Infants acculturate to their soundscape over the first year of life (e.g., Hannon & Trehub, 2005a; Werker & Tees, 1984). This perceptual tuning of early auditory skills requires integrating across experiences that repeat and vary in content and are distributed in time. Music is part of this soundscape, yet little is known about the real-world musical input available to infants as they begin learning sounds, melodies, rhythms, and words. In this dissertation, we collected and analyzed a first-of-its-kind corpus of music identified in day-long audio recordings of 6- to 12-month-old infants and their caregivers in their natural, at-home environments. We characterized the structure of this input in terms of key distributional and temporal properties that shape learning in many domains (e.g., Oakes & Spalding, 1997; Roy et al., 2015; Vlach et al., 2008; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). This everyday sensory input serves as the data available for infants to aggregate in order to build knowledge about music. We discovered that infants encountered nearly an hour of cumulative music per day distributed across multiple instances. Infants encountered many different tunes and voices in their daily music. Within this diverse range, infants encountered consistency, such that some tunes and voices were more available than others in infants’ everyday musical input. The proportion of music produced by live voices varied widely across infants. As infants progressed in time through their days, they encountered many music instances close together in time as well as some music instances separated by much longer lulls. This bursty temporal pattern also characterized how infants encountered instances of their top tune and their top voice – the specific tune and specific voice that occurred for the longest cumulative duration in each infant’s day. Finally, infants encountered many pairs of consecutive music bouts with repeated content – the same unique tune or the same unique voice. Taken together, we discovered that infants’ everyday musical input was more consistent than random in both content and time across infants’ days at home. These findings have potential to inform theory and future research examining how the nature of early music experience shapes infants’ early learning.

This article shows the more salient characteristics in bornes from low economic status, which affect children's normal cognitive and psychosocial development as well as their school performance. It is suggested that in order to improve children's chance for a better performance at school, mothers should be trained in strategies and practices to assist in the learning process their children to successfully achieve their goals. / El artículo trata sobre las características más evidentes en hogares de nivel socioeconómico bajo, que afectan tanto el desarrollo cognitivo y psicosocial de los niños, como su desempeño escolar. Se sugiere que para mejorar las oportunidades de lograr un mejor desempeño escolar, las madres deberán ser entrenadas en estrategias y prácticas que apoyen el proceso de enseñanza/aprendizaje de sus niños.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

According to the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) of South Africa cognitive development is a prominent matter which should already commence at pre-school teaching and learning. The NCS envisages learners who will develop to maturity, take their place in society and solve problems by means of critical and creative thinking. Accordingly, teachers are challenged to create teaching and learning environments that stimulate and encourage intellectual openness. This study was undertaken in an attempt to determine to which extent thinking skills in the Foundation Phase, with specific reference to Grade 3 learners, are developed. The study also sought to establish the potential of a self developed, curriculum-based co-operative teaching-learning intervention programme for the development and/or improvement of the thinking skills of Grade 3 learners. The nature of cognitive development, the importance of co-operative learning for cognitive development and the thinking skills that Grade 3 learners should possess, were researched by means of a literature study. A quasiexperimental study followed, using a sequential mixed-method research design. By means of a pre-test the cognitive development levels of two experimental groups, namely experimental group A and experimental group B, comprising thirty learners each, were determined. Thereafter, both groups were exposed to a co-operative teaching-learning intervention programme on a rotational basis to determine the impact of the cooperative teaching-learning intervention programme on the thinking skills of the learners. Data was collected by means of testing and semi-structured interviews with the class teachers of the experimental groups A and B prior to and after the completion of the intervention, focus-group interviews with the learners after the intervention and observation during the implementation of the intervention. Based on the results, it appeared that in accordance with the vision of the NCS, trouble is being taken with the development of the thinking skills of the Foundation Phase learners who took part in the study, and that co-operative learning possesses the latent potential to further develop and promote thinking skills. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Learning and Teaching)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2010.

According to the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) of South Africa cognitive development is a prominent matter which should already commence at pre-school teaching and learning. The NCS envisages learners who will develop to maturity, take their place in society and solve problems by means of critical and creative thinking. Accordingly, teachers are challenged to create teaching and learning environments that stimulate and encourage intellectual openness. This study was undertaken in an attempt to determine to which extent thinking skills in the Foundation Phase, with specific reference to Grade 3 learners, are developed. The study also sought to establish the potential of a self developed, curriculum-based co-operative teaching-learning intervention programme for the development and/or improvement of the thinking skills of Grade 3 learners. The nature of cognitive development, the importance of co-operative learning for cognitive development and the thinking skills that Grade 3 learners should possess, were researched by means of a literature study. A quasiexperimental study followed, using a sequential mixed-method research design. By means of a pre-test the cognitive development levels of two experimental groups, namely experimental group A and experimental group B, comprising thirty learners each, were determined. Thereafter, both groups were exposed to a co-operative teaching-learning intervention programme on a rotational basis to determine the impact of the cooperative teaching-learning intervention programme on the thinking skills of the learners. Data was collected by means of testing and semi-structured interviews with the class teachers of the experimental groups A and B prior to and after the completion of the intervention, focus-group interviews with the learners after the intervention and observation during the implementation of the intervention. Based on the results, it appeared that in accordance with the vision of the NCS, trouble is being taken with the development of the thinking skills of the Foundation Phase learners who took part in the study, and that co-operative learning possesses the latent potential to further develop and promote thinking skills. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Learning and Teaching)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2010.

A longitudinal study lasting 3.5 years was conducted to investigate complex grammar development, focusing on acquisition of the passive and type 3 conditionals, and its relationship with a number of domain-general, domain-specific and environmental factors. 128 children (M = 5 years 10 months) were tested at the beginning and towards the end of each school year starting from Year 1. The administered measures included established tests of fluid intelligence, short-term and working memory, seriation, grammar, vocabulary, literacy and arithmetic, plus newly-developed tests of passive and conditional sentence acquisition, and arithmetic word problem solving. It was demonstrated that grammar acquisition is not complete even when children start Year 4 of primary school (M = 8 years 7 months), when the current study was completed. At that time, 32% of children have not acquired type 3 conditionals and 89% showed no understanding of centre-embedded sentences. However, only 3% showed no passive sentence acquisition. Fluid intelligence, verbal STM and WM, ability to seriate, vocabulary and parental education level were all found to contribute to individual differences in complex grammar acquisition, independently of age differences and, where relevant, independently of non-verbal ability. There were differences between the passives and the conditionals in their relationship to these variables. Complex grammar development was found to be a significant predictor of reading comprehension, spelling and arithmetic performance, independently of age, non-verbal ability, verbal STM and WM. The findings demonstrate the inter-relatedness of higher cognitive functions, particularly domain-general with domain-specific ones. Modularity in its strictest sense (informational encapsulation, functional isolation) is not present in normally developing brains. Educational applications of the results are discussed.