While pre-schoolers can mix up reality and fantasy, by primary school children should know the difference between the two.

There are many reasons why a child may lie. Sometimes it’s to avoid what they see will be unfair punishment. If children see others getting away with lying, they may try it.

Your child may tell stories to others to be cool. Children who tell boastful lies can be lonely, bored or have low self-esteem.

With younger children, it’s sometimes easier to tell when they’re lying. Their story doesn’t sound right or they break into a smile as their plot unravels.

A few simple questions can also reveal a lie. Asking how your child came to have $10 might include some calm, clear questions about when, where, who was with them, or the order of events.

To discourage lying, parents need to discuss it with their children. It’s important your child knows lying is unacceptable, and the effects of it. You could calmly tell your child: “I feel angry and disappointed when you lie. It makes it hard to believe anything you say. If you keep telling lies nobody will trust you.”

Give your child opportunities to be honest and praise them for it. Your positive response to their behaviour will encourage them to repeat their honesty. Tell them you will give them chances to be honest and try it out. For example, if you know they haven’t tidied their room, ask. You will know whether they are being honest.

If your child finds it hard not to tell lies, set up a written contract signed by you and your child. It should state what you expect your child to do and the rewards and consequences that will follow. Put it up on the fridge. If your child lies, the consequences are clearly listed in the contract. As your child learns to not lie, you will no longer need a written contract.

If your child owns up to doing something they know you would not have allowed them to do make sure you praise them for their honesty, before you deal with the misbehaviour. (…)

Source: springfield-news.whereilive.com.au - News Limited Community Newspapers, Australia
http://tinyurl.com/69cklf

Hoping to turn a new page on early-childhood education in Boston, Mayor Thomas M. Menino declared today as “Talk, Read, Play Day” in conjunction with Boston public schools’ Countdown to Kindergarten program and ReadBoston.

The day is part of a new public awareness campaign focused on the role of parents and their responsibility as their child’s “first teacher,” from birth until age 5.

The program’s three components of interaction meld to give babies and toddlers essential skills. Talking, reading, and playing help young children develop longer attention spans, larger vocabularies, and proper social interactions as well as foster creativity, imagination, and problem-solving skills, Menino said.

“Talk, Read, Play” is part of Thrive in 5, Boston’s new 10-year plan, spearheaded by Menino and the United Way, to ensure Boston children are prepared for educational success.

The program, implemented in March after two years of planning and $3.25 million in funding from the city, the United Way, and area hospitals, highlights the importance of a child’s first five years in five areas of growth: language development, cognition and general knowledge, approaches to learning, social and emotional development, and physical and motor development.

Source: Boston Globe, United States
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/11/12/mayor_to_parents_read_to_children/

We agree that talking about sex and puberty with your kids is difficult. Like Lena, a mother of two teenager children says, “I’ vent spoken to my children about sex. I assumed that with the constant bombardment by our media, they will pick up all that they need to.” A wrong approach, according to Dr. Sheetal Pradhan, a child psychologist, who says, “ Media tends to portray emotions in extreme – no doubt the young mind picks up all that’s there, but the child does not know the difference between the good and the bad. He watches the drama unfold between the hero and the heroine…he watches them run around trees and kiss under the stars. He sees everyone around him smiling…and assumes that it’s the right thing to do!” And when Lena was called by the school counselor because her daughter was caught ‘kissing’ in the empty class room, hell hath no fury! But it was too late. Maya, her teenage daughter was experimenting with all that she had seen. Her parents hadn’t spoken to her and she just assumed that it was ok!

Shocking! But more and more parents are faced with daunting challenge of fast forwarding the clock and having ‘the talk’ at an early age. Talking early helps to establish a relationship with your kids that will continue as they get older. So that by the time they reach the rebellious teens, they’ll not only know the facts, but they’ll feel they can be open with you about their feelings and what’s going on in their lives.

Why is talking about sex important?

