Age 5 cognitive development in England

Children’s development in the early years has been shown to be related to their success in later life in a range of areas including education, employment and crime. Determining why some children do better than others in the early years is a key issue for policy and is crucial in attempts to reduce inequalities. This research examines differences in early child development by examining the factors associated with the cognitive ability of children up to age 5 using cognitive assessments administered as part of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and teacher reports of child ability. The results show that younger children, those with low birth weight, lower parental education, lower income and living in social housing is related both to lower achievement, on average. and the probability of being at the bottom of the distribution of cognitive scores at age 5

Music\u27s Influence on Cognitive Development

Many people have disputed that music affect\u27s brain development. Often, people will challenge the idea that music can lead to an enhancement of higher brain functioning. However, it has been demonstrated, through varied use of music that people benefit from music\u27s impact on both hemispheres of the brain, which make learning easier. Through the collection of multiple resources, my research study will focus on the various benefits of music with regard to cognitive development. The action research study will be based on music integration at the elementary level and its impact on student learning and motivation. I will survey various classroom teachers to understand the involvement of music in their curriculum and music services offered to students with special needs. The goal of this research study is to investigate the relationship between music and brain growth with regard to student learning and motivation within the classroom. I hope to find a strong connection between engaging children with music at various levels and development. Also, I am hoping to find an increase in student motivation when music is integrated within the curriculum. This topic was chosen because of its impact on my childhood. I grew up with music in my home and in various classroom settings. I felt that music helped me to remember things when they were put to music. In first grade my teacher would play her guitar and we would sing songs. To this day I still remember Down by the Bay... a song about creating rhymes. I feel that this had an influence on my achievement because it always kept me thinking and learning new things keeps my brain exercised

Perceptual Abstraction for Robotic Cognitive Development

We are concerned with the design of a developmental robot that learns from scratch simple models about itself and its surroundings. A particular attention is given to perceptual abstraction from high-dimensional sensors

Development in the early years : Its importance for school performance and adult outcomes [Wider Benefits of Learning Research Report No. 20]

Early development of children’s intellectual, social and physical abilities has the potential to affect their long term achievement, beyond the initial introduction to the classroom, through their school lives and into adulthood. A greater understanding of the processes at work in these early years and their role in later success is therefore important to ensure that resources are appropriately targeted. Past research has shown that early cognitive attainment is strongly related to later academic success. But we are also interested in the benefit that children gain from arriving at school with particular personal characteristics and the relationship which these may have to cognitive development. We also seek to explore the role of development (as opposed to innate capability) in the pre-school years. Data from the 1970 British Cohort Study is used to examine the importance of early measures of children’s cognitive ability and behavioural development for their subsequent school and labour market achievement. Our results suggest that, of the various measures used in this study, the most powerful predictor of later academic and labour market success is the ability of children to copy basic designs. However, we do not ignore the influence of behavioural factors and highlight the particular importance of skills related to attention with respect to these outcomes. The results clearly show that early development of both cognitive and behavioural skills have a role in subsequent achievement. In this respect, we believe that the findings in this report add to the debate on the appropriate balance between cognitive and non-cognitive skills at different ages and for different groups of children. In particular, failure to place sufficient emphasis on cognitive development may run counter to the interests of children from low SES groups. We believe that pedagogy should continue to address ways in which cognitive and non-cognitive abilities can support one another and how the interactions between these different groups of skills can best be harnessed for different groups of children

Evolution of cognitive function via redeployment of brain areas

The creative re-use of existing cognitive capacities may have played a significant role in the evolutionary development of the brain. There are obvious evolutionary advantages to such redeployment, and the data presented here confirm three important empirical predictions of this account of the development of cognition: (1) a typical brain area will be utilized by many cognitive functions in diverse task categories, (2) evolutionarily older brain areas will be deployed in more cognitive functions and (3) more recent cognitive functions will utilize more, and more widely scattered brain areas. These findings have implications not just for our understanding of the evolutionary origins of cognitive function, but also for the practice of both clinical and experimental neuroscience

The role of falsification in the development of cognitive architectures: insights from a Lakatosian analysis

It has been suggested that the enterprise of developing mechanistic theories of the human cognitive architecture is flawed because the theories produced are not directly falsifiable. Newell attempted to sidestep this criticism by arguing for a Lakatosian model of scientific progress in which cognitive architectures should be understood as theories that develop over time. However, Newell’s own candidate cognitive architecture adhered only loosely to Lakatosian principles. This paper reconsiders the role of falsification and the potential utility of Lakatosian principles in the development of cognitive architectures. It is argued that a lack of direct falsifiability need not undermine the scientific development of a cognitive architecture if broadly Lakatosian principles are adopted. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the Lakatosian concepts of positive and negative heuristics for theory development and of general heuristic power offer methods for guiding the development of an architecture and for evaluating the contribution and potential of an architecture’s research program

Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development

This study investigates the relationship between parental employment and child cognitive development using data from multiple years of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Maternal labor supply during the first three years of the child's life is predicted to have a small negative effect on the verbal ability of 3 and 4 year olds and a substantial detrimental impact on the reading and math achievement of 5 and 6 year olds. Working during the second and third years appears to have less favorable or more deleterious consequences when the mother is also employed in the first year. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls for day care arrangements or paternal job-holding and there is some indication that early employment may be particularly costly for children in traditional' two-parent families. Finally, the data suggest that paternal and maternal employment have qualitatively similar effects, hinting at the importance of time investments by fathers. The overall conclusion is that previous research may have provided an overly optimistic assessment of the effects of parental employment on child cognitive development.

Measuring cognitive load and cognition: metrics for technology-enhanced learning

This critical and reflective literature review examines international research published over the last decade to summarise the different kinds of measures that have been used to explore cognitive load and critiques the strengths and limitations of those focussed on the development of direct empirical approaches. Over the last 40 years, cognitive load theory has become established as one of the most successful and influential theoretical explanations of cognitive processing during learning. Despite this success, attempts to obtain direct objective measures of the theory's central theoretical construct – cognitive load – have proved elusive. This obstacle represents the most significant outstanding challenge for successfully embedding the theoretical and experimental work on cognitive load in empirical data from authentic learning situations. Progress to date on the theoretical and practical approaches to cognitive load are discussed along with the influences of individual differences on cognitive load in order to assess the prospects for the development and application of direct empirical measures of cognitive load especially in technology-rich contexts