In 1983, Howard Gardner rocked the education and social science communities with publication of a theory of multiple intelligences in his book, Frames of Mind. Gardner argued that in addition to defining intelligence in terms of a child or adult’s ability to solve problems and use language, other capacities and abilities such as musical, spatial,…
Early mythologies express a deep reverence for the mystery of birth. The stars, the mountains, and the oceans are all described as having been issued from some wonderful and hidden generative force. Human birth is in many ways equally mysterious. Modern science enables doctors to detect conception shortly after it has occurred and to visualize…
Link to Education Connection Gifted students are not necessarily those who bring home the best report cards, but may well be the students at the back of the classroom whose abilities go unnoticed. Find out more about the task of identifying gifted students and the development of special programs to address their needs. Identifying the…
In the Beginning All human beings begin life as a fertilized egg, called a zygote, which is a single cell about one-fifth the size of the period at the end of this sentence. By adulthood, the human body has grown to more than a hundred trillion cells, most of which are highly specialized for particular…
How Do We Learn Language? Most new moms and dads know a lot about language acquisition because they witness it first-hand. They can tell you that babies start to babble around six to ten months of age, and that not long afterward they say a few words like “no” or “uh-oh.” At around two years,…
Introduction: Piaget and His Ideas A young child passes a fence with a cow standing nearby and gleefully exclaims: “Dog!” Another child examines a row of seven checkers. When the seven checkers are spread out to form a longer row, the child claims that there are now “more” checkers. Children have very different ideas about…