Children will learn about sex whether or not you want them to. “The sources are many, but it may not always be the right information. A gallimaufry of information would leave your child confused and usually is a trigger to experimenting”, says Dr. Sheetal. She adds, “As a parent, you play a very important role in making sure that the information is right. While our children need to know the biological facts about sex, they also need to understand that sexual relationships involve caring, concern and responsibility. Very often the child sees a movie wherein two people meet and later end up in bed together. But you need to educate them that in real life there is time to get to know each other — time to hold hands, go bowling, see a movie, or just talk. Children need to know that this is an important part of a caring relationship.”

When should I start?

A dilemma faced by all parents…but child psychologists across believe earlier the better. When they are young, the first question that would crop up is “where do babies come from?” And before you know it, puberty would hit in and your child needs the right information before they start experiencing bodily changes.

I’m uncomfortable talking about sex with my child

“Thinking back, my parents never educated me about sex. My mother had an open woman to woman conversation only after I got married.” When I asked her, she said, she was uncomfortable. And I don’t blame her. It is difficult talking to your child about sex. How do you get down to the basics? But, avoiding it is not the solution. No one said parenting was going to be easy. The discussion is what is important and being honest about your awkward feelings shows your child how to face difficult situations. Its okay to say something like, “You know, I’m uncomfortable talking about sex because my parents never talked with me about it. But I want us to be able to talk about anything—including sex—so please come to me if you have any questions. And if I don’t know the answer, I’ll find out.”

Bringing it up

1. Use everyday situations to start conversations. TV programmes are often a good opportunity to talk about relationships, or talk when you’re doing something like the washing up. This makes your child feel that sex is a normal part of family life and not a special subject.

2. Children notice the tone of what you say as much as what you say. So don’t get cross or put them down.

3. If you don’t know the answer, say so but find out later.

4. Try to be truthful as stories about storks delivering babies just confuse children.

What if my child does not want to talk to me?

13 year Mia would roll her eyes every time her mother would broach the topic of sex! She would rather read about it from Mills and Boons and the net, because she says, “the information is so cool and talking to ma is boring”. Teenagers often find it much harder to talk to their parents about sex, so it’s important talk to children when they’re much younger, rather than leaving it until they feel really awkward. You may have to accept that your teenager doesn’t want to talk to you. Children need privacy and the chance to make their own decisions, but to have your support when they need it. You can help by making sure that they know where else to get advice if they don’t want to discuss these issues with you.

Source: MSN India, India
http://lifestyle.in.msn.com/relationships/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1695993

I grew up in the 1970s. To me it seemed a pretty anxious era. The Cold War, unemployment, staggering blindly around the house during power-cuts. Yet today, research shows, we are more anxious than ever. Children in particular are feeling the impact.

A recent report found that children as young as 8 are worried about the world today and a third of 10 and 11-year-olds are concerned about the credit crunch. And the Government has just announced that schools are to receive an extra £4.5 million to teach students about terrorism and violent extremism.

Against this backdrop, psychologists at Sussex University have embarked on research into the role that parents may play in transmitting anxiety to their children. At the Sussex University psychology lab, Isaac Maltby, 9, approaches with trepidation two cardboard boxes labelled “quoll” and “cuscus”.

A researcher asks if he’d like to stroke the animals inside. Isaac boldly puts his hand into the hole in the quoll’s box. Approaching the cuscus he is more circumspect, inserting his hand slowly, pulling it out again quickly.

His mother, Candida Maltby, 40, looks even more nervous when she comes into the room. “OK,” she murmurs, inching her fingertips in. “Feels still asleep to me,” she adds, swiftly pulling back.

Over the previous hour, Isaac and Candida have taken part in tests aimed at investigating how Candida’s feelings about these unusual animals might affect how confident her son is about them. When he was first told about the cuscus, Isaac sounded curious, keen to stroke one. As his mother’s trepidation became clear, so he, too, became more cautious.

Though the research is still incomplete, it looks likely to show scientifically what many parents feel instinctively: that children not only take seriously what their parents say about potential dangers, but are equally alert to more subtle, non- verbal clues. As Dr Andy Field, of Sussex University, puts it: “Do anxious parents give visual cues to their children that are anxiety-provoking? And do they overlook signs of anxiety in their children?”

Other adults can also let children down, particularly when it comes to social anxiety. “You have teachers saying things such as: ‘this child doesn’t really engage’. If I hear that, I think: they want to engage, but they’re anxious,” Dr Field says.

