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Children's Learning (children + learning)
Selected AbstractsAdult Sensitivity to Children's Learning in the Zone of Proximal DevelopmentJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 4 2001Amy Chak Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development (zpd) has brought wide attention to the role of adults in children's learning and development. The author proposes that beyond understanding its mechanism, its use is influenced by various factors which the adult needs to be sensitive to. Through integrating related literature on the zpd and on adult-child interactions, this paper aims to shed light on the nature of adult sensitivity in actualizing the zpd. The concept is first analyzed theoretically. Two types of sensitivity will then be discussed: adults' self-awareness and their awareness of children as active players in the interaction process. Sigel's concept of distancing is suggested as a means of enhancing one's sensitivity. [source] The Rebirth of Children's LearningCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2000Robert S. Siegler Learning is a central part of children's lives, but the study of learning is a rather peripheral part of the field of cognitive development. Fortunately, this situation is starting to change; recent theoretical and methodological advances have sparked renewed interest in children's learning. This renewed interest has already yielded a set of consistent and interesting findings regarding how children learn, as well as intriguing proposals regarding the mechanisms that underlie the learning. Increasing our focus on children's learning promises to yield practical benefits as well as a more exciting field of cognitive development. [source] Extending the Testimony Problem: Evaluating the Truth, Scope, and Source of Cultural InformationCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2006Brian Bergstrom Children's learning,in the domains of science and religion specifically, but in many other cultural domains as well,relies extensively on testimony and other forms of culturally transmitted information. The cognitive processes that enable such learning must also administrate the evaluation, qualification, and storage of that information, while guarding against the dangers of false or misleading input. Currently, the development of these appraisal processes is not clearly understood. Recent work, reviewed here, has begun to address three important dimensions of the problem: how children and adults evaluate truth in communication, how they gauge the inferential potential of information, and how they encode and evaluate its source. [source] Adult Sensitivity to Children's Learning in the Zone of Proximal DevelopmentJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 4 2001Amy Chak Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development (zpd) has brought wide attention to the role of adults in children's learning and development. The author proposes that beyond understanding its mechanism, its use is influenced by various factors which the adult needs to be sensitive to. Through integrating related literature on the zpd and on adult-child interactions, this paper aims to shed light on the nature of adult sensitivity in actualizing the zpd. The concept is first analyzed theoretically. Two types of sensitivity will then be discussed: adults' self-awareness and their awareness of children as active players in the interaction process. Sigel's concept of distancing is suggested as a means of enhancing one's sensitivity. [source] Designing ubiquitous computing to enhance children's learning in museumsJOURNAL OF COMPUTER ASSISTED LEARNING, Issue 4 2006T. Hall Abstract In recent years, novel paradigms of computing have emerged, which enable computational power to be embedded in artefacts and in environments in novel ways. These developments may create new possibilities for using computing to enhance learning. This paper presents the results of a design process that set out to explore interactive techniques, which utilized ubiquitous computer technology, to stimulate active participation, involvement and learning by children visiting a museum. Key stakeholders, such as museum curators and docents, were involved throughout the process of creating the exhibition, Re-Tracing the Past, in the Hunt Museum, Limerick, Ireland. The paper describes aspects of the evaluation of the exhibition, which involved 326 schoolchildren (ages 9,12-year-old), and which exemplifies important features of the design and use of the novel technology in the museum. The paper concludes by articulating a series of design guidelines for developing ubiquitous computing to enhance children's learning in museums. These guidelines relate 12 experiential criteria to five supporting design informants and resources. The guidelines encompass important dimensions of children's educational experience in museums, including collaboration, engagement, active interpretation, and materiality. While developed in a museum context, these guidelines could be applied to the development of novel computing to enhance children's learning in other educational environments, both formal and informal. [source] Chinese children's constructive activity and text comprehensionJOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN READING, Issue 4 2008Yin-Kum Law This study investigated how constructive activities are involved when Chinese students are performing reading tasks that require deeper levels of understanding. Forty students from Grade 5 (19 boys and 21 girls), and 42 students from Grade 6 (20 boys and 22 girls) participated in this study. To reveal the children's constructive processes in reading, they were asked to think aloud while responding to a text. Analyses of the children's protocols identified five levels of constructive activity. Analyses further indicated that the Grade 6 children performed better than the Grade 5 children, and skilled readers outperformed less skilled readers in higher levels of constructivist activity and text understanding tasks. Implications of the important roles of constructivist activity in children's learning from texts were discussed. [source] Drama activities as ideational resources for primary-grade children in urban science classroomsJOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING, Issue 3 2010Maria Varelas Abstract In this study we explored how dramatic enactments of scientific phenomena and concepts mediate children's learning of scientific meanings along material, social, and representational dimensions. These drama activities were part of two integrated science-literacy units, Matter and Forest, which we developed and implemented in six urban primary-school (grades 1st,3rd) classrooms. We examine and discuss the possibilities and challenges that arise as children and teachers engaged in scientific knowing through such experiences. We use Halliday's (1978. Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press) three metafunctions of communicative activity,ideational, interpersonal, and textual,to map out the place of the multimodal drama genre in elementary urban school science classrooms of young children. As the children talked, moved, gestured, and positioned themselves in space, they constructed and shared meanings with their peers and their teachers as they enacted their roles. Through their bodies they negotiated ambiguity and re-articulated understandings, thus marking this embodied meaning making as a powerful way to engage with science. Furthermore, children's whole bodies became central, explicit tools used to accomplish the goal of representing this imaginary scientific world, as their teachers helped them differentiate it from the real world of the model they were enacting. Their bodies operated on multiple mediated levels: as material objects that moved through space, as social objects that negotiated classroom relationships and rules, and as metaphorical entities that stood for water molecules in different states of matter or for plants, animals, or non-living entities in a forest food web. Children simultaneously negotiated meanings across all of these levels, and in doing so, acted out improvisational drama as they thought and talked science. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 302,325, 2010 [source] Drawing facilitates children's reports of factual and narrative information: implications for educational contextsAPPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 7 2009Julien Gross In the present study, we examined the effect of drawing on children's reports of an educational event. Five- and 6-year-old children visited a local museum and were interviewed either 1,2 days or 7 months later. After each delay, half of the children were asked to tell about what they had learned during their visit to the museum and the other half were given the opportunity to draw while telling. All children were also given a standard comprehension test, covering material that the museum staff considered to be most relevant to the visit. When tested after a short delay, children who drew while talking reported more factual and more narrative information than children who did not draw. When tested after a long delay, drawing only enhanced children's reports of narrative information. After both delays, children's verbal descriptions of the event exceeded their scores on the comprehension test. These data have important practical implications for the educational value of museum visits and suggest a new method of assessing children's learning in educational contexts. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Special educational needs and disabilityBRITISH JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION, Issue 4 2006Sue Keil Issues relating to the categorisation and labelling of pupils, and, the use of the terms ,special educational needs' and ,disability' in particular, have been the topic of debate in BJSE before. In this article, Sue Keil, a research officer at the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Olga Miller, of the Institute of Education, University of London, and Rory Cobb, a development officer at the RNIB, summarise some of the key findings from a review carried out on behalf of the Disability Rights Commission (DRC). The authors highlight confusion over the use of terms that represent differing ideological perspectives. Despite the social focus that characterises much of the discourse about disability, disability is frequently regarded as an aspect of special educational needs, an area in which a medical model is often dominant. These confusions benefit neither children with disabilities nor those with less clearly-defined difficulties. Sue Keil, Olga Miller and Rory Cobb note with interest recent developments in Scotland where a new framework based on the concept of ,additional support needs' separates disability from educational need and is intended to represent a more inclusive approach to children's learning. [source] Towards an inclusive school culture , but what happened to Elton's ,affective curriculum'?BRITISH JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION, Issue 3 2003Gerda Hanko The inclusion debate is no longer concerned merely with the extent to which mainstream schools are able to accommodate all children regardless of need but increasingly focuses on institutional improvement in understanding the range of their needs. In spite of our better understanding of how children learn and of how their emotional and social realities can be used as a source of learning that is relevant to the needs of all, ,difficult' children continue to be seen by many as impeding their teachers' pedagogical effectiveness and as damaging the educational chances of others. In this article, Gerda Hanko, an education consultant and staff development tutor who has substantial experience in teaching and teacher training, offers an overview of the development of practical approaches to professional development which, by deepening teachers' insight into emotional and social factors in children's learning, have been shown to supersede the need to exclude the disaffected , as already suggested in the Elton Report. Gerda Hanko's own publications, initially developed under the auspices of a London Institute of Education associateship when she was Head of Education at a teacher training institution, promote collaborative problem-solving approaches among staff , ideas that she takes forward in this paper. [source] The Rebirth of Children's LearningCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2000Robert S. Siegler Learning is a central part of children's lives, but the study of learning is a rather peripheral part of the field of cognitive development. Fortunately, this situation is starting to change; recent theoretical and methodological advances have sparked renewed interest in children's learning. This renewed interest has already yielded a set of consistent and interesting findings regarding how children learn, as well as intriguing proposals regarding the mechanisms that underlie the learning. Increasing our focus on children's learning promises to yield practical benefits as well as a more exciting field of cognitive development. [source] A One-to-One Bias and Fast Mapping Support Preschoolers' Learning About Faces and VoicesCOGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 5 2010Mariko Moher Abstract A multimodal person representation contains information about what a person looks like and what a person sounds like. However, little is known about how children form these face-voice mappings. Here, we explored the possibility that two cognitive tools that guide word learning, a one-to-one mapping bias and fast mapping, also guide children's learning about faces and voices. We taught 4- and 5-year-olds mappings between three individual faces and voices, then presented them with new faces and voices. In Experiment 1, we found that children rapidly learned face-voice mappings from just a few exposures, and furthermore spontaneously mapped novel faces to novel voices using a one-to-one mapping bias (that each face can produce only one voice). In Experiment 2, we found that children's face-voice representations are abstract, generalizing to novel tokens of a person. In Experiment 3, we found that children retained in memory the face-voice mappings that they had generated via inference (i.e., they showed evidence of fast mapping), and used these newly formed representations to generate further mappings between new faces and voices. These findings suggest that preschoolers' rapid learning about faces and voices may be aided by biases that are similar to those that support word learning. [source] | |||||||||||||