Education
fromPsychology Today
2 hours agoScreens Are Out. Here's How Schools Can Prepare Kids for AI.
Bipartisan legislation is increasingly banning screens in classrooms, emphasizing the need for digital literacy education alongside restrictions.
A diagnostic assessment is a pre-instruction evaluation used to identify learners' prior knowledge, skill gaps, and misconceptions before teaching begins. Its purpose is not to grade performance, but to inform decisions about teaching, pacing, and support.
'We absolutely should challenge stereotypes about ageing. Children do build their understanding of the world from these tiny repeated narratives. If old always equals useless or confused then that's going to shape their perception.'
Research has shown there is a reading for pleasure crisis among children in the UK, where enjoyment of books has fallen to its lowest level in two decades. Not so here at Christ Church primary, a tiny Church of England school tucked behind the maze of HS2 construction works in Camden, north London, where children fizz with excitement about books.
US researchers found that engaging in intellectually stimulating activities throughout life, such as reading, writing or learning a new language, was associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, and slower cognitive decline. The study author Andrea Zammit, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said the discovery suggested cognitive health in later life was strongly influenced by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments.
With literacy rates declining across OECD countries, building healthy habits around books is truly essential. Allowing reading at dinner started as one of those on-the-spot parental solutions. Letting them have a copy of Bunny Vs Monkey or The Beano while they ate seemed like a more ethical solution for keeping them in their chairs for the duration of the meal than, say, duct tape.
Collective learning is how a group or system creates, improves, and keeps knowledge. This knowledge lasts beyond any one person or cohort. That is the most practical collective learning definition, because it shifts the focus away from individuals and toward the learning system itself.
We sit down for dinner. Declan (5) whines, 'You didn't get me my milk!' Not, 'Thank you so much for this delicious meal you have made after a long workday, Mommy. Can I please have some milk?' We get to the playground, and he complains, 'You didn't bring the right pail!' We read three books at bedtime, he accuses, 'We didn't get to read my favorite book about the pandas (because he hadn't chosen it!) The whining is out of control and driving us mad.
At least one fundamental human trait persists in the smartphone era: People seem to love a challenge. The internet teems with viral competitions, gamified health apps, and "life-maxxing" exercises of many kinds. Even those who resist the lure of screens-by, for instance, reading books-are frequently doing so with a kind of competitive zeal. A University of Pennsylvania professor has built a strict, rules-based classroom cult around reading.
For many Canadians, Scholastic brings about an instant wave of nostalgia. Memories come flooding back of flipping through colourful catalogues, circling must-have books, and browsing tables stacked with trinkets from scented erasers to posters and pencils set up in school auditoriums during book fair week. For generations of elementary school students, Scholastic brought excitement and joy and for many kids today, even in an age dominated by screens, that magic hasn't faded, say educators.
What many reception teachers say they did not sign up for was spending large chunks of the school day managing toileting, feeding and basic self-care because growing numbers of children are arriving without those skills in place. New data points to a widening gap in England and Wales between what parents believe school ready means and what classrooms are actually experiencing
The effort to get a snapshot of kindergarten readiness is part of the National Survey of Children's Health, which collected information from thousands of parents and guardians about their child in five areas - early learning, motor skills, social-emotional development, self-regulation and health. The goal was to answer an overall question: Is your child ready for school? Readiness in California is on par with the nation's average, which also puts kindergarten readiness at two-thirds of 3- to 5-year-olds.
The neural networks that process written and oral language are deeply intertwined and largely overlap when reading print books or listening to audiobooks. There isn't much of a difference between the brain network for reading and the brain network for language comprehension. The brain area we call the 'letter box,' which processes print, is not as engaged when you listen, but it has been shown that when some people listen to words, they visualize them, so the letter box gets activated as well.