A child’s early environment can also be important, says Graham Music, child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, London. “Recent research has shown that maternal anxiety can be transmitted in utero; stress hormones can be transmitted across the placenta. As they grow up, children are often emotional barometers of their environments.”

There are times, though, when a child can have extremely high levels of anxiety, but may not show it. Music says: “Attachment experiments show that one-year-olds who don’t cry when their mothers leave them alone in a room, and who seem not to care, often have the same physiological signs of stress as the babies who cry out when left.” While some children might go into a “cut-off, almost dissociated state”, others “become very reactive to almost every stimulus, and these often become out-of-control children”.

What’s the best advice for most of us, when we find ourselves confronted by a fearful child? Sam Cartwright-Hatton, of Manchester University, says that the first thing to do is to check your general parenting environment. “For a sensitive child, things need to be calm, clear, warm and consistent. Avoid shouting and smacking.”

Show confidence to your children, even if you don’t feel it. “If you’re scared of dogs, try not to leap 6ft in the air. Keep calm.” And monitor what you tell children - whether about the environment, the economy or creepy-crawlies.

If all else fails, contact your GP and ask for professional help. “Beware the advice that children just grow out of anxieties,” she says. “They usually don’t.”

ANXIETY TIMELINE

0-2 YEARS Unusual situations, water, heights, not being around care-givers, fears about survival.

3-5 YEARS Ghosts, goblins, nightmares, monsters under the bed, increasing awareness of threat in the immediate environment.

5-8 YEARS Animals, growing awareness of the real threat in the immediate environment. Children of this age are aware that, while very mobile, they are still small and vulnerable.

9-11 YEARS Personal injury, fears of injections, breaking arms and legs.

11-13 YEARS Social anxieties, social phobias, fears about one’s place in the hierarchy, fears of being cast out if you don’t have the “right” clothes or trainers.

What children really fear

Elsie, 3 “I get scared when someone says they don’t want to be my friend and they don’t want to play with me any more.”

Charlie, 5 “In the daytime foxes have gone to bed but when they come out at night, a fox could bite my bottom.”

Millie, 5 “I am a bit scared of carrots. I used to be scared of pear but now I know it is nice.”

Maddie, 6 “I always tuck the duvet under my legs when I go to sleep because I don’t want snakes to eat my feet. When I was little the snakes got in and ate my feet.”

Jess, 6 “In the night, when everyone’s asleep, I can hear footsteps going up the stairs and I feel scared. I think there’s kind of a monster creeping up the stairs.”

Josh, 8 “It’s scary to think of the pollution destroying all the rainforest so the animals haven’t got anything to eat and then the plants will die and the human race will die.”

Nye, 9 “I don’t like burglars. When there’s a loud noise upstairs I always think that there’s a burglar breaking in.”

Ira, 10 “I’m scared of hookworms and tapeworms. I hate the thought of having one in my body because they worm their way into you and live inside you.”

Tula, 11 “I worry about all the people in Africa dying and I feel I should be doing something about it. I also worry about my house setting on fire.”

Lemar, 12 “I want to drive a car when I’m older, so I worry about petrol prices and more people driving electric cars which are really dangerous and will cause road deaths because people won’t hear them.”

Amy, 13 “It scares me thinking that one day I might get so old that I lose my sense of humour and no one wants to be friends with me because I’m no fun.”

Source: Times Online, UK
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article5124499.ece

Be wary

We’ve all heard that you can’t believe everything you read. It is true! If reading were just a matter of deciphering the letters, words and sentences, it’d be a lot easier. But to be truly well informed and smart, you have to read critically too. That means going beyond the mere basic reading skills into thinking and research skills. If you can’t believe everything you read, although you can believe much of what you read, then how can you tell what to believe and what to dismiss or take with a grain of salt?

Basics

There are many ways. Start with your own knowledge. If you think you know for sure that something is true but somebody is saying something different, then it’s time to a) double check that you are correct; and b) check other things the writer is saying. It won’t take long to find out if the writer is trustworthy.

What if you don’t know either way? Reputations help sometimes. Are they trustworthy, is the publication usually trustworthy, are the credentials of the author credible? These don’t guarantee correctness, but they are positive signs.

