Research

There has been an explosion of research over the past decade that shows how important the first few years of a child’s life are in terms of brain development. To help us make sense of how those early experience can shape a child’s brain, we called up Dr. Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

Tomorrow I'm scheduled to sit down with economist James Heckman of the University of Chicago. Heckman won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2000 for a statistical model he developed in the field of econometrics. But in recent years, Heckman has become famous for something else. He is perhaps the leading advocate in the U.S. for investing in early childhood. Heckman has run the numbers in an impressive number of academic papers, and he says there's almost no better way for a society to spend its money than on early childhood.  

"There are many projects out there, but few have the rate of return of early childhood investments," Heckman says. 

Check out this video for a preview of why Heckman thinks early childhood education is so important, and stay tuned in the coming weeks for my interview: 
 

I've been kind of obsessed with neuroscience lately. The study of our brains has made some amazing leaps in the past decade or so, particularly when it comes to how we understand our children's minds. Behind many of those leaps have been advances in brain scans. Scientists have been able to use non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging to study adult brains for some time. But young kids were just too squirmy for the most detailed types of scans. Now, though, scientists are starting to figure out ways to see what's going on in developing brains, regardless of the squirms.

We know that children are aware of class, but Jessi Streib at the University of Michigan showed in a study published last year just how early this can happen, and how it affects the learning environment. Streib found that preschoolers who came from more affluent backgrounds used verbal skills they learned at home to interrupt class, redirect the teachers' attention and "effectively silence the working-class children."