Schools are responding positively to the recommended phonics method of teaching reading, suggests a snapshot survey by inspectors.

Ofsted inspectors say there is a “virtuous circle” of improved reading skills and higher expectations.

The report from inspectors also concluded that children were enjoying phonics lessons.

This survey tested the progress of the Rose Review of reading, which called for a more systematic use of phonics.

‘Raised expectations’

Ofsted inspectors found schools using the recommended phonics method had “raised their expectations of how quickly and well children could learn to read and write”.

“Teachers have been ’surprised by the joy’ shown by children as they master phonic skills,” says the report.

The principle behind phonics is that children learn the sounds of letters and of combinations of letters and use them to decode words.

The report, based on visits to 20 schools and responses from a further 43, found that teachers were putting into practice the recommendations for improving the teaching of reading.

In 2005, the government-commissioned review of reading by Sir Jim Rose called for “relatively short, discrete sessions, designed to progress from simple elements to the more complex aspects of phonic knowledge”.

Phonics had already been taught in many primary schools, but the Rose Review emphasised the need for a rigorous and systematic use of from the earliest years.

And this snapshot survey shows that in 16 of the 20 schools visited such sessions of teaching phonics were taking place every day.

It also found that 19 of these schools had adopted a systematic approach to phonics teaching.

However, it also found that this was not an easy subject to explain to parents.

Meetings for parents about phonics were poorly attended and teachers said there were difficulties in “conveying the subtleties of the programme”.

Source: BBC News, UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7391948.stm

A tide of recent research on early childhood development is inspiring prominent scientists and politicians to argue for an unprecedented investment in schooling that begins virtually at birth.

But as decades of academic studies on brain development start to land in the real world, experts are divided on whether to focus new funding on infants and toddlers, or conventional preschool. Many now think some policies popular with politicians and the public, such as universal prekindergarten, may fail to reach at-risk kids at a young enough age.

The scientific controversy also is spilling into the presidential contest, where the Democratic candidates have taken divergent positions on universal preschool and other early childhood issues.

Studies have suggested that intervening before children start preschool improves academic outcomes for low-income kids and may reduce the risk that they will end up in prison. Such interventions stem from the theory that experiences in the first five years of life set a lifelong course for brain development.

Chicago has become a national proving ground for schooling during the first three years and is home to prominent advocates such as Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman of the University of Chicago, who said reaching kids before preschool could offer the best long-term economic return.

“Even at age 4 or 5, you may be starting too late,” Heckman said. “I wouldn’t say it’s hopeless to help kids after those early years, but it’s extremely expensive.”

Backers of universal preschool say the evidence for even earlier intervention is not yet solid and offering conventional prekindergarten to everyone would help build popular support for early education.

In theory, starting to intervene soon after birth should help kids more because that’s when experience starts to shape their brains, many experts said.

Children’s brains change more between conception and kindergarten than at any other time. University of Chicago neuroscientist Peter Huttenlocher showed in studies over the last 30 years that connections between cells in most brain areas peak by age 3, then decline gradually as experiences mold the brain’s circuitry.

The zero-to-3 period is not necessarily a magical and irreplaceable window for teaching children. But studies show that babies raised in poverty get fewer of the early experiences that spur vocabulary growth and good social judgment, making it harder for them to catch up later.

For example, toddlers whose parents speak more words to them develop bigger vocabularies than children who hear less speech, studies have found. One University of Kansas study concluded that kids from upper-income backgrounds hear 30 million more words by age 3 than those from poor families.

Early intervention with enrichment programs can narrow that gap, researchers and advocates say.

“The basic science of brain development says you need to start as early as possible for kids in the greatest danger to get the best outcomes,” said Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California-Berkeley, said he feared focusing on universal prekindergarten — making preschool a middle-class entitlement — could divert help from low-income families that need it most.

“Why would we use scarce public dollars to subsidize all families if we know the biggest impact is with poor kids?” he said.

Source: Detroit Free Press, United States
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080502/NEWS07/805020328

Parents have some homework to do, according to new findings presented at the Pediatric American Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, this weekend.

