Erin is a research assistant for UConn KIDS from Shelton, CT. She is a sophomore Physiology and Neurobiology major and Spanish minor. She is happy to be a part of UConn KIDS because it gives her the opportunity to become more involved with children and the various research opportunities at UConn.

After graduating, she plans on attending medical school where she will pursue pediatric neurology. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, running, painting, and spinning for the UConn Color Guard!

 

When we look at babies, the first thought that comes to mind might be how cute they are and how new they are to the world. However, one aspect we often overlook is how babies think, process information, and perceive their surroundings. Patricia Kull delves into how babies are linguistic geniuses, as they have the ability to acquire a second language extremely quickly until the age of seven. After puberty, we observe a sharper decline to the point where it completely disappears. She mentions that there is a critical period in development, where babies attempt to master the sounds in a language. The fascinating thing about babies is that they can discriminate the sounds of every language, regardless of which country it is from, which is something adults cannot do. Because adults are culture-bound listeners, they can only differentiate the sounds of their primary language, not foreign ones.

Kuhl explains further that they were able to pinpoint when babies become culture-bound listeners, as a study was conducted with babies in Tokyo and the United States, in which they listened to “ra” and “la”—sounds, which are important in English but not in Japanese. It was found that at around six to eight months, the babies were completely equivalent in ability to discriminate between these two sounds. However, only two months later, the babies in the U.S. got significantly better, and the babies in Tokyo got significantly worse. This signified that the babies were preparing for the exact language that they were going to learn in such a short span of time.

Additionally, to provide us with an understanding of how babies can perceive another language, Kuhl explains another study conducted in which they compared Taiwanese babies’ understanding of Mandarin to 6-month-old American babies (who had never heard a second language before) who were exposed to Mandarin through twelve sessions. It was found that after two months, the American babies were just as good at perceiving Mandarin as the Taiwanese babies who had been listening to Mandarin for the past 10 and a half months.

Through both of these studies, scientists were able to figure out two things: babies are listening intently to us, and they are taking statistics while doing so. They can absorb the statistics of which language they are learning, and this changes the way their brains perceive language. The way we perceive language is founded on the representations that were formed extremely early in development.

 

If you want to watch the full Ted Talk, click here!

Alexandra Lagaros

UConn KIDS Research Assistant

Welcome back to Trivia Tuesday!

This week’s question is: How developed is a child’s brain by age 5?

A. 75% developed 
B. 90% developed
C. 45% developed
D. 60% developed

Tune in next week to find out the answer to this week’s question!

Screen time for children is a tricky topic since we’re entering such a predominant technological world. It’s hard to not utilize screens when engaging and raising young children nowadays, which makes it important to learn how to do this in a healthy way. There are ways to positively promote child health and development in the digital world. Four evidence-based principles are minimizing, mitigating, mindfully using, and modelling healthy use of screens. 

 

Minimizing the use of screens is always recommended. It’s not recommended for children younger than 2 years old to use screens, and for children 2-5 years old, it’s recommended about 1 hour or less of screen time. It’s also recommended to avoid screens 1 hour before bedtime and to maintain daily screen-free times like family meals and book-sharing.  

 

Another principle for healthy use of screens is mitigating the risks associated with screentime. One way to do this is to be present and engaged when screens are being used, so it’s important that children aren’t using screens by themselves. Another way to mitigate risks is to encourage the use of screens for creative activities like drawing rather than passive viewing. Curating and monitoring young children’s media are something else that could help.  

 

Being mindful about the use of screen time is another important principle for healthy use of screens. Creating a plan for when, how, and where screens may and may not be used could help with this as well as prioritizing shared family media use like watching television or movies together, rather than having children play or watch by themselves. 

 

The last principle for healthy use of screens is that adults should model health screen use. They can do this by encouraging and participating in activities that don’t involve screens like shared reading, outdoor play, board games, and crafts. It’s also important to turn off devices during family time at and away from home as well as when not in use and avoid background television.  

 

If you want to read more, click here!  

Angelina Stofka 

UConn KIDS, Research Assistant 

Cooper Armogida is a new research assistant for UConn KIDS from Ashford, Connecticut. He is a junior Psychological Sciences major with a goal of eventually becoming a professor and conducting his own research lab! This is Coopers first semester working with us at UConn KIDS and we are so thrilled to welcome him to the team!

He has been passionate about psychology and working with kids for many years, so it’s no surprise he is ecstatic to be a part of our team!

In his free time, Cooper enjoys nature, playing basketball, and spending quality time with his loved ones.

In this Ted Talk by Rúben Martins Da Costa, he explains how children are born curious. Using a quote saying, “Every kid starts out as a natural born scientist, and then we beat it out of them,” by Carl Sogan. He goes on to explain that kids have this innate curiosity but in grade school this curiosity in minimized by encouraging formulas and memorization rather than imagination. He explains that in recent discussion people have claimed that parents and teachers should model scientific inquiry to help children learn that it is good to make a hypothesis, test it, and sometimes be wrong. But, Rúben Martins Da Costa thinks that scientists themselves can be responsible for shaping the minds of young children by including interaction moments and by connecting with the children. 

