The term "active learning" is used in a variety of educational contexts. As described in this guide, however, it refers to an instructional approach developed by Lilli Nielsen--a Danish psychologist--for promoting the learning and development of children who have significant support needs. Nielsen's Active Learning involves a range of…

I grew up immersed in the sounds of nature. However, throughout childhood, the ambient soundscape that once thrilled me was usurped by human-made sounds. I conducted an autoethnographic inquiry to seek the ways that my early and middle childhood music education diverted my attention from local soundscapes to a near-exclusive focus on…

Bilingual environments are more complex than monolingual environments. To adapt to this complexity, bilingual infants may navigate their environment in fundamentally different ways than monolingual infants. Drawing from visual, social, and linguistic processing, in this article, I present evidence to suggest that bilingual and monolingual learners…

Human neonates spend the majority of their time sleeping. Despite the limited waking hours available for environmental exploration, the first few months of life are a time of rapid learning about the environment. The organization of neonate sleep differs qualitatively from adult sleep, and the unique characteristics of neonatal sleep may promote…

Sagacious wisdom finds much support from more than 80 years of research: play is crucial to the development of creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, anticipatory planning, and even complex brain structures. The benefits of play go well beyond physical fitness. Recent research demonstrates the positive effects interactive play and…

As knowledge production, interpretation, and representation in educational settings rolls along Guttenberg's (text-based) track, the twenty-first-century world outside the doors of the schools and universities is exploding with visual ways of knowing and being. As visual text is silenced in education, it is simultaneously exploited in the…

Forty toddlers aged 20 to 24 months were presented with 32 pairs of images with the auditory stimulus Look followed by the name of the target image (e.g. "Look...tree") in an intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm. The same series of 16 items was presented first with one image as target and then with the other member of the pair as target.…

According to Piaget, 5- or 6-year-old children gradually acquire the concept of time based on events (Piaget, 1969). In his experiment of investigating children's time concepts, Piaget found that children of these ages were able to place pictures based on sequential events with some errors; the younger children made more errors. The National…

According to this country's traditions, the formal school experience begins with kindergarten. Kindergarten takes different forms in different places, but most people remember it as a time when concrete foundations are laid for learning the core subject areas: reading, writing, math, and science. In general, infants are sent to school for a very…

For infants and toddlers demonstrating feeding problems, it is critical to find the basis for the problems to create more pleasurable mealtimes for the child, his or her family members, and caregivers. Feeding difficulties can affect general health, developmental gains, and emotional well-being. Understanding the cause of feeding problems and…

For most children, musical instruction may not begin until 3 or 5 years of age or even older. However, musical experiences can offer numerous and significant benefits during the first weeks and months of a child's life. Infants can successfully learn "about" music and "through" musical experiences. The most meaningful and appropriate musical…

Three-year-olds were given a search task with conflicting cues about the target's location. A ball rolled behind a transparent screen and stopped behind one of four opaque doors mounted into the screen. A wall that protruded above one door provided a visible cue of blockage in the ball's path, while the transparent screen allowed visual tracking…

Human infants actively forage for visual information from the moment of birth onward. Although we know a great deal about how stimulus characteristics influence looking behavior in the first few postnatal weeks, we know much less about the intrinsic dynamics of the behavior. Here we show that a simple stochastic dynamical system acts…

The spatial frequency hypothesis contends that performance differences between the hemispheres on various visuospatial tasks are attributable to lateralized processing of the spatial frequency content of visual stimuli. Hellige has proposed that such lateralization could arise during infant development from the earlier maturation of the right…

In this article, the author discusses two strategies--visual cues (modeling) and verbal cues (short, accurate phrases) which are related to teaching motor skills in maximizing learning in physical education classes. Both visual and verbal cues are strong influences in facilitating and promoting day-to-day learning. Both strategies reinforce…