The research shows that 31% of U.S. parents know very little about the pace of a typical infant’s development, whether it’s when a child should start talking or begin potty training. The data is based on an analysis of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study’s Birth Cohort, a nationally representative sample of more than 10,000 9-month-old babies and their primary caregivers. Parents were asked to answer 11 questions, where those who got four or fewer correct were considered to have low-level knowledge.

While it may not sound like a big deal, experts say that this lack of knowledge can negatively affect parents’ interactions with their babies.

We asked study author Dr. Heather Paradis, a fellow in pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center, why so many parents don’t know what to expect after expecting and what they need to know about their babies’ development.

Why do so many parents lack knowledge about infant development?

I think that parents get parenting information from a variety of sources, from reading magazines and books … most importantly, parents look for information from their child’s doctors.

There’s a lot of information that’s out there about what to expect when people are pregnant, but I don’t know that there is quite as much information on what to expect about how your child grows and develops in the first years of life, and there’s a tremendous amount of change. This study was surprising in just how many parents don’t have knowledge of normal infant development.

Do you have a sense as to whether this is a new trend?

I think that a lot of emphasis in the past has been placed maybe on what we would call “high-risk” parents–those with a lower education, lower socioeconomic status. But one of the surprising things that this study showed is that it’s not only those parents we should be targeting, but it’s something we should expand to the general population of parents. Everyone could benefit.

What was one of the most surprising things the study revealed in terms of parents’ confusion?

The most surprising thing to me was not necessarily what knowledge they did or didn’t have, but how that knowledge translated into actual behavior, or observed interaction with the child. That connection is something lacking in previous studies. This study showed that parents who have higher knowledge of normal infant development were shown to have higher (quality) observed interactions with their children.

The other thing is that we looked at not only parent/child interaction but parents’ reports of frequency of what I would call enrichment activities, such as reading books with a child, singing songs. We know early enrichment activities with kids leads to higher IQs, earlier reading, better school preparation. The parents with the higher knowledge of normal infant development also had a significantly higher reported frequency of doing those enrichment activities with their kids.

What are the potential negatives?

Parents who have unrealistic expectations could misinterpret a child’s normal behavior and could respond inappropriately. An example would be like a mom who expects an 18-month-old child to sit still during an appointment. Eighteen-month-olds are normally curious. I would expect them to be wandering around the room. If parents are expecting a child to sit still on a chair for an entire appointment, they may take normal curiosity and interpret it as intentional defiance, rather than the normal curiosity it is. That could lead to inappropriate harsh discipline or the withdrawal of affection.

I think quite often parents maybe underestimate a child’s ability to pick up language skills. A lot of parents don’t think that it’s worthwhile to read a book to their infant, to their 2-month-old, and they definitely should be doing that, even if it’s to look at pictures and let the child hear the normal qualities of voice. They might not understand the words the parent is saying but they definitely understand what’s going on and the interaction going on between the two of them.

How should parents go about educating themselves?

Certainly, I think it’s an opportunity for pediatricians that, even during our brief office encounters with parents, we can potentially do something that can have a large impact on the way that parents and children interact. I do think that getting information from reputable sources, asking a child’s doctor for recommendations on books and Web sites to get high-quality information, is something parents could do.

Source: Forbes, NY
http://tinyurl.com/68hrk2

For generations, scholars have debated whether language constrains the ways we think. Now, neuroscientists studying reading disorders have begun to wonder whether the actual character of the text itself may shape the brain.

Studies of schoolchildren who read in varying alphabets and characters suggest that those who are dyslexic in one language, say Chinese or English, may not be in another, such as Italian.

Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet, new neuroimaging studies reveal. It’s the same with dyslexia, psychologist Li Hai Tan at Hong Kong Research University and his colleagues reported last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The problems occur in areas not involved in reading other alphabets.

Using two brain-imaging techniques, they identified striking differences in neural anatomy and brain activity between children able to read and write Chinese easily and classmates struggling to keep pace. Both were at odds with patterns of brain activity among readers of the English alphabet.