Truly important is attribution. Is a writer explicit about his or her sources or vague? If vague, be alert! “As everybody knows. . .” or “it is common knowledge. . .” and similar phrases are often used to hide a lack of research. Such writers often have no facts, just an opinion. Do you know whatever the author says everyone knows? Do your friends or co-workers know? Be suspicious! Look it up if it matters. Generalizations are not always a bad thing, but they can be, and often are, abused.

Specifics

Be alert for specific citations to back up cited facts or contentions: “in experiments that we reported in the journal Science, we found. . .” tells you the writer is one of the experimenters, that a proper report of results exists and it can be found in a respected scientific journal. You can go to the journal and check it out! Such citations help keep writers honest.

The key word is “specific.” Academic footnotes require citations right to the page number and are common in good books. In the media it is often more vague. Still, the information ought to be enough so you can look it up. “As Pierre Trudeau once said. . .”, is too vague to easily verify, but “as Pierre Trudeau said as he welcomed the constitution home. . .” gives enough information for it to be checked. In the media, much is also direct attribution (he said. . . she said. . .) from a reporter who got it first-hand. Just be aware that sometimes people are accidentally misquoted. Check to see if there was a subsequent correction or denial.

Check it!

Still suspicious? Check the citations. That’s why they are there! Most times the citations will support the writer, but I’ve seen more than one that actually says the opposite when you check it out, the writer having taken one small line out of context to make it look like impressive support when in fact it was no support at all. Such writers hope that by giving a citation most readers will assume they are being honest with the facts and won’t check.

The Internet’s Snopes.com site is indispensable to those questioning the veracity of information. It isn’t perfect, but it works very hard at verifying or debunking urban legends, misinformation, and separating the true from the false. When it is unable to do so, it says so. It also cites its sources and explains its reasoning.

There is also much to be said for being aware of what’s what in our modern society and the various trends, fads and “movements” out there ranging from whacko fringe to fully legitimate. Beware of the fringe, whose literature and information is most deceptive and misleading, although frequently highly readable and seductive.

Myths live

It isn’t just the fringe that gets things wrong, though. All movements tend to have, and promote, certain myths or beliefs that are either not true or not totally in line with reality, and these take on a life of their own. The environmental movement provides a fine example: it is the commonly seen myth about a magnificent speech “Chief Seattle” allegedly gave in 1854 when he was considering selling what is now the land the City of Seattle sits on to the U.S. government. Environmentalists will quote this passionate speech about the sanctity of the land, air and water and the need to take good care of it. Others will just make passing reference to it (yes, it’s that well known).

Trouble is that it’s a fiction! But it is still widely published as fact, even by Al Gore in his book Earth In The Balance. It has been cited so often, it seems researchers and writers just assume it is true. It isn’t. Check it out at Snopes.com mentioned earlier.

The words were written in 1971 by Hollywood screenwriter Ted Perry for the 1972 film “Home,” a movie about ecology. And as Snopes.com notes, with citations, there are portions of the speech that are truly unlikely to ever have come from Chief Seattle. But people want to believe it because it suits their purpose so they’ve never actually checked it out. That’s a blunder. It makes one wonder how credible the rest of their “facts” actually are. And that’s a good reason to be a careful researcher yourself if you want to be taken seriously.

The last word

Here is John Adams, second president of the United States:

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of the facts and evidence.”

* Lex Talk! is researched and written by Times & Transcript editorial page editor Norbert Cunningham. It appears in this space every Monday.

Source: Times and Transcript, Canada
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/476094

The proportion of infants arriving at school not knowing whether they are right or left-handed has trebled in the past decade, researchers say. The situation has been made worse by excessive parental fears, driven by cot death, about letting them lie or crawl on their front.

“The most important thing parents can do is ensure that when they are being observed during the day, they are given a chance to be on their front.” Previous research by Portwood has found that 57% of three-year-olds are unable to carry out tasks expected at their age. She cited children’s inactive lifestyles as “a major contributory factor”.

Other experts have also raised concerns about children’s development. “Brain development is at its most rapid between the age of zero and three,” said Aric Sigman, a psychologist and a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. He pointed to research showing that for every hour a day a three-year-old watches television, there is a 9% rise in attention problems.

