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Children's Learning & Development

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…

Compulsory Education: When it starts and how long it lasts

Around the world, for the most part, compulsory schooling starts at 6, although some start at 7, and a very few at 5 or even younger. There is less consensus about how long compulsory education should last, but 9 years is the most…

Types of reading disability

A longitudinal study that used imaging to compare brain activation patterns has identified two types of reading disability:

  • a primarily inherent type with higher cognitive ability (poor readers who compensate for disability), and
  • a more…

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…

Montessori education

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was an Italian physician. After working with retarded children in a psychiatric clinic attached to the University of Rome, she applied the ideas she had developed to children in a slum district in Rome. This was the first Casa dei Bambini ("…

Introduction

In 1997, the U.S. Congress asked the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at the National Institutes of Health, in consultation with the Secretary of Education, to convene a national panel to assess the effectiveness of different…

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…

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…

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…

Two large-scale international studies have become established to compare countries' performance in the core subjects of literacy, mathematics and science.

TIMSS: Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study

TIMSS is an international study involving 50 countries that assesses…