Even when readers in both languages looked at the same written characters, the brain activity was different, other researchers found. Arabic numerals of standard arithmetic — used by readers of Chinese and English alike — activate different brain regions depending on which of the two languages people had first learned to read, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China’s Dalian University of Technology reported in 2006.

“In this sense, we may regard dyslexia in Chinese and English as two different brain disorders,” Dr. Tan said, “because completely different brain regions are disrupted. It’s very likely that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese would not be dyslexic in English.”

By any measure, reading is a complex and peculiar task. At the speed of thought, readers of English turn letters they see into sounds, sounds into words, and words into meaning. Fluency is measured in milliseconds. Spelling variations are speed bumps in the brain.

Until recently, researchers who study reading abilities focused mostly on Western alphabets. English and 218 other languages, from Alsatian to Zulu, share variations of the same Latin character set. But that set is only one of 60 writing systems used among the world’s remaining 6,912 spoken languages. Even so, those studies convinced many scientists and educators that the brain’s response to the written word, regardless of the language, is universal.

The new research suggests they’re wrong. The schooling required to read English or Chinese may fine-tune neural circuits in distinctive ways.

“We have to recognize that the writing system in China is different, the demands on the brain are different and the characteristics of dyslexia are different,” said Georgetown University pediatric learning specialist Guinevere Eden, who is incoming president of the International Dyslexia Association.

To document the effects on brain development, Dr. Eden and her colleagues are launching a five-year study in Beijing and Washington to compare the neural changes in 60 schoolchildren learning to read either Chinese or English. “Nobody has ever done this across two writing systems,” Dr. Eden said.

In ways that ancient scribes never imagined, text has transformed us. Every brain shaped by reading, whether it is schooled in Chinese or English text, measurably differs — in terms of patterns of energy use and brain structure — from one that has never mastered the written word, comparative brain-imaging studies show. “There are real differences that emerge because of literacy,” Dr. Wolf said.

Some social psychologists speculate that the brain changes caused by literacy could be involved in cultural differences in memory, attention and visual perception. In January’s Psychological Science, MIT researchers reported that European-Americans and students from several East Asian cultures, for example, showed different patterns of brain activation when making snap judgments about visual patterns.

No one knows which came first: habits of thought or the writing system that gave them tangible form. A writing system could be drawn from the archaeology of the mind, perpetuating aspects of mental life conceived at the dawn of civilization.

“Once you have different writing systems in place,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett. “They may reinforce the perceptual and cognitive trends that preceded the invention of writing. They may go hand in glove.”

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://tinyurl.com/6c4gax

Psychologist explores how our ability to function in adult relationships is directly connected to our mother factor legacy

Clinical Psychologist Stephan B. Poulter demonstrates in THE MOTHER FACTOR: HOW YOUR MOTHER’S EMOTIONAL LEGACY IMPACTS YOUR LIFE (Prometheus Books) that most of us will never understand the complex legacy imparted by our mothers or its far-reaching impact on our lives. The initial bond formed at birth becomes the foundation from which our emotional development, communication style, and personality type evolve through adulthood. No other relationship in our lives has the potential to shape us like the one we share with our mothers, and the more we understand the emotional components of it, the more choices and opportunities for relationship change and personal growth will be available to us.

Poulter defines the mother factor as our emotional development, functioning, and ability to form meaningful relationships in family life, in social life, and with intimate partners. It is an emotional template started with the mother-child relationship that influences our feelings of frustration, love, fear, and hope; our mothers’ style of parenting as the template for our emotional disposition and our core sense of who and what we are in the world; our emotional functioning as consciously and unconsciously shaped by our mothers.

The mother factor can work for or against us. Poulter shows that in order for it to work for us, we must understand the pervasive influence of our mothers. By focusing on our mother factor from many different angles and perspectives, Poulter strives to give us a more complete view of our own legacy. Once we have these new and crucial insights, we will have the personal power to make different choices, to let go of old self-defeating patterns, to take new and positive action, and to have a deeper sense of fulfillment.

“This entire investigation into your mother factor is for the sole purpose of gaining new, valuable insight and clarity, which will open more options to your life,” Poulter explains.