Sigman has described television as “the greatest unacknowledged public health issue of our time”. He also believes video games have led to children spending less time working with their hands and failing to grasp concepts such as weight, volume and measurement.

“By using your hands, you can actually become more civilised,” said Sigman. “These are problems likely to persist in life, they are rather indelible.”

The problem was highlighted at the Conservative party conference when a restaurateur told a session addressed by David Willetts, the shadow skills secretary, that she was unable to find British employees under 25 who had the dexterity to peel a potato.

Source: Times Online, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article5114484.ece

Melissa Marsh is a special education co-ordinator at Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw School in Port Hardy, at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Its students include some of the most challenged kids in Canada. Many struggle with learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities and behaviour problems. The community has its share of social issues, and parental involvement is low.

For kids like these, academic failure is depressingly familiar. “The shutdown mode comes extremely quickly,” Ms. Marsh says. But now, kids at this school are experiencing the unaccustomed taste of success in a subject that far more advantaged kids have grown to dread - math.

The JUMP program, pioneered by Toronto mathematician John Mighton, breaks almost every rule of current math pedagogy. It does not depend on the “discovery” method, group work or real-life examples. It is highly structured, relies on a great deal of direct instruction, repetition and reinforcement, and proceeds in small, incremental steps.

It also works.

“Repetition is crucial for many of our students,” says Wayne Peterson, the principal. He adds, “Your regular math texts have too much reading.” JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) is structured so that every kid can solve the problems, one small step at a time. That builds their confidence and self-esteem, and keeps them motivated and engaged. It can get even low achievers excited about math. Teachers say their math skills dramatically improve - and so does their behaviour, their levels of engagement and their attitude.

“The kids aren’t fighting me tooth and nail any more,” says Ms. Marsh. “They know what’s expected. They have the steps set out in front of them and they know they are going to be able to achieve all of those steps. The kids in my special education class go, ‘Whoo-hoo! I did the bonus question and I got it right!’ One Grade 7 student has never been able to sit in math class without completely disrupting it. JUMP has changed that. Today, he participates in class discussion and does the written work by himself.”

The JUMP program is now being used in more than a dozen first nations schools in B.C., as well as in many regular schools in the Vancouver area. “We found that the regular textbook way wasn’t reaching all the kids,” says Christine Hammond, head teacher of N’Kwala School, near Merit. The program is especially effective with her ESL students, because they don’t have to wade through oceans of text. One floundering Innu boy, for example, quickly became a math whiz. The kids at her small band school are now performing at the regional average in math, she says. JUMP is also effective with adult learners, some of whom, after a lifetime of frustration, are getting their GEDs.

Liz Barrett is a South Africa-born educator who travels the province doing outreach and teacher support in first nations schools. For her, proficiency in math is a social justice issue. “These kids are falling by the wayside, and that’s unacceptable. If your students aren’t getting a Grade 12, the door is closed to them.” She discovered the JUMP program four years ago, when she heard Mr. Mighton lecture in B.C., and became a passionate advocate. She’s now helping to launch a JUMP pilot program in South Africa.

Mr. Mighton, 52, is an unusual man. As well as being a mathematician (currently in residence at Toronto’s Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences), he is one of Canada’s best playwrights. He got interested in math education because he thinks the state of numeracy in Canada is a disaster. Judging by the evidence, he’s right. In Ontario, for example, a third of community college students are in danger of failing first-year math. Mr. Mighton also believes we must reverse the “culture of failure” that permeates math education. “There’s no reason the vast majority of kids can’t learn math.”

Ten years ago, Mr. Mighton began tutoring inner-city Toronto kids in his apartment, with great success. The next task was to determine whether JUMP would scale up. He began working to persuade school boards, a far tougher task than he expected. But the initial results have been good. One British inner-city school district, in London, agreed to try it. At the start, the kids were performing an average of two years below the national level in math. After one year of JUMP, 60 per cent of them passed the national exams.

