability. Children whose parents had higher levels of education tended to have stronger genetic influence on their reading disability than children whose parents had lower levels of education. The researchers concluded that on average, poor instruction or lack of reading practice may often be the main influence on reading disabilities in families with low socioeconomic status, while genes may be the main influence on reading disability among children in families with high socioeconomic status and educational support.

This study has important implications not only for future genetic research, but for national education policies as well. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires that all children reach “grade level” performance on reading and other academic skills by 2014, and assumes that this goal can be met through appropriate education. However, the authors of this study suggest that a more beneficial policy would acknowledge genetic constraints on meeting these standards among some children with reading disability, and honor the functionally important gains they make in reading and other academic skills even if they do not reach grade level.
15  EARLY LEARNING / Early Learning - General Discussions / Self-regulation Abilities, Beyond Intelligence, Play Major Role In Early Achieve on: April 16, 2009, 04:14:25 AM
Self-regulation Abilities, Beyond Intelligence, Play Major Role In Early Achievement

Although intelligence is generally thought to play a key role in children's early academic achievement, aspects of children's self-regulation abilities--including the ability to alternately shift and focus attention and to inhibit impulsive responding--are uniquely related to early academic success and account for greater variation in early academic progress than do measures of intelligence. Therefore, in order to help children from low-income families succeed in school, early school-age programs may need to include curricula designed specifically to promote children's self-regulation skills as a means of enhancing their early academic progress.

Those are the findings of a new study conducted by researchers at the Pennsylvania State University and published in the journal Child Development.

Although there is currently a focus on teaching specific content and factual information in pre-kindergarten and early elementary education, these findings indicate that without a simultaneous focus on promoting self-regulation skills, many children are likely to struggle to keep pace with the academic demands of the early elementary classroom.

The study examined the role of self-regulation in emerging academic ability in 141 3- to 5-year-old children from low-income homes who attended Head Start, the federal preschool program for children living in poverty. The researchers sought to determine the extent to which distinct but overlapping aspects of children's developing self-regulation (cognitive, social-emotional, and temperament-based) are associated with emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten.

The researchers found that all aspects of children's self-regulation are uniquely related to their academic abilities, over and above their intelligence. They also found that one particular aspect of self-regulation--termed the inhibitory control aspect of brain function used in planning, problem solving, and goal-directed activity--is predictive of all academic outcomes but was particularly associated with early ability in math.

"Children's ability to regulate their thinking and behavior develops rapidly in the preschool years," according to Clancy Blair, associate professor of human development and family studies at the Pennsylvania State University and lead author of the study. "By the time children start school, they are expected to be able to sufficiently regulate attention, impulsivity, and emotion so as to communicate effectively and to jointly engage in learning experiences with teachers and classmates.

"For some children, however, particularly children from low-income homes or facing early adversity, self-regulation abilities may be slow in developing, leading to problems in the transition to school and increased risk for early school failure. In the attempt to improve educational achievement and decrease inequities in educational progress associated with socioeconomic status, it is important to understand the nature of multiple influences on early progress in school."

The study was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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