He also explores how our emotional connections in adult relationships are based on the “style” of our mothers. Poulter defines the five styles of mothering as:

* The Perfectionist Mother- whose family must look perfect in every way

* The Unpredictable Mother- whose ups and downs can create lifelong anxiety and depression in her son or daughter

* The “Me First” Mother- whose children come second or last

* The “Best Friend” Mother- who’s now in vogue but can wreak havoc

* The Complete Mother- who provides guidance and shows compassion to her child

THE MOTHER FACTOR makes clear that no matter what type of mother we have— and most mothers are a combination of the above—her style of mothering affects our lives in ways that should not be ignored. Through an investigation of the strengths, insights, and liabilities that derive from each mothering style, Poulter seeks to help us transcend the mysterious anger, anxiety, depression, and shame that we feel and achieve the kind of relationships we deserve. Dr. Poulter demonstrates how the internalized “rulebook” we inherit from our mothers is a very powerful force, as well. These unspoken rules govern our work, relationships, emotions, separation, and independence. Unless we become aware of the rules that guide our behavior, thoughts, and beliefs, we won’t have the ability to make our own choices.

Dani Levine, PhD, Clinical Psychologist and President of The S.T.E.P. Group (School Placement and Educational Placement), says THE MOTHER FACTOR “brilliantly captured the reality that although we are products of our mothers’ legacy, we are not prisoners. Dr. Poulter not only offers insight, but also provides the tools to escape the fate of falling into maladaptive patterns. I would recommend this book to the masses, as we are all in relationships today that have been influenced by our mothers.”

###

Stephen B. Poulter, PhD (Los Angeles, CA), is the author of three previously published books including THE FATHER FACTOR, which was praised by NEWSWEEK and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, among other publications, and received widespread attention with author appearances in ABC’s GOOD MORNING AMERICA, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News Channel FOX & FRIENDS. He has practiced as a clinical psychologist specializing in family relationships for twenty-four years.

Source: EurekAlert, DC
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-04/pb-hym042308.php

The kiwi classroom of the future could look a little like this, if American educationalist Dr Leonard Sax has any influence.

A room is filled with 7-year-old boys, none of whom is sitting - in fact there are no chairs on offer.

There is noise, cooler light and the temperature has been turned down. This, says Sax, is the environment in which boys learn best.

The Maryland-based executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, is in New Zealand next month to speak at several single sex schools including Auckland’s St Cuthbert’s College and Dilworth School, and at Iona College, Lindisfarne College and Woodford House, Hawke’s Bay.

Citing research from Harvard Medical School, the US National Institute of Health and various European studies, Sax argues that no one-size-fits-all education programme can be successfully applied across the sex divide, that both girls and boys will flourish in environments tailored to their gender-specific requirements.

Traditional arguments for sex-segregated schools are often based broadly on the management of teenage hormones. The theory was there would be less distraction for everyone if the girls and boys were educated separately. But hormones have no part in today’s rationale for single-sex classes.

“There’s been a pretty fundamental shift in the way people think about single-sex education, at least in North America, over the last 20 years or so,” says Sax. “That’s what’s new: the idea that the single-sex format may be most beneficial for children who are 5, 6, 7 years old. This is the empirical finding.”

Of the 367 public schools in the US that have adopted the single-sex format in the past few years, Sax says that all but about 20 are primary schools.

“[I’m] not saying that there are not benefits at the high school level; there certainly are. But the benefits in the early primary years are much greater.”

He says advanced imaging techniques have offered neuroscientists fresh insights into brain development.

“When you compare a six-year-old girl with a six-year-old boy, you find quite staggering differences in the brain,” says Sax.

Regions of the brain develop in a different sequence in the genders, he says.

The areas of the brain associated with language and fine motor skills mature about six years earlier in girls than boys. The areas of the brain associated with maths and geometry mature about four years earlier in boys than girls. This finding may help explain why some girls find maths “hard”, he says, while some boys think poetry is for “sissies”.

According to Sax, understanding and exploiting these nuances allow educators to adapt lessons and classrooms to suit the all-girl or all-boy population.