JUMP works for middle-class kids, too. One Toronto teacher used it with her Grade 5 kids, whose math skills at the start of the year ranged from Grade 3 to Grade 7. By the end of the year, every student signed up for the Pythagoras competition, which is written only by top students. Fifteen out of the 17 achieved distinction.

The JUMP program is founded on observation, evidence, teacher feedback, continuous improvement and rigour, combined with new research findings on how the brain learns. By contrast, most programs taught in school are not. For the past couple of decades, both math and reading instruction have been an ideological battlefield that pits the “progressives” - educators who favour good things such as discovery and creativity - against the traditionalists, who favour bad things such as repetition and direct instruction. The progressives have had the upper hand, which is one reason why JUMP has been regarded in some quarters - especially in progressive-minded Ontario - as positively dangerous. Last May, consultants with the Toronto District School Board dismissed JUMP as a form of “rote, procedural learning.” In Ontario, that’s the kiss of death.

Now the tide is turning, though not fast enough. Last spring, the U.S. National Mathematics Advisory Panel endorsed the seemingly obvious idea that, in order to succeed in math, children need to understand what they’re doing.

But the school system is plagued by other barriers that actively discourage best practices. One is the widespread use of consultants, who often write the very textbooks they then are paid to recommend. Some teachers are heavily discouraged from using instructional methods or materials their school board frowns on, even though they work. Many schools and parents are beaten into submission by claims that certain programs are “evidence-based” even though they’re not. There’s a lot at stake in how curriculum decisions are made - but parents and teachers seldom have a clue, or a voice.

So if you’re interested in JUMP for your kid, you may have to move to Vancouver or Port Hardy. You could also check out the JUMP website (jumpmath.org). And Mr. Mighton has written two books, The Myth of Ability and The End of Ignorance. The program survives on charitable support, and he is a more or less full-time volunteer.

“Teachers get so excited by this,” says Liz Barrett. “Suddenly they’ve got the tools to reach the students, and suddenly they’re all achieving.”

Source: Globe and Mail, Canada
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081108.COWENT08/TPStory/National

Three days earlier, on September 18, the 35-year-old housewife from Japan’s southern island had led a frantic search for the boy after telling police he had wandered off in a local park. Searchers found his body stuffed into a small gap in the wall of the park toilet. He had been strangled, most likely with the strap of a mobile phone.

In a depressingly familiar turn of events, investigators announced soon after the funeral that Kaoru had confessed to the “impulse” killing.

“I felt there was no hope for the future,” said the mother of one, who had reportedly become overwhelmed by her parental responsibility. “I thought about killing my son and also myself.”

Experts say the case is emblematic of a broader crisis. Recent statistics record more than 100 cases of maternal filicide — mothers murdering their children — since the end of 2005, including six in September this year. Although the proportion of Japanese aged 14 and younger has been steadily shrinking in the past decade, the number of filicides has stayed roughly constant.

“Women have become responsible not only for the full-time parenting and care of their children, but also their educational performance. The pressure is immense,” Professor Ohinata says. “That’s why, in recent cases of filicide, women haven’t just been killing infants but also schoolchildren, including teenagers.”

In an interview by AERA magazine, one psychiatrist said the killings could represent a kind of transference, whereby women were assigning the suppressed fury they felt at their neglectful husbands to their innocent children.

Evidence of the growing burden on mothers, Ohinata says, can be measured in another shocking statistic: reports of child abuse have jumped from 1101 in 1990 to more than 40,000 last year.

Criminologists say the breakdown of traditional family living arrangements, in which three or four generations of one family would live together in large suburban or rural houses, has cut young mothers off from family advice and support. Instead they rely on magazines and online parenting guides, which entrench anxieties that their children may have intellectual or physical disabilities.

Megumi Iwase, 33, earlier this year used a towel to strangle her three-month-old son Shuji before drinking a bleaching substance and slashing her wrists in a failed suicide attempt. The first-time mother had already resolved that his “development was slower than other children his age”.

In a recent court appearance, her 39-year-old husband admitted he had abandoned all parental duties to his wife and suggested he deserved to be jailed in her place.

Source: The Age, Australia
http://tinyurl.com/5n2vhl

The 11-year-old had been told to press the button in her right hand if the word was real, the button in her left if it was nonsense. The answer itself was less important than the map the scanner would make of which areas of Blair’s brain lighted up when she struggled with a word.

