Despite all our highly publicized efforts to improve our schools, the United States is still falling behind. We recently ranked 15th in the world in reading, math, and science. Clearly, more needs to be done. In The Learning Brain, Torkel Klingberg urges us to use the insights of neuroscience to improve the education of our children. The key to improving education lies in understanding how the brain works: that is where learning takes place, after all. The book focuses in particular on working memory--our ability to concentrate and to keep relevant information in our head while ignoring distractions (a topic the author covered in The Overflowing Brain). Research shows enormous variation in working memory among children, with some ten-year-olds performing at the level of a fourteen-year old, others at that of a six-year old. More important, children with high working memory have better math and reading skills, while children with poor working memory consistently underperform. Interestingly, teachers tend to perceive children with poor working memory as dreamy or unfocused, not recognizing that these children have a memory problem. But what can we do for these children? For one, we can train working memory. The Learning Brain provides a variety of different techniques and scientific insights that may just teach us how to improve our children's working memory. Klingberg also discusses how stress can impair working memory (skydivers tested just before a jump showed a 30% drop in working memory) and how aerobic exercise can actually modify the brain's nerve cells and improve classroom performance. Torkel Klingberg is one of the world's leading cognitive neuroscientists, but in this book he wears his erudition lightly, writing with simplicity and good humor as he shows us how to give our children the best chance to learn and grow.

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.

Using the highly influential working memory framework as a guide, this textbook provides a clear comparison of the memory development of typically developing children with that of atypical children. The emphasis on explaining methodology throughout the book gives students a real understanding about the way experiments are carried out and how to critically evaluate experimental research. The first half of the book describes the working memory model and goes on to consider working memory development in typically developing children. The second half of the book considers working memory development in several different types of atypical populations who have intellectual disabilities and/or developmental disorders. In addition, the book considers how having a developmental disorder and/or intellectual disabilities may have separate or combined effects on the development of working memory. The Development of Working Memory in Children is for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in development/child psychology, cognitive development and developmental disorders.

The idea of one's memory "filling up" is a humorous misconception of how memory in general is thought to work; it actually has no capacity limit. However, the idea of a "full brain" makes more sense with reference to working memory, which is the limited amount of information a person can hold temporarily in an especially accessible form for use in the completion of almost any challenging cognitive task. This groundbreaking book explains the evidence supporting Cowan's theoretical proposal about working memory capacity, and compares it to competing perspectives. Cognitive psychologists profoundly disagree on how working memory is limited: whether by the number of units that can be retained (and, if so, what kind of units and how many), the types of interfering material, the time that has elapsed, some combination of these mechanisms, or none of them. The book assesses these hypotheses and examines explanations of why capacity limits occur, including vivid biological, cognitive, and evolutionary accounts. The book concludes with a discussion of the practical importance of capacity limits in daily life. This 10th anniversary Classic Edition will continue to be accessible to a wide range of readers and serve as an invaluable reference for all memory researchers.

For some time now, the study of cognitive development has been far and away the most active discipline within developmental psychology. Although there would be much disagreement as to the exact proportion of papers published in developmental journals that could be considered cognitive, 50% seems like a conservative estimate. Hence, a series of scholarly books devoted to work in cognitive development is especially appropriate at this time. The Springer Series in Cognitive Development contains two basic types of books, namely, edited collections of original chapters by several authors, and original volumes written by one author or a small group of authors. The flagship for the Springer Series is a serial pUblication of the" advances" type, carrying the subtitle Progress in Cognitive Development Research. Each volume in the Progress sequence is strongly thematic, in that it is limited to some well-defined domain of cognitive-developmental research (e. g. , logical and mathematical development, development of learning). All Progress volumes will be edited collections. Editors of such collections, upon consultation with the Series Editor, may elect to have their books published either as contributions to the Progress sequence or as separate volumes. All books written by one author or a small group of authors are being published as separate volumes within the series. A fairly broad definition of cognitive development is being used in the selection of books for this series.

We learn and remember information by modifying synaptic connections in the neuronal networks of our brain. Depending on the type of information being stored, these changes occur in different regions and different circuits of the brain. The underlying circuit mechanisms are beginning to be understood. These mechanisms are capable of storing or reconstructing memories for periods ranging up to a lifetime, but they are also error-prone, as memories can be distorted or lost. Written and edited by experts in the field, this collection from Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology examines important aspects of the neurobiology of learning and memory. Contributors review the various types of memory and the anatomical architectures and specialized cells involved. The induction of synaptic and cell-wide changes during memory encoding, the transcriptional and translational programs required for memory stabilization, the molecular signals that actively maintain memories, and the activation of neural ensembles during memory retrieval are comprehensively covered. The authors also discuss the model organisms and state-of-the-art technologies used to elucidate these processes. This volume will serve as a valuable reference for all neurobiologists and biomedical scientists as well as for cognitive and computational neuroscientists wishing to explore the remarkable phenomena of learning and memory.

"In this introduction to The Development of Children's Memory: The Scientific Contributions of Peter A. Ornstein, we provide biographical information for Professor Ornstein and identify some contextual influences on his work. We then examine the four distinct but interrelated programs of research he conducted that form the structure for this volume. Next, we briefly describe the chapters that are included in the review of each research program and introduce the authors. Ornstein's scientific development over his 50 years in research is depicted as moving from the study of age-related changes in memory performance to an increasing emphasis on the developmental processes that result in skilled remembering in children. This transition both reflected and contributed to the emergence of a developmental science of memory. Over a century of memory research has swung between the two poles of the mechanistic model of Ebbinghaus and the adaptive, sociocultural, and organismic view of Bartlett, both of which were necessary but neither of which was essentially developmental. The Ornstein lab has, over the last half century, with experimental rigor, explored how growing children use memory adaptively in meaningful contexts. From the transitional era of "verbal learning" in the 1950s to the cognitive revolution of the information-processing period in the 1980s, models of memory focused on the development of the deployment and control of strategic processes of remembering, models that, despite their modern sophistication, owe something to Ebbinghaus. But children grow up embedded in cultural structures of meanings ranging from the doctor's office to the courtroom, aided or hindered by the people in them, intent on helping growing children to use memory adaptively within those cultural narratives"--