One “very reliable difference” between 6-year-old boys and 6-year-old girls is in their ability to sit still and be quiet. The average girl can sit still for longer than the average boy, with implications for the duration of lessons and the structure of the day, says Sax. Girls can have longer, uninterrupted classes, but boys will do best with 20-minute lessons followed by a run around outside.

Some US schools have taken this finding a step further. At both Cunningham School for Excellence, Iowa, and Foley Intermediate, Alabama, sitting is optional in the all-boys classes. And Chicago’s Hardey Prep doesn’t even supply chairs to their 6 and 7-year-old boys.

“As one teacher said to me: when that boy sits down his brain shuts off,” says Sax. “So the boys stand for many of the classes.

“In the mixed classroom, every choice you make is going to advantage the girls at the expense of boys or advantage the boys at the expense of girls,” he says. “The lack of awareness of gender differences often has the unintended consequence of disadvantaging both the girls and the boys.”

But Sax’s theories relate not only to the type of lesson, but to the environment the students work best in.

He says studies of young people of normal weight have shown that the ideal room temperature for boys to learn is about 20C; for girls it’s about 3 degrees higher. With classroom thermostats typically set at somewhere between 21C and 22C, Sax says that both genders will be outside their ideal comfort zone.

Evidence that tailoring the learning experience rather than simply splitting up boys and girls enhances academic performance is mounting, with research showing improved grades and test results in both sexes.

Sax advocates the introduction of single-sex classes into co-ed schools as some New Zealand schools are already doing. In Auckland’s Mt Albert Grammar, most of the junior classes are gender segregated while Long Bay College in Auckland last year introduced single-sex classes.

Sax says he wasn’t always a devotee of single-sex education, believing that “we live in a co-ed world… schools should prepare kids for the real world”. And there are still many critics of the single-sex education model, notably the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organisation for Women, who see it as a discriminatory anachronism. Under the old model that prevailed in the US until around the 1960s, boys’ schools typically received the bulk of the resources while girls’ schools made do with their leftovers and hand-me-downs.

But Sax has no intention of returning to what he describes as “the bad old days”. He was educated in an era when “they pushed girls and boys into pink and blue cubby holes” - boys had compulsory woodwork, girls had home economics. The new world order he favours aims to “expand educational horizons, to get more girls excited about computer science and physics and engineering - and to get more boys excited about art and poetry and creative writing and foreign languages“.

“The irony is that we’ve had roughly three decades throughout the English-speaking world of ignoring gender, pretending that gender doesn’t matter,” he says.

“There are substantially fewer young women studying computer science, physics and engineering than there were 20 years ago - and fewer men who regard creative writing, or writing at all, as something that boys do. So we’ve ignored gender and the result of ignoring gender has been not to eliminate gender stereotypes; it has been a hardening of gender stereotypes.”

New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=35&objectid=10505122

There’s perfectionist mothers, unpredictable mothers, “me first” mothers and “complete” mothers but family experts say the fastest growing group of mothers is the “best-friend mother” — and it can only end badly.

Clinical psychologist Stephan Poulter, who works with family relationships, has come up with five categories that he finds fit most mothers. He finds the group that is on the rise is mothers who want to be best friends with their children.

But he said going partying with your children, wearing the same clothes as them, trying to keep up with their youth with breast implants and surgery, erodes all boundaries — and leaves the children without a mother who can guide them.

“You see this all over the media with a lot of the actresses in Hollywood — their mothers are their friends,” said Los Angeles-based Poulter in a telephone interview.

“One tragic one is Lindsay Lohan. Her mother is out drinking with her. Now she’s been in and out of rehab and arrested twice. What kind of role model is she getting? Look at Paris Hilton too. Same story.”

He said Anna Nicole Smith, the former Playboy model, was another prime example. She died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in Florida in February 2007 — just five months after her 20-year-old son Daniel died of a drug overdose.

Poulter, who has just released a book called The Mother Factor, said this style of mothering had been on the rise for about 15 years but now accounted for 30-40 percent of mothers.

“This really is an epidemic. Because of unresolved issues with their parents, some parents today don’t want to be so hard and just want their children to like them. At the end of a long working day they don’t want conflict,” he said.

