If we teach in the way that human brains learn, both students and their teachers will thrive! This book aligns evidence from the learning sciences on how and what students need to learn with classroom practice (pre-K-12). It demonstrates, with hands-on examples, how a change in educational mindset (rather than in curriculum) can improve student…

Children learning two languages (Dual Language Learners; DLLs) represent a rapidly growing population in the United States. DLLs are disproportionately more likely to live in families of low socioeconomic status (SES), which places many of them at risk for poor dual-language outcomes. To date, most studies on SES and dual language development have…

Early language competence is a reliable and powerful predictor of children's success in school, and word gaps linked to socioeconomic status disparities have cascading effects on academic outcomes. While early research -- such as the work of Hart and Risley (1995) -- focused on gaps in vocabulary, growing evidence reveals wide gaps in syntax as…

Throughout their 1st year, infants adeptly detect statistical structure in their environment. However, little is known about whether statistical learning is a primary mechanism for event segmentation. This study directly tests whether statistical learning alone is sufficient to segment continuous events. Twenty-eight 7- to 9-month-old infants…

Two studies examined U.S. mothers' (N=1130) and child development professionals' (N=99) beliefs about the relationship between play and learning. Study 1 investigated relationships among maternal conceptualizations of play, perceived learning value, and frequency of children's play behaviors. All Play mothers viewed activities ranging from…

Children at 34 months of age were asked to point to a "Sesame Street" character performing an action in sets of four drawings. With familiar words and actions, children made correct choices 97% of the time. With novel action words, children performed at levels mostly above chance. (BC)

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a…