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A child’s earliest interactions with the world have tremendous effects on long-term development. Neural connections are most actively formed during the first few years of life – 700 new connections every second. This tidbit comes from Harvard University’s Five Numbers to Remember About Early Childhood Development, which lays out the results of several research studies [...]
Research shows that a significant portion of children’s learning and brain development occurs in the first five years. While the Washington State Constitution (Article IX) states that “It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account [...]
Following up yesterday’s post about the the big payoffs for intensive early learning programs, here’s another piece of the puzzle from Kevin Drum, excerpted from Mother Jones: The chart on the right compares four big English-speaking countries on a single measure: vocabulary test scores of five-year-olds. You’d expect that children of highly educated parents would [...]
By Kevin Drum, excerpted from Mother Jones: Jon Cohn has an eye-opening piece in The New Republic, “The Two Year Window,” about advances in the science of early childhood development. It opens with a description of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a study that removed infants from warehouse-style orphanages in Romania and adopted them out: [...]
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