“But kids need a parent, not another friend, and this leaves them motherless. This can create a lot of rage in boys, and daughters who are drug-orientated and out of control tend to be motherless daughters of this type.”

Rose Rock, the mother of U.S. comedian Chris Rock, who has raised 10 children of her own and looked after 17 foster children, has also warned about this shift in parenting.

She has laid down the 10 commandments of parenting in a new book, Mama Rock’s Rules: Ten Lessons for Raising a Houseful of Successful Children, and No. 1 is to be a child’s mama, not their friend — and to have rules in your house.

“At no time should you let your children think they can disrespect you or treat you like a buddy,” Rock told Reuters.

She attributed the rise in the number of mothers wanting to be their children’s best friend to a lack of time and to parents finding it is easier to let children lay down their own rules.

“It is a new thing that everyone wants their children to like them but parenting is not a popularity contest,” she said.

“I don’t need to be a 12-year-old’s friend but I do need to be their protector, guide and warden. This is just a cop out.”

Poulter says he tries to make families realize that they need to take back the traditional roles.

“I need the parents to recognize that they are not their child’s friend and get their kids’ respect and then the kids can separate from their mother and move forward in their life and not feel they are responsible for their mother,” he said.

“For the kids this can work. But I think it is very hard for the mother to shift and to become the parent.”

Source: Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSSYD20577820080414

They are age-old questions, from the moment of birth: What’s your baby thinking? How much does your child really understand?

“They’re not just wailing away. There’s something going on that’s important to their development, right from the very beginning,” said speech professor Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington.

Researchers at the UW are now using baby caps that can detect the most minute electrical current being sent out by a baby’s brain.

Little Isabella is listening to a very unusual audio tape.

To most adults the syllables all sound alike, but in fact they are just slightly different. Believe it or not, Isabella, who isn’t even yet talking, can tell the difference and her brain waves prove it.

“Their brains are set automatically to capture this information in ways that are completely surprising,” said Kuhl.

Kuhl and her husband, psychology professor Andy Meltzoff, are two of the world’s top scientists in the growing field of early learning.

Their research has shown up in every major magazine. Their book, The Scientist in the Crib, is now published in French, German, Chinese - more than 10 languages in all.

Several years ago, they started the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, bringing together 50 scientists at the UW, studying both the brain and behavior, and discovering that babies understand far more than parents or scientists ever thought possible.

“Babies learn more in the first three years of life than we ever will again,” said Dr. Meltzoff.

What we know is they learn by copying us. In a very simple experiment, Dr. Meltzoff stuck out his tongue and found that even a two-week-old baby knows how to imitate.

“It shows that they’re born learning. Really, babies are born learning,” he said.

Perhaps more remarkable is what Dr. Meltzoff discovered with slightly older babies. If you show them how to play with a toy, even if you don’t let them imitate immediately, they will save it in their brain. They’ll imitate you when you give them the toy - up to four months later, demonstrating that babies have incredible memory.

“Often times, the parents would say, oh I know I’ve seen that toy before, but I can’t remember what to do with it. And the baby would do the right thing,” said Dr. Meltzoff.

“That’s what’s different about the brain of a baby,” said Dr. Kuhl.

Meanwhile, Dr. Kuhl has spent years focusing on language. What struck her is that all mothers have a special way of talking to a baby.

Kuhl calls it “motherese,” or “parentese,” because dads do it naturally too.

Why do we talk that way? Are babies getting anything out of it?

It turns out they are.

“The vowels, if you measure ee, ah and ooh, in words like sheep and shoe and keys, they’re much more distinct in motherese. They’re further apart acoustically. It’s like being able to show a baby, here’s what to listen for. Here are the components,” said Dr. Kuhl.

She discovered that babies learn about language long before they utter their first word.

In a speech lab, she took 9-month-old babies and exposed them to a second language, either Spanish or Mandarin. And after just 12 sessions over one month, the babies could detect subtle phonetic sounds in the foreign language.

“The babies in the United States, exposed in that way, are as good as the babies in Taiwan for example, at hearing the Chinese distinctions,” said Dr. Kuhl.

