Three Ss to reduce the stress of “homeschooling” our kids: Simplify, Structure, Support

With nation­wide school clo­sures in effect, many par­ents are now mon­i­tor­ing home­school­ing while at the same time try­ing to make a liv­ing in the midst of an eco­nom­ic cri­sis. In this envi­ron­ment of bro­ken rou­tine and uncer­tain­ty, chances are your child is show­ing big feel­ings and chal­leng­ing behav­iors. In my work as a school psychologist,…

Read More

Study: Neonatal MRI scans of preterm children can help predict cognitive and academic problems, and guide early interventions

Pre­dict­ing future cog­ni­tion in preterm chil­dren with MRI (Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press blog): “In the wake of the devel­op­ment of advanced neona­tal inten­sive med­ical care, more and more chil­dren born preterm man­age to beat the pre­vi­ous­ly tough odds…While this is one of the suc­cess sto­ries of mod­ern med­i­cine, long-term fol­low-up of pre­­ma­­ture-born pedi­atric cohorts show that…Many children…

Read More

In the Age of Google, Should Schools Teach Memorization Skills?

As school is about to resume, peo­ple are remind­ed of their strong opin­ions about how to fix schools: more fund­ing, bet­ter teach­ers, less gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence, more gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence, etc. But the one obvi­ous, and nev­er-stat­ed prob­lem, is that stu­dents don’t remem­ber what they are taught. In spite of all the “teach­ing to the test” that…

Read More

The 2012 SharpBrains Virtual Summit Continues…

Third time’s the charm”…this is being our best Sum­mit, con­tent and tech­nol­o­­gy-wise, so THANK YOU to all par­tic­i­pants for excel­lent talks, ques­tions and dis­cus­sions last week. We hope you enjoyed the ses­sions as much as we did! Please remem­ber that the Sharp­Brains Vir­tu­al Sum­mit con­tin­ues this week:

Read More

Study: Dyslexia not related to intelligence. Implications for discrepancy model?

NIH-fund­ed study finds dyslex­ia not tied to IQ (NIH press release): — “Regard­less of high or low over­all scores on an IQ test, chil­dren with dyslex­ia show sim­i­lar pat­terns of brain activ­i­ty, accord­ing to researchers sup­port­ed by the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health. The results call into ques­tion the dis­crep­an­cy mod­el — the prac­tice of classifying…

Read More

Developing self-regulation at school

Excel­lent arti­cle in the New York Times on learn­ing, self-reg­u­la­­tion and exec­u­tive fuunc­tions: The School Issue: Preschool: Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Con­trol? (New York Times) — “Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among schol­ars and sci­en­tists who study ear­­ly-child­­hood devel­op­ment, a phrase that sounds more as if it…

Read More