Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8
Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2015-07-23

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 0309324882

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Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.

Causal Learning
Causal Learning

Author: Alison Gopnik

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-03-22

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0190208260

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Understanding causal structure is a central task of human cognition. Causal learning underpins the development of our concepts and categories, our intuitive theories, and our capacities for planning, imagination and inference. During the last few years, there has been an interdisciplinary revolution in our understanding of learning and reasoning: Researchers in philosophy, psychology, and computation have discovered new mechanisms for learning the causal structure of the world. This new work provides a rigorous, formal basis for theory theories of concepts and cognitive development, and moreover, the causal learning mechanisms it has uncovered go dramatically beyond the traditional mechanisms of both nativist theories, such as modularity theories, and empiricist ones, such as association or connectionism.

The Understanding of Causation and the Production of Action
The Understanding of Causation and the Production of Action

Author: Peter Anthony White

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1317734904

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This text is an attempt to trace out a line of development in the understanding of how things happen, from origins in infancy to mature forms in adulthood. There are two distinct but related ways in which people understand things as happening, denoted by the terms "causation" and "action". This book is concerned with both.; The central claim and organizing principle of the book is that, by the end of the second year of life, children have differentiated two core theories of how things happen. These theories deal with causation and action. The two theories have a common point of origin in the infant's experience of producing actions, but thereafter diverge, both in content and in realm of application. Once established, the core theories of causation and action never change, but form a permanent metaphysical underpinning on which subsequent developments in the understanding of how things happen are erected. The story of development is therefore largely the story of how further concepts become attached to integrated with the core theories. Although the developmental and adult literatures on causal understanding appear at first glance to have little in common, in fact this appearance is illusory, and the idea of two theories helps to bring the two literatures in contact with each other.; The book begins with a survey of the main philosophical ideas about causation and action. Following this, the possible origins of understanding in infancy are reviewed, and separate chapters then deal with the development of understanding of action and causation through childhood. This is then linked to the adult understanding of action and causation, and the literature on adult causal attribution and causal judgement is reviewed from this perspective.

Perspectives on Language and Language Development
Perspectives on Language and Language Development

Author: Dorit Diskin Ravid

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-08-25

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 1402079117

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Perspectives on Language and Language Development brings together new perspectives on language, discourse and language development in 31 chapters by leading scholars from several countries with diverging backgrounds and disciplines. It is a comprehensive overview of language as a rich, multifaceted system, inspired by the lifework of Ruth A. Berman. Edited by Dorit Ravid and Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot, both from Tel Aviv University, Israel, the book offers state-of-the-art portrayals of linguistic and psycholinguistic phenomena with new insights on the interrelations of language structure, discourse theory, and the development of language and literacy. The volume presents innovative investigations on the interface of language and narrative in a broad range of languages, with a section devoted to linguistic studies of Modern Hebrew. It traces the development of language and literacy from early childhood through adolescence to maturity in spoken and written contexts, and in monolingual as well as multilingual perspectives. Linguists, psycholinguists, discourse scholars, cognitive psychologists, language teachers, education experts, and clinicians working in the field of language and discourse will find this book extremely useful both as a textbook and as a source of information.

Foundations of the Mind
Foundations of the Mind

Author: Evgeniĭ Vasilʹevich Subbotskiĭ

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780674311879

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In the wake of Jean Piaget's work on children's understanding of reality, it is generally accepted that by age two, children assume that an object hidden in a box will remain there unchanged until someone tampers with it. Eugene Subbotsky persuasively demonstrates that many children--and some adults--will often accept mysterious disappearances and creations, perceiving them not as tricks or illusions but as actual occurrences. His analysis clearly shows that alongside our everyday belief in object permanence, we also have a set of quasi-magical beliefs that can be activated by appropriate situations and behaviors. The acceptability of these beliefs will vary from culture to culture, and will be widespread among preliterate peoples but less obvious in advanced industrial countries. The author, a Russian psychologist, draws on his own extensive research and examines other taken-for-granted concepts, such as the distinction between animate and inanimate. Foundations of the Mind, amply illustrated with experimental material, has enormous implications for the study of both child development and the psychology of human beliefs. It attacks our complacent and often culturally biased faith in the nature of reality, and as such will become required reading for all psychologists.

Progress in infancy Research
Progress in infancy Research

Author: Harlene Hayne

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2014-03-18

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 113563064X

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The Progress in Infancy Research Series is dedicated to the presentation of innovative and exciting research on infants, both human and animal. Each volume in the series is designed to stand alone and contains autonomous chapters which are based on high quality programs of research with infants. These chapters integrate the work of the authors with that of other experts working in the same or related areas. The authors wish to present high quality critical syntheses bearing on infant perception and sensation, learning and memory processes, and other aspects of development. This series will be a forum for the presentation of technological breakthroughs, methodological advances, and new integrations that might create platforms for future programmatic work on the complexities of infant behavior and development. Each volume in the series is dedicated to an outstanding investigator whose research has illuminated the nature of infant behavior and development, and whose contributions to the field have been of seminal importance.