Investing Early in Our Children

Neuroscience tells us that the highest return on investment is when the brain is growing fastest - in the first years of life. Common sense tells us that a savings of $17 or more for every $1 invested in quality early education is an opportunity not to be missed.

Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, 94, is being honored as a White House  Champion of Change for his contribution to Head Start and his studies and promotion for quality early education.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/06/18/investing-early-our-children

Babies acquire binocular vision by looking around, study says

A baby views patterns that appear to change once binocular vision has developed.… (Gabor Jando, University…)Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary

Early life experiences play a crucial role in the development of normal brain function. In the visual system in particular, a "critical period" takes place during infancy in which the part of the brain that processes what we see becomes highly plastic. If problems are not fixed during the critical period, they often remain for life.

During the experiment, 30 newborn babies viewed a screen with a pattern of dots that changed in a way that only people with binocular vision could detect. When the data were in, the results were clear: Postnatal age determined when binocular vision arrived, with both groups of babies developing it about four months after birth.

Takao Hensch, an expert in the biology of early brain development at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study, said the research provides a rare glimpse into how early experiences can change our brains for life. "It's a very clever, very clean experiment where you can look at the effects of experience starting from nothing."

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/22/science/la-sci-binocular-vision-20120623

Sheffield U, Linguistics, What is language acquisition

Language is a crucial part of everyday life. But how did we learn to speak? How do we know what to say and when to say certain things? Language Acquisition is something that can often be misunderstood, or simplified, or even forgotten. Yet from the word GO, acquiring language and using language is an amazing ability we, as human-beings, have.
https://sites.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/all-about-linguistics/branches/language-acquisition/what-is-child-lanuage-acquistion

Common Core State Standards

The mission of the Common Core State Standards is to “provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them.” Ultimately, the CCSS aim to create the framework for a well-rounded education that will prepare students for the global economy. To date, 45 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to adopt the CCSS. What sets the CCSS initiative apart from past educational initiatives?

Supporters of the CCSS emphasize the focus on developing students into 21st century learners rather than getting them to perform well on tests.

Importance is placed on participating in higher-order thinking by understanding the processes behind concepts. Specifically, the standards focus on how students learn, not just on what they learn (Farrell 2011).”

How teachers support students before reading, during reading, and after reading? Scaffolding before reading (activating prior knowledge), scaffolding during reading (relying on “text dependent questions”), and different scaffolding after reading, with a much stronger focus on oral response and collaboration among small groups of students before students independently write a response independently.
http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=4130

Language acquisition by DeeChee the robot

The best way for robots to learn language could be the same way small children do - through interaction with adults.

Researchers at the University of Hertfordshire say they've given their iCub robot basic language skills as part of the iTalk project, using methods similar to those used to teach children.

Initially, the robot, named DeeChee, is programmed with around 40,000 English syllables, and can only babble and perceives speech as a string of sounds, rather than being divided up into words.

However, after engaging in a few minutes of 'conversation' with humans, in which the participants were instructed to speak to the robot as if it were a small child, the robot adapted its output.

It caught onto the most frequently heard syllables and started to repeat them, and was thus able to produce some word forms, such as the names of simple shapes and colours.

"It is known that infants are sensitive to the frequency of sounds in speech, and these experiments show how this sensitivity can be modelled and contribute to the learning of word forms by a robot," says Dr Caroline Lyon.

Although the iCub robot is learning to produce word forms, it doesn't know their meaning - and this will form the next stage in the iTalk project’s research.
http://www.tgdaily.com/trendwatch-features/64165-robot-baby-learns-first-words

A new class of carriers

Ricky Thompson/U.S. Navy

The final keel section of the future USS Gerald R. Ford is lowered into place at Huntington Ingalls Industries-Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia, on May 24, 2012.

The U.S. Navy is betting $42 billion on a new class of aircraft carriers, the world’s biggest and costliest warships ever, even as the Pentagon budget shrinks and China and Iran arm themselves with weapons to disable or destroy the behemoths.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-19/u-s-navy-bets-42-billion-on-carriers-in-china-s-sights.html