Rúben Martins Da Costa then goes on to give fascinating personal anecdotes about his interactions with children in scientific manners. He also brings up an interesting project where children are responsible, with the help of a mentor, to review scientific articles to make them more digestible for an adolescent ages 8-15. By doing this, the researcher gets a new piece of published work that is accessible for children, and the children learn the scientific review process and now have a piece of scientific information to read and learn from. 

All in all, Rúben Martins Da Costa talk about the innate curiosity of kids, and elaborates on how to harness that curiosity and not dismiss it. He gives personal anecdotes and legit studies that have done exactly this to inspire others to include kids in scientific review. A great Ted Talk to listen to, and a great initiative to help bring kids into the world of research and help them flourish within their curious minds!

If you want to watch this Ted Talk click here!

Jenna Coplon

UConn KIDS, Research Assistant

Montessori classrooms have become more popular and known overtime and have become one of the preferred ways of arranging and conducting classrooms for preschools. The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) is the most used observation system used in research, practice, and policy to look at classroom process quality. CLASS focuses mostly on teacher-child interactions as the site of learning, and Montessori classrooms focuses mostly on child-environment interactions, which might cause Montessori classrooms to score lower than conventional classrooms on CLASS. 

 

Montessori preschool classrooms tend to have more students, causing a higher child to teacher ratio, which may not seem efficient to some people. However, these classrooms see that children’s development and learning occur not only through teacher to child interactions, but through a relationship between the child, the environment, and the teacher. This is not something that CLASS typically looks at but is shown to be effective in children’s development.  

 

Montessori preschool classrooms with larger class sizes had higher emotional support and classroom organization than conventional classrooms using CLASS. They also found that classrooms with higher child to adult ratios lead to higher instructional support. This goes to show the advantages of Montessori classrooms that CLASS observations might miss! 

 

If you want to read more, click here!  

Angelina Stofka 

UConn KIDS, Research Assistant 

 

Cognitive processing language (CPL) is defined as instructional language rich in strategy suggestions, metacognitive references, and memory requests, all of which are important in the learning development of elementary-aged students, as it is linked to children’s early use of strategies and self-regulated learning (SRL). Self-regulated learning includes skills such as planning, monitoring, setting goals, and evaluating progress.

 

This study explores how the combination of a teacher’s instructional language and children’s self-regulated learning both contribute to children’s use of memory strategies in first and second grade. The conclusion was that the groups of children who had higher self-regulated learning abilities and were in classrooms in which teachers utilized more cognitive processing language displayed similar patterns of growth in sorting over time, while groups of children with lower SRL and exposed to lower CPL showed significantly less growth in these same skills.

 

The implications of this study were that the type of language a teacher decides to use is important for the development of memory skills in elementary schoolers, especially with students with lower self-regulated learning abilities. In other words, students who may be at risk with either lower academic levels or lower SRL abilities are the ones who will benefit most from cognitive processing language. The environment that a teacher creates for students, especially at a younger age, is crucial, as all children are able to benefit regardless of academic and self-regulated learning ability!

 

If you want to read more, click here!

Alexandra Lagaros

UConn KIDS, Research Assistant 

There has been much research that has shown bilingual individuals underperforming in standardized vocabulary assessments, yet do better in executive control tasks/cognitive control, compared to monolingual individuals. Hence, researchers questioned whether bilingual children had such a benefit on working memory. Working memory can be defined as the ability to take in and retain information when distracted, processing other information simultaneously, etc.

They hypothesized that bilingual children would have better working memory compared to monolingual children and how it affects them over a span of three years. However, their results demonstrated that their hypothesis was not supported; bilingualism does not provide an advantage in working memory. The monolingual and bilingual children performed equally well!

To read more, click here!

Ashley Bejar, UConn KIDS Research Assistant

Constructionism is defined as the understanding that children actively construct knowledge through the interactions they have with their surrounding environment by building ideas. This can be stimulated by interacting with meaningful objects that allow them to express and materialize their ideas. Hence, building and playing with sandcastles, Legos, dolls, and collectible cards should be considered as models for designing new tools for children’s play. 

Digital manipulatives (interactive, web-based representations of manipulatives like base-ten blocks) allow for a hands-on, engaging alternative to traditional digital tools by promoting exploratory learning and encouraging creativity and collaboration. Research shows Digital manipulatives enhance engagement, verbal interaction, and social skill development. However, early childhood curriculums often separate play from digital tool use, suggesting a need to better integrate children’s play with digital learning tools through deeper understanding of their play experiences

This study looked at Digital manipulatives and how they influence constructionism and found that children were able to explore and use the functions of the Digital Manipulative without any sort of help. Additionally, the children created their own play rules through negotiations with each other on how to handle the block, allowing autonomy and being able to create things on their own, which resulted in playful interactions and collaborations. The children also used the blocks for both creating visual narratives and for construction material, ensuring that children were able to engage in a diverse range of activities and not be confined to the computer. The blocks also gave democratic interactions, giving kids equal power to interact with the device, further encouraging social interaction and collaboration.

Overall, digital manipulatives have the ability to transform early learning by making digital experiences more playful, collaborative, and engaging. However, there’s still a gap between how play is understood in educational settings and how digital tools are used. In order to start bridging this gap, we need to rethink how children can play and how technology can support, NOT replace, those meaningful experiences!

To read more, click here!

Alexandra Lagaros, UConn KIDS Research Assistant