Summary. In a three‐year cumulative study, children's learning in 19 randomly arranged classrooms (R) was compared with that in 19 classrooms (S) in which space was deliberately arranged to promote learning. Time scheduling, equipment, materials and teacher‐child communication patterns were similar for all classrooms. Over 250 four‐year‐olds and 250 five‐year‐olds were observed in each setting (N = 1072). Creative productivity and skills, generalisation of number concepts, variety of oral language use and utilisation of listening and pre‐reading materials were significantly better for both four‐year‐old and five‐year‐old children in the (S) classrooms.
The music and spoken language domains share acoustic properties such as fundamental frequency (f0, perceived as pitch), duration, resonance frequencies, and intensity. In speech, the acoustic properties form an essential part in differentiating between consonants, vowels, and lexical tones. This study investigated whether there is any advantage of musicality in the perception and production of Thai speech sounds. Two groups of English-speaking adults—one comprising formally trained musicians and the other non-musicians—were tested for their perception and production of Thai consonants, vowels, and tones. For both groups, the perception and production accuracy scores were higher for vowels than consonants and tones, and in production, there was also better accuracy for tones than consonants. Between the groups, musicians (defined as having more than five years of formal musical training) outperformed non-musicians (defined as having less than two years of formal musical training) in both the perception and production of all three sound types. Additional experiential factors that positively influenced the accuracy rates were the current hours of practice per week and those with some indication of an augmentation due to musical aptitude, but only in perception. These results suggest that music training, defined as formal training for more than five years, and musical training, expressed in hours of weekly practice, facilitate the perception and production of non-native speech sounds.
A double-blind follow-up study of Grade 2 children showed that those who had experienced a kindergarten programme stressing personal task-management skills were more likely to perceive themselves as responsible for their own learning than those from teacherdirected kindergartens.An earlier article (Nash, 1979) described strategies for teaching 4and 5-year-old children how to plan classroom learning activities. Immediate effects included the children's perception of being in control of their own learning. Recently a study was done of some children from such programmes two years later.Two Grade 2 classes were located in which about half of the children had had the task management kindergarten programme (known as Learning Environment (LE)) and the rest had not. Neither Grade 2 teachers nor the investigator knew which of the children were LE graduates. After kindergarten, no special attempt had been made to encourage pupils to participate in decisions about their learning. The LE approach stresses the choice and pre-planning of learning activities by the child, with the teacher monitoring task completion and discussing goal attainment with the pupils.
SUMMARY. In a cumulative study over five years, detailed evaluation of kindergarten programmes was made along the dimensions of teacher treatment of time, classroom spatial arrangement, equipment and materials, and communication between people. After preliminary studies, four types of programme varying in time scheduling and planning for and reinforcement of task orientation were defined. The effects of the programmes on four-and five-year-old pupils were observed.As predicted, the task orientation of the children in both age groups varied with the degree of attention to programme planning to enhance it. Detailed description of the task orientation enhancing programme is provided. Girls in all programmes increased their task orientation more than boys, and in regular programmes decreased their task orientation in response to teacher-planned interruptions.In the enhancing programmes, children felt more responsibility for their own learning. It is concluded that the climate of the classroom for young children is set mainly through the treatment of time. The early part of the school is the period when task orientation can be increased and during the second half of the year it is consolidated or decreased. In programmes of the type most commonly used in North America and Great Britain, task orientation was found to decrease between January and May for almost half the children. INTRODUCTIONMANY studies of the outcomes of programmes for young children have failed to provide detailed descriptions of the characteristics of the programmes (Walsh, 1931 ;Andrus and Horowitz, 1938;Moore et al., 1972). Yet anyone who has visited a large number of early childhood settings will be aware of the variations among supposedly similar programmes. Even with a prescribed programme as in North American versions of a Montessori programme, the interaction of teachers and children and materials varies from setting to setting. Charters and Jones' (1973) caution about the danger of evaluating non-events in education prompts continued attempts to find ways of observing and describing programmes accurately, so as to describe their outcomes in terms of child behaviour and learning. This article describes the results of one segment of a systematic analysis conducted during the development implementation phase of an approach to kindergarten teaching.Preliminary observations of, and discussions about, programmes for young children revealed a tendency for teachers and administrators to schedule time with more regard for the needs of the school, the teacher, or the programme content, than for any objectives related to the child's learning to use or understand time. This was revealed in the comments made to the investigator when time was discussed. A feeling of helplessness prevailed. " We don't understand the child's view of time. We cannot plan our programme around something we do not know about."Discussion with several hundreds of teachers revealed that programmes had no particular objectives in relation to time, at least none that were related to...
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