Describes a typical day at the Rudolf Steiner School, an arts-based Waldorf school that encourages students to be anything they want to be and integrates the arts into everything. Natural developmental stages is an intrinsic part of the curriculum. Students remain with the same teacher for 8 years. A sidebar notes what opponents say about Waldorf…

Highlights the views of three keynote speakers who will share their insights into the future of the camp experience at the next American Camping Association National Conference. Environmentalist Bill McKibben, educator Cynthia Tobias, and futurist Ira Blumenthal focus, respectively, on connecting children to the natural world, understanding…

Examined development of inhibitory control using a stop-signal procedure with subjects ages 6 to 81 years. Found that the speed of stopping becomes faster with increasing age throughout childhood, with limited evidence of slowing across adulthood. The go-signal reaction time clearly increased through childhood and slowed markedly through…

Describes the variety of possible effects of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) on early childhood development in the cognitive, language, social-emotional, motor, and adaptive domains. Suggests interventions which can assist young survivors and their families. Suggests that more long-term, intensive studies be conducted on the short- and long-term…

Describes the positive mental, physical, and social growth impacts that the camping experience had on the author, and urges camp program evaluation to plan and implement such changes. Sidebar lists steps of effective evaluation: program goals and objectives, goals of evaluation, implementation of evaluation, data analysis, and findings and…

Behaviors of eight children (ages 2-5) with profound congenital deafness were analyzed using six classes of egocentric language: motor reaction activity, silent lips articulation, murmur, oral-facial mimics, body expression, and vocalization. Events in which children engaged in "dialogue" with themselves or a toy, while pursing a specific…

This article chronicles changes in vowel production by a child with congenital deafness who received a multichannel cochlear implant at 19 months. The child exhibited three vowel types before implantation, however, a total of nine different vowel types were observed during her first year of implant experience. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Describes a methodology that may offer an operationalized model that allows empirical analysis of paired associate versus symbolic learning. Presents an operational definition of the phenomenon in question and why it might be useful to model the phenomenon. Illustrates distinct advantages offered within this approach to scholars interested in…

Discusses the importance of pretend play for various aspects of children's development and the difficulty for adults, especially Montessorians, in understanding such play. Presents views of leading play researchers and theorists regarding role of play in distinguishing fantasy from reality, in acting as a springboard to representational thought,…

Child positive affect and task orientation in response to cognitively demanding puzzle tasks were assessed at two time points separated by 12 months in children with mild mental retardation and mental age and chronological age matched controls (ages 1-5 years). Results suggested correlates of motivation were similar for children with mild mental…

We used an optimized configuration of the delayed-response task to explore the ability of young infants to remember which of 2 locations was correct across 12 trials after a 1- to 2-sec delay. Performance improved with age, particularly after 5.5 months. These findings suggest an onset of appreciable working memory for many infants in the middle…

This study investigated the effects of spatial arrangement on preschool children's selective attention and incidental learning. Three- and four-year old children were shown a multi-coloured box designated as a "special place" containing miniature chairs and models of animals. One category of objects were designated as relevant and one as…

Very young infants are sensitive to and follow other people's gaze. By 18 months children, like chimpanzees, apparently represent the spatial relationship between viewer and object viewed: they can follow eye-direction alone, and react appropriately if the other's gaze is blocked by occluding barriers. This paper assesses when children represent…

The authors' main question in this article was, can a wretched upbringing or a traumatic youth be a reason for exempting, be it fully or partially, a person from his criminal behaviour? In their view it indeed can, provided that a number of conditions are fulfilled. First, it must be demonstrated that the person lacks a certain configuration of…

The goal of this paper is to explore the design and implementation of early years educational policy in England in the period 1997-2004. First to be described are the innovations in policy (i.e. the promise), followed by the 'evidence base' for new policy (i.e. the research), the delivery of new services (i.e. the achievement), and finally the…