The Developing Brain: Building Language, Reading, Physical, Social, and Cognitive Skills from Birth to Age Eight

How can early childhood teachers, administrators, and parents translate discoveries on early brain development into strategies that nurture cognitive growth? The key is to using the information gathered from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and child development. The Developing Brain offers brain-compatible teaching practices for parents and teachers that are linked to principles for working with young children from the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

This volume summarizes research on important topics in cognitive research and discusses what must be done to apply this research in early elementary classrooms. Purposefully, it focuses on areas of cognitive research that have only recently begun to be studied in early elementary classrooms or that, based on educational and psychological theory, appear to have the greatest implications for early classroom learning

Thinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy, have over the past century emerged as core topics of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. Formerly seen as too complicated and amorphous to be included in early textbooks on the science of cognition, the study of thinking and reasoning has since taken off, branching off in a distinct direction from the field from which it originated.

How Words Mean: Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models, and Meaning Construction

introduces a new approach to the role of words and other linguistic units in the construction of meaning. It does so by addressing the interaction between non-linguistic concepts and the meanings encoded in language.

This book presents unique insights into a significant area of French research relating the learning and teaching of mathematics in school classrooms and their development. Having previously had only glimpses of this work, I have found the book fascinating in its breadth of theory, its links between epistemological, didactic and cognitive perspectives and its comprehensive treatment of student learning of mathematics, classroom activity, the work of teachers and prospective teacher development.