Isabella was exposed to Spanish for a month, which is why she now distinguishes sounds that most English-only speakers cannot.

In another lab, Dr. Meltzoff is studying the crucial moment when a baby learns not just to look at mom, but to follow where mom’s eyes are focused.

He said 10-month-old babies, who are good at following where an adult is gazing, had about twice as many words in their speech eight months later.

“So when she’s around in the living room and says, ‘here’s a rattle, look at the rattle,’ the babies need to know to follow where she’s looking and that’s what the word refers to,” he said.

All these studies suggest that babies are learning an incredible amount that first year, and yet scientists cannot explain why we as adults have no specific memories of our time as babies.

We’re tempted to think maybe there isn’t that much going on in their brains, but Kuhl and Meltzoff say it’s just the opposite, that babies absorb culture, language, social interaction, emotions - the most basic building blocks of who they’ll become some day.

“The news is that babies are even learning from their peers at day-care centers, and learning from us so we’re role models right from the beginning,” said Dr. Kuhl.

“It is lasting learning. It’s the kind of learning that makes a profound effect on the baby’s brain and mental operations, and that sets them up for later.”

Source: KING5.com, WA
http://tinyurl.com/6a7zh6

Dyslexia affects different parts of children’s brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. That finding, reported in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means that therapists may need to seek different methods of assisting dyslexic children from different cultures.

“This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics’ brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese,” said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. “Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia.”

Millions of children worldwide are affected by dyslexia, a language-based learning disability that can include problems in reading, spelling, writing and pronouncing words. The International Dyslexia Association says there is no consensus on the exact number because not all children are screened, but estimates range from 8 percent to 15 percent of students.

Reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese, which relies less on sound representation, instead using symbols to represent words.

Past studies have suggested that the brain may use different networks of neurons in different languages, but none has suggested a difference in the structural parts of the brain involved, Tan explained.

Tan’s research group studied the brains of students raised reading Chinese, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. They then compared those findings with similar studies of the brains of students raised reading English.

Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University in Washington, said the process of becoming a skilled reader changes the brain.

“Becoming a reader is a fairly dramatic process for the brain,” explained Eden, who was not part of Tan’s research team on this paper.

For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently.

For example, English-speaking children learn the sounds of letters and how to combine them into words, while Chinese youngsters memorize hundreds of symbols which represent words.

“The implication here is that when we see a reading disability, we see it in different parts of the brain depending on the writing system that the child is born into,” Eden said.

That means, “we cannot just assume that any dyslexic child is going to be helped by the same kind of intervention,” she said in a telephone interview.

Tan said the new findings suggest that treating Chinese speakers with dyslexia may use working memory tasks and tests relating to sensor-motor skills, while current treatments of English dyslexia focus on letter-sound conversions and sound awareness.

He said the underlying cause of brain structure abnormalities in dyslexia is currently unknown.

“Previous genetic studies suggest that malformations of brain development are associated with mutations of several genes and that developmental dyslexia has a genetic basis,” he said in an interview via e-mail.

“We speculate that different genes may be involved in dyslexia in Chinese and English readers. In this respect, our brain-mapping findings can assist in the search for candidate genes that cause dyslexia,” Tan said.

In their paper, the researchers noted that imaging studies of the brains of dyslexic children using alphabetic languages like English have identified unusual function and structure in the left temporo-parietal areas, thought to be involved in letter-to-sound conversions in reading; left middle-superior temporal cortex, thought to be involved in speech sound analysis, and the left inferior temporo-occipital gyrus, which may function as a quick word-form recognition system.

When they performed similar imaging studies on dyslexic Chinese youngsters, on the other hand, they found disruption in a different area, the left middle frontal gyrus region.

The study was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the University of Hong Kong.

In a separate paper, published two years ago, University of Michigan researchers reported that Asians and North Americans see the world differently.

Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene.

Source: The Associated Press
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hobiJ-tiOnp79R-0onuBx8oMn2CwD8VT8R1G1

Perhaps the government confused fantasy with reality the day it endorsed Brain Gym

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning. Last week I watched, open-mouthed, a Newsnight piece on the spread of “Brain Gym” in British schools. I’d read about Brain Gym before - a few years back, in Ben Goldacre’s excellent Bad Science column for this newspaper - but seeing it in action really twisted my rage dial.

