Nadine Burke Harris explains that she wrote The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversities to help parent and caregivers provide their children with the best opportunity in life, even when they face difficulties. This book is a critical, and eye-opening read for those invested in supporting the health and education of young people. […]
Andrew C. Watson, the editor of Learning and the Brain Blog, long-time teacher at some of the country’s most prestigious schools, and consultant to educators around the world, recently released his second book in the Learning Brain series. While the first book in the series focused on working memory and attention and the final book […]
Two recent articles in the New York Times have gotten lots of teacherly attention. What’s Love Got to Do With It? The first, an op-ed by David Brooks, announces that “students learn from people they love.” Brooks’s piece includes some heart-warming anecdotes, and name checks some important researchers: Antonio Damasio, for instance, and Mary Helen […]
Head Start programs prepare young children — especially those from lower socio-economic cohorts — for success in school. Can these programs help more if extended by the parents?
We would, of course, like to see studies with larger sample sizes, active control conditions, longer-term evaluation of results and so forth. This study find some positive trends, but overall isn’t impressed with the research progress over the last 13 years.
It’s finals time! As the promise of spring and summer days rolls in, the increase in sunshine can mean only one thing for students: assignments, exams, papers, and projects are due. Not surprisingly, this time of year arrives with no shortage of stress for those with tight deadlines, writer’s block, computer glitches, or myriad other […]
We are not rational beings. In fact, many aspects of our cognition are inherently emotional. When one’s emotional well-being suffers, so does her cognition. Because of the inseparable nature of emotion and cognition, the way we feel has a profound effect on our learning. And yet, the emotional processing inherent in cognition is not always […]
Show me the Money As most parents, teachers, and education policy folks know well, early childhood education is expensive. Whether federally-funded, state-funded, or family-funded, preschool and structured early care generally operate on a pretty tight budget. They also generally operate on pretty high hopes: academic achievement, personal growth, reduced delinquency, and much more. And they […]
Executive functioning (EF) is a burgeoning research area for psychologists, neuroscientists, and educators. For some, EF might seem like the cognitive science flavor of the week. But for others, its study is uncovering a significant piece of the puzzle for how we learn, feel, and act. And those latter folks have a lot to show […]
Studies of neglect and maltreatment of young children have revealed a lot about early brain development (e.g., Cicchetti, 2002; Nelson, 2000). These studies have highlighted that experiences in the first years of life can have profound implications across the lifespan. In a seminal study, Nelson and others (2007) found that children reared in abject circumstances […]
