Children's Learning & Development

We all know that lack of sleep makes us more prone to attentional failures, more likely to make mistakes, makes new information harder to learn, old information harder to retrieve ... We all know that, right? And yet, so many of us still go to bed too late to get the sleep we need to function…

The conventional view of brain development has been that most of this takes place in utero and in the first three years, with the further development continuing until the brain is fully mature at around 10-12 years of age. The turbulence of adolescent behavior has been deemed to be mostly caused…

Most people believe that an adult learner can't hope to replicate the fluency of someone who learned another language in childhood. And certainly there is research to support this. However, people tend to confuse these findings - that the age of acquisition affects your representation of grammar…

Some comments on the commonalities between the Suzuki approach to learning music and the Montessori approach to education.

My sons have both been in Montessori since they were three (they are now 8 and nearly 11, respectively). My elder son started learning the violin from a Suzuki…

Nowadays every school has to have computers. I don't refer to legal requirementbut to perception. Schools are judged on how many computers they have. It would be more to the point if they were judged on their computer-savvy.

I'm a fan of computers; my computer is a vital part of my work…

Children’s understanding, and their use of memory and learning strategies, is a considerably more complex situation than most of us realize. To get some feeling for this complexity, let’s start by looking at a specific area of knowledge: mathematics.

Here’s…

A number of countries have national curricula: France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom. Most States in the U.S. follow common guidelines for a core curriculum, although there is no national curriculum as…

A Scientific American article talks about a finding that refines a widely-reported association between self-regulation and academic achievement. This association relates to the famous ‘marshmallow test’, in which young children were left alone with a marshmallow, having been told that if they…

While parents and teachers have always strongly supported small class sizes, their belief has not always been supported by evidence. Part of the problem lies in that word “small” — what constitutes a small class? Different interventions have looked at reducing class sizes from 40 to 30, or 30 to…

Many parents enrol their children in Montessori preschools because they are an "educational" way of getting childminding - if you're going to put your child in a creche, why not put them in a preschool instead - or because they want to give their child a "head start" on education. Quality…