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Preschoolers’ Counting Abilities Relate to Future Math Performance, MU Researcher Says

By Guest PostNovember 13, 2012Education, Scienceadults, alphabet, carrots, chronological order, cognitive activity, data, elementary school, essential skill, future success, louis manfra, math score, math skills, memory, missouri, number, numerical values, object, quantity, reciting numbers, set, university, young children

Counting, in addition to reciting, should be emphasized in early childhood education to establish foundation for future academic success

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Along with reciting the days of the week and the alphabet, adults often practice reciting numbers with young children. Now, new research from the University of Missouri suggests reciting numbers is not enough to prepare children for math success in elementary school. The research indicates that counting, which requires assigning numerical values to objects in chronological order, is more important for helping preschoolers acquire math skills.

“Reciting means saying the numbers from memory in chronological order, whereas counting involves understanding that each item in the set is counted once and that the last number stated is the amount for the entire set,” said Louis Manfra, an assistant professor in MU’s Department of Human Development and Family Studies. “When children are just reciting, they’re basically repeating what seems like a memorized sentence. When they’re counting, they’re performing a more cognitive activity in which they’re associating a one-to-one correspondence with the object and the number to represent a quantity.” (more…)

Children Don’t Give Words Special Power to Categorize Their World

By Guest PostJanuary 1, 2012Scienceadults, carrot eaters, dog, experiment, fictional creatures, flurps, jeff grabmeier, language, meat eaters, objects, ohio state, salient feature, scientists, thinking of children, triangle antennae, vladimir sloutsky, wei deng, young children

COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research challenges the conventional thinking that young children use language just as adults do to help classify and understand objects in the world around them.

In a new study involving 4- to 5-year-old children, researchers found that the labels adults use to classify items – words like “dog” or “pencil” – don’t have the same ability to influence the thinking of children. (more…)

Changes in Brain Circuitry Play Role in Moral Sensitivity as People Grow Up

By Guest PostMay 31, 2011Health, Scienceaccidental actions, amygdala, behavioral measures, brain, brain scanning, cingulate cortex, cognitive processes, dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, eye tracking, fmri scan, insula and subgenual prefrontal cortex, jean decety, kalina michalska, katherine kinzler, mental states, moral judgment, moral responses, negative emotions, neurodevelopmental perspective, people, perpetrator, pupil dilation, social neuroscience, university of chicago, young children

People’s moral responses to similar situations change as they age, according to a new study at the University of Chicago that combined brain scanning, eye-tracking and behavioral measures to understand how the brain responds to morally laden scenarios.

Both preschool children and adults distinguish between damage done either intentionally or accidently when assessing whether a perpetrator had done something wrong. Nonetheless, adults are much less likely than children to think someone should be punished for damaging an object, especially if the action was accidental, said study author Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago and a leading scholar on affective and social neuroscience. (more…)

Tag Archives: young children

Preschoolers’ Counting Abilities Relate to Future Math Performance, MU Researcher Says

Children Don’t Give Words Special Power to Categorize Their World

Changes in Brain Circuitry Play Role in Moral Sensitivity as People Grow Up