Lynn Spampinato, deputy superintendent of the Pittsburgh Public Schools, said schools were trying to adjust to the realities of the 21st century.

“We don’t want education to be the way it was in 1920,” she said. “There’s more for children to learn today, more exposure to all kinds of information at younger ages. …

“I’m not sure I believe we’re pushing children to the edge. I’d say in many cases we’re not challenging them enough.” …

“It’s not an either/or situation of play versus academics. It’s how you deliver. Learning can be a lot of fun, and children feel really good when they break the code and learn to read.”

Source: Redding.com
http://tinyurl.com/2vc4kw

The Learning Partnership offers some tips to ease the transition

With school starting next week, thousands of preschool children across Canada will be embarking on their journey of lifelong learning - and the first part of this adventure starts with Kindergarten. Just like when a family is planning a vacation, parents and their children should be prepared for the adventures that await them in the classroom.

To help ease the transition into the classroom, The Learning Partnership (TLP), a national not-for-profit organization dedicated to championing a strong public education system in Canada, is providing strategies and resource ideas that will enable parents to help prepare their children for the start of Kindergarten by introducing early literacy and numeric learning skills…

Top tips for early learning and a successful transition into Kindergarten
include:

- Take every opportunity that comes along to talk to your child - ask questions and answer questions. This will not only develop the child’s language skills but also nurture curiosity.

- Read to your child and talk about books to help develop your child’s
listening skills and an interest in stories and print.

- Talk to your child about letters and numbers and do fun activities with them to help your child develop number and letter awareness. For example, when at the grocery store make a game of looking for items with a letter that is the same as your child’s initials.

- If English is your second language, speak to your child in the language that is most comfortable for you. ESL parents should continue reading and talking in their first language to their children.

- Initiate activities with resources such as crayons, safety scissors, construction paper, glue and playdough to help your child develop the finger control and the coordination they need for writing as well as encourage their creative expression.

- Chant rhymes and sing songs to help your child play with language as well as hear and recognize sounds and learn new words.

- Introduce your child to their teacher, bring them to their new classroom so they are familiar with their new environment, and know what their school day will be like…

Source: CNW Group
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/August2006/28/c8792.html

Many experts say kindergarten has evolved into the new first grade, bumping skills once learned in kindergarten down to the preschool level.

“This revolution has been going on for quite a while. The research had been around that early stimulation made a difference in children’s learning,” said Libby Doggett, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Pre-K Now.

Studies have shown children are so much more capable than previously thought that parents really need to pay more attention to children in the first five years before they enter kindergarten, she added.

Source: Patriot-News
http://tinyurl.com/3xbq3q

The extent to which temperament and IQ are predetermined is not just a thorny scientific question, it is fundamental to a just society. The nurture crowd insist genes are not destiny and that good child care, schools and better parenting skills can make a big difference to children’s lifetime chances. The hereditarians maintain low intelligence, in particular, is resistant to change, and that governments could be wasting their money on early intervention and disadvantaged children schools programs…

A new wave of research is casting the old nature/nurture debate in a different light and providing ammunition to those who argue environment matters a good deal. The case for early childhood programs is strengthening…

Research in France on the relatively unusual cases of children born to middle-class parents and then adopted reinforces the importance of environment and experience. These children on average had a higher IQ than children born into poorer backgrounds. But it varied by 12 points, depending on whether their adopted families were middle class or working class. The crucial difference in these outcomes was the lives the children had led…

The old view of nature/nurture saw people as the sum of their genetic endowments and their experiences. The new view is that genes can influence the effect of experiences and experiences can influence how genes are expressed. Heredity may define the limit of intelligence but experience largely determines whether children will reach their genetic potential. Genes may determine a volatile, difficult temperament, but in the right environment a child will learn how to exercise self-control.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald
http://tinyurl.com/2jedd8

A family with one or more children studying in school or kindergarten spent an average 3,522 yuan (about 440 U.S. dollars) on their education between October 2004 and October 2005, accounting for nearly a third of the household’s annual income, the survey said…

The survey also showed that about 85 percent of Chinese families choose to send their children to public schools rather than private ones, citing “low tuition fees” and “standardized teaching methods” as the major reasons.

