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posted by n1 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the or-send-'em-down-the-mines dept.

The New York Times reports:

As school reformers nationwide push to expand publicly funded prekindergarten and enact more stringent standards, more students are being exposed at ever younger ages to formal math and phonics lessons [...]. That has worried some education experts and frightened those parents who believe that children of that age should be playing with blocks, not sitting still as a teacher explains a shape's geometric characteristics.

But now a new national study suggests that preschools that do not mix enough fiber into their curriculum may be doing their young charges a disservice.

The study found that by the end of kindergarten, children who had attended one year of "academic-oriented preschool" outperformed peers who had attended less academic-focused preschools by, on average, the equivalent of two and a half months of learning in literacy and math.

"Simply dressing up like a firefighter or building an exquisite Lego edifice may not be enough," said Bruce Fuller, the lead author of the study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you can combine creative play with rich language, formal conversations and math concepts, that's more likely to yield the cognitive gains we observed."

U.S. News published a related piece recently arguing for more attention to preschool curricula and specific content, in addition to other measures of preschool programs. In contrast, a story in the Atlantic last year pointed out new "academic" approaches to preschool may actually be doing more harm than good. And any immediate gains (as cited in the new study) frequently turn out to be temporary. One oft-cited alternative is Finland's approach, which delays formal schooling until age 7, after a year of relatively unstructured government-mandated kindergarten.


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:16PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:16PM (#521548) Journal

    Actually, there are alternative methods of teaching basic calculus principles that can easily be understood by 10-year-olds today. The algebraic formulations may be too complex for the average 10-year-old, but geometric approaches can actually teach kids a lot, and with a surprising amount of rigor. For just one example, see Tom Apostol's introduction [mamikon.com] to an alternative visual (geometric) way of doing integration problems to find areas of many complex shapes. (Many people may remember Apostol from those dark blue rigorous "intro" to calculus tomes he pioneered at CalTech.)

    Anyhow, the basic concepts of calculus are simple. With a little creativity, the concepts can be taught to young kids and they can develop intuitions about it, long before they have to manipulate abstract symbolic formulas for integrals and derivatives.

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