Movement programs have the potential to make a significant contribution to the goals of aesthetic education. Movement professionals must be prepared to articulate and to demonstrate physical education's contributions towards the realization of these goals. (CJ)

Notes benefits of movement experiences to young children. Explains and discusses developing and refining movement patterns and developing perceptual abilities so that sensory information can be used to help refine movement skills. Includes an annotated bibliography of 15 pertinent references. (SB)

Two experiments examined problem solving in 16-month-olds' adaptive locomotion (crossing bridges of varying width with/without handrail). Findings indicated that toddlers attempted wide bridges more than narrow ones. Attempts on narrow bridges depended on handrail presence. Toddlers had longer latencies, examined bridge/handrail more closely, and…

Recent research has established closer links between language, cognition, and social life than Piaget or Vygotsky imagined. Connections have been established between object permanence development and acquisition of disappearance words and the quantity and quality of child-adult joint attentional social interactions and children's early word…

The study evaluated positional concepts and balance performance in 67 blind/visually impaired children, age 6-13, to determine the most important conditioning factors. The study also evaluated the effects of 2 pedagogical situations: 1 with more cognitive activity and less motor activity, and the other with more motor activity and less cognitive…

Twenty children, aged 7-12, with severe visual impairments completed a series of visual tasks requiring interpretation, analysis, manipulation, and visual motor coordination. Findings are discussed in terms of total performance, individual task performance, performance of younger versus older children, and performance of good versus poor readers.…

Eighteen science activities that help children learn to use their senses are described. Multisensory activities and single-sensory activities are provided. Each activity includes a list of materials, the procedure, information for the teacher, questions, and a vocabulary list of words often used by children to describe what is taking place. (KR)

This study reexamines factor analyses from which A. J. Ayres claimed to have identified perceptual-motor factors found in the scores of children with learning disabilities but not normally learning children. The reappraisal finds no support for the claim, and as a result, no support for derived diagnostic procedures or remedial programs.…

Believes that Emile Jaques-Dalcroze is not the only person who has affected movement-based instruction. Highlights the history of movement-based instruction in elementary music education by addressing the influence of Isadora Duncan and modern dance, the efforts of Francois Delsarte and Rudolph von Laban, and the role of remedial perceptual-motor…

Asserts that, for young children's development, there is no other activity as meaningful as play. Discusses how play helps in life skill development, how children learn through their senses during play, how play contributes to children's independence, how to shop for toys, and age-appropriate toys and activities. (EV)

Sensory and motor experiences are essential in childhood and are the foundation for all higher level learning and skill acquisition. This paper examines how young children make sense of sensory experiences, focusing on infants and toddlers, preschoolers, and school-age children. It also looks at the importance of creating an environment rich in…

Activities-oriented instruction offers multi modal opportunities for learning science. How do college students in elementary pre-service teacher preparation programs describe science lab activities in terms of visual, kinesthetic, auditory and motor characteristics? Research with elementary science methods students shows that the Levels of…

In this article Tortora, a dance therapist, interviews Myron Hofer, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Columbia University. Dr. Hofer has spent decades studying how the mother's behaviors and actions shape and regulate the physiological, neurophysiological, and psychological functioning of her babies--specifically,…

Imaginal perspective switches are often considered to be difficult, because they call for additional cognitive transformations of object coordinates (transformation hypothesis). Recent research suggests that problems can also result from conflicts between incompatible sensorimotor and cognitive object location codes during response specification…

Large gains in performance, evolving hours after practice has terminated, were reported in a number of visual and some motor learning tasks, as well as recently in an auditory nonverbal discrimination task. It was proposed that these gains reflect a latent phase of experience-triggered memory consolidation in human skill learning. It is not clear,…