Brain Gym, y’see, is an “educational kinesiology” programme designed to improve kiddywink performance. It’s essentially a series of simple exercises lumbered with names that make you want to steer a barbed wire bus into its creator’s face. One manoeuvre, in which you massage the muscles round the jaw, is called the “energy yawn”. Another involves activating your “brain buttons” by forming a “C” shape with one hand and pressing it either side of the collarbone while simultaneously touching your stomach with the other hand.

Throughout the report I was grinding my teeth and shaking my head - a movement I call a “dismay churn”. Not because of the sickening cutesy-poo language, nor because I’m opposed to the nation’s kids being forced to exercise (make them box at gunpoint if you want) but because I care about the difference between fantasy and reality, both of which are great in isolation, but, like chalk and cheese or church and state, are best kept separate.

Confuse fantasy with reality and you might find yourself doing crazy things, like trying to wave hello to Ian Beale each time you see him on the telly, or buying homeopathic remedies - both of which are equally boneheaded pursuits. (Incidentally, if anyone disagrees with this assessment and wants to write in defending homeopathy, please address your letters to myself c/o the Kingdom of Narnia.)

Perhaps the Department for Children, Schools and Families confused fantasy with reality the day it endorsed Brain Gym. Because while Brain Gym’s coochy-coo exercises may well be fun or relaxing, what they’re definitely good at is increasing the flow of bullshit into children’s heads.

For instance, according to the Brain Gym teacher’s manual, performing the “brain button” exercise increases the flow of “electromagnetic energy” and helps the brain send messages from the right hemisphere to the left. Brain Gym can also “connect the circuits of the brain”, “clear blockages” and activate “emotional centering”. Other Brain Gym material contains the startling claim that “all liquids [other than water] are processed in the body as food, and do not serve the body’s water needs … processed foods do not contain water.”

All of which sounds like hooey to me. And also to the British Neuroscience Association, the Physiological Society and the charity Sense About Science, who have written to every local education authority in the land to complain about Brain Gym’s misrepresentation of, um, reality.

Look at the accredited practitioners of the art: top of their list of qualified Brain Gym “instructor/consultants” is a woman who is apparently also a “chiropractor for humans and animals”. That’s nothing: I read tarot cards for fish.

And check out the linked bookshop, Body Balance Books. Alongside Brain Gym guides and wallcharts, it stocks titles such as Awakening the Child Heart and Resonance Kinesiology, which, apparently, “holds information on how to move forward with truth, without the overlays of people’s beliefs and ideas about what is best for themselves and others”. Huh?

If we mistrust the real world so much that we’re prepared to fill the next generation’s heads with a load of gibbering crap about “brain buttons”, why stop there? Why not spice up maths by telling kids the number five was born in Greece and invented biscuits? Replace history lessons with screenings of the Star Wars trilogy? Teach them how to whistle in French? Let’s just issue the kids with blinkers.

Because we, the adults, don’t just gleefully pull the wool over our own eyes - we knit permanent blindfolds. We’ve decided we hate facts. Hate, hate, hate them. Everywhere you look, we’re down on our knees, gleefully lapping up neckful after neckful of steaming, cloddish bullshit in all its forms. From crackpot conspiracy theories to fairytale nutritional advice, from alternative medicine to energy yawns - we just can’t get enough of that musky, mudlike taste. Brain Gym is just one small tile in an immense and frightening mosaic of fantasy.

Still, that’s just my opinion. Lots of people clearly think Brain Gym is worthwhile, or they wouldn’t be prepared to pay through the nose for it. If you’re one of them, here’s an exciting new kinesiological exercise that should dramatically increase your self-awareness - and I’m giving it away free of charge. Ready? OK. Curl the fingers of your right hand inward, meeting the thumb to form a circle. Jerk it rhythmically up and down in front of your face. Repeat for six hours. Then piss off.

Source: Guardian Unlimited, UK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/07/education