STUDY: Young toddlers think in terms of the whole object, not just parts

"This new research shows that as young toddlers learn language, they are more likely to focus on objects rather than parts..." more»

ARTICLE: Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All

Mounting evidence suggests that passive screen sucking not only doesn't help children learn, but could also set back their development...more»

STUDY: Understanding the Building Blocks of Language and Thought

Infants comprehend spatial relationships such as "in" and "on" through language input from caregivers and the babies' own play behaviors... more»

ARTICLE: Japanese scientists develop robo-toddler

A group of scientists in Japan have developed a robot that acts like a toddler to better understand child development... more» more» movie»

RESEARCH GROUP: Harvard Family Research Project

The Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) strives to promote more effective educational practices, programs, and policies for disadvantaged children and youth by generating, publishing, and disseminating our and others’ research. Their complementary learning model focuses on how school-based and non-school-based supports can be linked and can all work toward consistent learning and developmental outcomes for children. They have developed a set of Family Involvement Teaching Cases that relate to dilemmas in family educational involvement. more»

ARTICLE: When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?

Here's an article on the "graying of kindergarten." Some argue that one way to help solve the accountability crisis (i.e., poor performance on high-stakes achievement tests) is to just have parents hold back (or "red-shirt") their children. Of course, we could also get a bump by just pushing off the testing and not starting it in the third grade. How about we let kindergarten be kindergarten and allow instruction to be guided by children's development and interests rather than attempting to reverse-engineer a solution to this heavily manufactured crisis... more»

In a report on kindergarten, the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education wrote, "Most of the questionable entry and placement practices that have emerged in recent years have their genesis in concerns over children's capacities to cope with increasingly inappropriate curriculum in kindergarten.

STUDY: Children can perform approximate math without arithmetic instruction

"Study shows that children spontaneously show a sense of number when presented with symbolic math." This work will no doubt feed the nativist developmental camp. It is quite striking that so many programs of developmental psych research are built upon the assumption that if a child has not attended school yet then they must not have been taught in any formal way -- say in the home by parents, siblings, or media. This is especially not true in these academically fueled times we live in. But their assumption allows them to claim things are "spontaneous" or taught "implicitly" -- when the fact of the matter is that they just never empirically look at actual early childhood development in naturalistic settings... more»

ARTICLE: Beginning the Journey: Five-Year-Olds Drive Their Own PBL Projects

Project-based learning ties nicely into role play dimensions of early development. "Student-driven projects, enhanced by technology, launch kindergartners on their way to lifelong learning..." more»

STUDY: I like to do it, I’m able, and I know I am: Longitudinal couplings between domain-specific achievement, self-concept, and interest

Here's a study of longitudinal development of the intraindividual coupling between academic achievement, interest, and self-concept of ability (SCA) with a sample of about 1,000 children between grades 1 and 12. The degree of coupling was the highest between interest and SCA and the lowest between interest and achievement... more»

STUDY: Toddlers find photos easier to learn from than drawings

What do toddlers learn from everyday picture-book reading interactions? Well, the older children get, the better they become at realizing the connection between abstract representations and their real-life counterparts. Learning follows the iconicity... more» more»

BOOK: Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development: Mixed Methods in the Study of Childhood and Family Life

This book provides a new perspective on the study of childhood and family life. Successful development is enhanced when communities provide meaningful life pathways that children can seek out and engage... more»

Successful pathways include both a culturally valued direction for development and competence in skills that matter for a child's subsequent success as a person as well as a student, parent, worker, or citizen. To understand successful pathways requires a mix of qualitative, quantitative, and ethnographic methods--the state of the art for research practice among developmentalists, educators, and policymakers alike.

STUDY: Toddlers engage in 'emotional eavesdropping' to guide their behavior

From the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences: 18-month-old toddlers engage in "emotional eavesdropping" by listening and watching emotional reactions directed by one adult to another and then using this emotional information to shape their own behavior. It is the first demonstration that infants can modify their own behavior in response to an emotional communication that does not involve them. press release» study»

REPORT: Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8

Here's a synthesis of what we know about how children learn science across the K-8 grade span. It argues that they are much more capable than our historical account of young children as "concrete" thinkers -- and it shows how they bring a lot of relevant prior knowledge to kindergarten from the earliest years of development... report» article» press release» press release»

STUDY: Families' engagement with young children's science and technology learning at home

It is important to not equate learning with formal schooling. For example, families strongly influence how, what, and why children learn while they are in non-school settings... more»

The findings showed that families engaged with children's inquiries at home in many ways - by providing resources, conversing, and investigating collaboratively with children. Moreover, when families pursued inquiries together and when children conducted their own sustained intellectual searches, children's ideas deepened. Such evidence of the educational significance of what families do suggests that early science and technology education might be made more effective if it were aligned with the ways people learn together outside formal institutions.

STUDY: Occasioned knowledge exploration in family interaction

This article examines the ensemble of conversational practices a particular family makes use of to cultivate active and joyful engagement in imaginative inquiry about the world, during mundane, largely unstructured activity... more»

Parents provide opportunities for children to query new words, idioms, and concepts, and invite them to do so, though they do not impose explanations on children. Explanations are ‘recipient-designed’ in terms of age appropriateness, and may involve dramatic animations through use of the current scene as a local metric. Unpacking meanings of words and concepts can involve the playful exploration of possible rather than literal meanings as well. Participants choose to hear (and restructure) words in particular ways so that they can be seized as opportunities for launching play on sound structure. Involvement in the talk of the moment entails practices such as collaborative production of utterances, format tying, and sound play.

ARTICLE: The Multitasking Generation (Time magazine)

A 14 year-old girl: "You just multitask...my parents always tell me I can't do homework while listening to music, but they don't understand that it helps me concentrate"... more»

ORGANIZATION: The Center on the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) at UCLA

CELF is an interdisciplinary center where anthropologists, applied linguists, education specialists, and psychologists study how working parents and their children approach the challenges of balancing the demands of work, school, and family life using detailed, ethnographic research of everyday life... more»

RESOURCE: A Girl Like Me (video)

Gloria Ladson-Billings used the anguishing doll selection moment from this video to exemplify her recent work on the ethnography of (collective) misery -- miserable indeed... more»

STUDY: The ambiguity of the child’s ‘voice’ in social research

"Drawing on a recent research project on young children's communication difficulties, the author argues that the currently popular discourse on ‘listening to children’ is beset with practical and ethical ambiguities that result from the ‘socialness’ of human interaction, discourses and practices..." more»

In particular, the author argues that the notion of the child's ‘voice’ is, despite being a powerful rhetorical device, socially constructed. This article illustrates and discusses ambiguities that arose from fieldwork in two ‘special needs’ settings, considering their epistemological implications for social research, and offers reflexivity as a strategy for ethical research conduct.

BOOK: The Hidden Life of Girls

"On countless playgrounds each day girls are at work crafting intricate social organizations through language and embodied action..." more»

In this ground-breaking ethnography, the voices of girls from a range of ethnicities and social classes show that rather than avoiding conflict, girls actively seek it out. The Hidden Life of Girls thus offers a challenge to the notion that girls are inherently supportive of each other. The moral universe that girls create, and in which they hold their peers (including boys) accountable, contradicts stereotypes that have dominated much work on female moral development.