Source: People’s Daily Online
http://english.people.com.cn/200608/22/eng20060822_295792.html

Our education system should adjust to the needs of boys

Dozens of studies in every arena, from childhood development to brain science, show that our educational process not only favors girls over boys but also sets up boys for early learning failure and discouragement. Because boys lag girls developmentally, they are not nearly as ready to read and write in kindergarten — yet today, that is what’s required…

Boys have less serotonin than girls, and they learn by manipulating things, not by sitting quietly at a desk. Yet if they can’t sit still, they are labeled disruptive. Too many boys develop painful educational insecurities, shut down youthful interest in learning, and focus instead on video games, sports or whatever else makes them feel adept.

Source: Seattle Times
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003198869_womanrebut15.html

Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.

Psychologist George Miller of Princeton University famously estimated the limits of working memory–the scratch pad of the mind–in a 1956 paper entitled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” Miller showed that people can contemplate only five to nine items at a time. By packing hierarchies of information into chunks, Simon argued, chess masters could get around this limitation, because by using this method, they could access five to nine chunks rather than the same number of smaller details…

The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others…

Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will become a great expert in any field, a notable experiment has shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. László Polgár, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daughters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day, producing one international master and two grandmasters–the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest Polgár, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world…

Teachers in sports, music and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity. There is usually no way to tell, from a recital alone, whether a young violinist’s extraordinary performance stems from innate ability or from years of Suzuki-style training. Capablanca, regarded to this day as the greatest “natural” chess player, boasted that he never studied the game. In fact, he flunked out of Columbia University in part because he spent so much time playing chess. His famously quick apprehension was a product of all his training, not a substitute for it.

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert–in chess, music and a host of other subjects–sets a clear challenge before the schools…

Source: Scientific American
http://tinyurl.com/nw6q6

Taken at face value, the Flynn effect would imply that human beings are indeed becoming more intelligent. Disappointingly, however, this seems improbable. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University and author of several popular science books including The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and How the Mind Works, says: “In terms of basic raw brainpower, most evolutionary biologists would say it’s unlikely that people are any smarter today than they were a couple of centuries or even millennia ago. Evolution is a slow process and a few millennia are not much time for smarter people to out-reproduce duller ones enough to change the make-up of the species.”

“It may be true that kids don’t know the capitals as well as they did before, but part of my reaction to that is: You know what? We have Google now,” Johnson says. “Is it more important that they have memorised the names of all the capitals or that they have great skills at using the internet to find the information they need? One is give someone fish; the other is teach them how to fish.”

Source: Financial Times
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9b4c5dc8-291e-11db-9dcc-0000779e2340.html

Council President Alan Mole says the English language would be less problematic, if spelling rules were changed. It would increase literacy among the general population, and make learning English easier for children and non-English speakers.

“English has thousands of weird spellings, so learning in sound-spell [spelling as it sounds], instead, will be a great boon to them, and could make English so easy [to learn] that it becomes the true international language,” he said.

Source: VOA News
http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-08-11-voa45.cfm

The scary-smart 20Q AI project asks: Animal, vegetable, mineral or legendary ’70s rock star?

The 20Q initiative is an ongoing project in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that uses an insanely complex Web-based neural network to simulate a game of 20 Questions. You think of something — person, place, thing, abstract idea; doesn’t matter — and start answering questions posed by the 20Q AI. The questions posed can seem impossibly random, some examples might be: “Can you buy it?” “Does it have four corners?” “Does it like to be petted?” (www.20q.net)

Source: PopMatters
http://www.popmatters.com/columns/mcdonald/060810.shtml