The aim of the study, said Laurie Cutting, director of the Education and Brain Research Program at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, is to understand the neurological differences among students who are skilled readers, those who have difficulties and those with diagnosed learning disabilities.

If neuroscientists can pinpoint which parts of the brain are activated when a reader puzzles over an unknown word, they may eventually help teachers tailor reading instruction for individuals.

That is only the beginning. Many educators hunger for scientific data to help them structure their lessons, and neuroscience is beginning to offer them broad guidance about what works best.

One of the most startling recent revelations in neuroscience has been that the brain’s structure is much more flexible (a concept called neuroplasticity) than was previously thought; this understanding may help teachers find ways to train the brain to better solve math problems or understand a book.

“There’s an awful lot that neuroscience can begin to tell us in broad strokes that’s relevant for education and that ultimately 10 or 20 years downstream can provide us with prescriptive information,” said Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education.

“I think we’re looking at a period of five years of very rich territory for investigation here.”

Complex conditions

Brain research already is opening the way to help teachers detect and address complex conditions — such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia and its mathematical cousin, dyscalculia — that defy blood tests and other simple medical diagnostics.

Cognitive scientists are developing a theory of “micro-development” that could turn some lesson plans upside down. Studies have found that, on a minute-to-minute basis, children and adults learn in fits and starts, often going backward. That could indicate that students should be allowed to grope their way to understanding — for instance, by being asked to power up a light bulb using a battery and a strand of wire before having the theory of electricity explained to them.

How the brain functions remains deeply mysterious, with studies seeming to unfold at a glacial pace. One expert noted that it took decades for researchers, examining data from brain and behavioral studies and other sources, to confirm the belief of many educators that focusing on phonics helps youngsters who struggle with reading.

Still, top educational institutions have recently shown new interest in the link between brain activity and education. Harvard University founded its mind, brain and education degree program in 2002. Johns Hopkins University this year briefed the Maryland State Board of Education on a neuro-education initiative that aims to “explore how current findings have application to educational practice.”

Better ways of teaching

A study published in the journal Nature last month reported a link between a primitive, intuitive sense of the size of numbers and performance in math classes, a finding that could lead to ways to identify young students who may have trouble with math and develop better ways of teaching them. Advocates of expanding pre-kindergarten classes point to studies that show the importance of early education in molding young minds.

Pianta, of the Curry School, said neuroscience has also influenced the education of autistic students.

“Twenty years ago, you might have seen an intervention that was far more oriented toward trying to get those kids to be affectionate, let’s say. Or the therapist in that case would be promoting physical contact with kids who didn’t like physical contact,” Pianta said. “Now we would look at that (response) as sort of saying this kid’s behavior is a result of their brain’s ability to process social, emotional information. You would structure your interactions with an autistic child so as not to overwhelm their capacity to process that information.”

Kurt Fischer, director of Harvard’s mind, brain and education master’s degree program, warned that many educational theories claim to be based on science but are not.

“One of the major problems we face is that there are a whole lot of things that claim to be ‘brain-based education’ that are nonsense,” he said. “One of them is the belief that boys and girls have totally different brains and learn totally differently. That’s not what the evidence shows. Not at all. The other is kind of a rigid idea of sensitive periods: that after a certain age you can’t learn a foreign language. You’ve also heard that there are left-brained and right-brained people. Total nonsense, unless they’ve had their left or right hemisphere removed. All of us use all our brains.”

Craving information

Another example Fischer cited is the widely held but dubious notion that listening to Bach in the bassinet will make babies smarter. Still, Fischer said, the popularity of such ideas shows that educators and the public crave scientific backing for classroom innovations.

At Kennedy Krieger, Cutting gave a nifty copy of her brain scan to Blair, her young research subject. The research team prepared Blair’s identical twin sister to go inside the tube for a new round of scans. They are both perfectly good readers, but the data from their studies might help others.

“Creepy but cool at the same time,” said Blair, an aspiring veterinarian. “It’s good because you help other kids.”

Source: Monterey County Herald, CA
http://www.montereyherald.com/health/ci_10913995