How children learn to organize their daily activities and function in multiple environments is important to our understanding of development. In general, children learn to represent their world through their interaction with both social and physical environments. What happens to the child's understanding of the world when those environments are impoverished? How does an impoverished environment affect the child's ability to function in the larger society? The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of severely impoverished home environments on young children's ability to organize and represent daily routines, using temporal and casual relations.
Previous research over the past decade has demonstrated a strong relationship between children's exposure to the arts and educational outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to examine low-income urban kindergarten parents' beliefs concerning the relationship between music and art young children's school performance, behavior, and participation in the arts. Parents of 215 children attending kindergarten in one of two Title 1 public schools in New York City completed a survey concerning their beliefs about the effects of music or art on their children's learning. Of the 215 parents, 73 (45.2% with children receiving music) and (16.4% with children receiving art) completed the survey. The results revealed that parents in both groups perceived music and art as influencing academic skills, with all parents seeing improvement in children's attention to detail. For children who received music training, parents observed an improvement in their children's listening skills and pattern recognition. Parents' perceived the most significant improvement in their ability to recognize shapes for children who received art training. Findings from this study suggest the need for encouraging parents from low-income communities to support and advocate for their children to have exposure to the arts during the early childhood years.
Music has been shown to be positively related to early learning and academic outcomes. Teachers' beliefs about how children learn and how they think about their own skills and competencies have also been shown to be linked to educational outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to examine kindergarten teachers' beliefs about the role of music in the curriculum and its relationship to classroom learning and educational outcomes. The methods involved surveying two teachers, one a classroom teacher, and the other a music specialist about the role of music in classroom learning. Qualitative results demonstrated that while both teachers believed music enhanced academic skills and memory, as well as promoted desirable behavior, the music teacher provided more direct links between music and other academic areas. The findings suggested that in general teachers believe that music plays a critical role in young children's early learning and educational experience, however, having training in music allows teachers to draw clear parallels between music and other areas of learning.
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