To be successful takes creativity, flexibility, self-control, and discipline. Central to all those are ‘executive functions,’ including mentally playing with ideas, giving a considered rather than an impulsive response, and staying focused. Diverse activities have been shown to improve children’s executive functions – computerized training, non-computerized games, aerobics, martial arts, yoga, mindfulness, and school curricula. Central to all these is repeated practice and constantly challenging executive functions. Children with worse executive functions initially, benefit most; thus early executive-function training may avert widening achievement gaps later. To improve executive functions, focusing narrowly on them may not be as effective as also addressing emotional and social development (as do curricula that improve executive functions) and physical development (shown by positive effects of aerobics, martial arts, and yoga).

https://www.doctorbrunner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Science-2011-science_interventions_-shown_to_aid.pdf

Interventions Shown to Aid Executive Function Development in Children 4 to 12 Years Old

This statement defines and describes principles of develop­ mentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs for administrators, teachers, parents, policy-makers, and others who make decisions about the care and education of young children. An early childhood program is any group program in a center, school, or other facility that serves children from birth through age 8. Early childhood programs include child care centers, family child care homes, private and public preschools, kinder­ gartens, and primary-grade schools. The early childhood profession is responsible for establishing and promoting standards of high-quality, professional practice in early childhood programs. These standards must reflect current knowledge and shared beliefs about what constitutes high-quality, developmentally appropriate early childhood education in the context within which services are delivered. This position paper is organized into several components, which include the following:

Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs

This is a review of Collected Works of John Tate. Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2016. For several decades it has been clear to the friends and colleagues of John Tate that a “Collected Works” was merited. The award of the Abel Prize to Tate in 2010 added impetus, and finally, in Tate’s ninety-second year we have these two magnificent volumes, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate. For an overview of Tate’s work, the editors refer the reader to [4]. Before discussing the volumes, I describe some of Tate’s work. 1. Hecke L-series and Tate’s thesis Like many budding number theorists, Tate’s favorite theorem when young was Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1946, he was fortunate to find there the person, Emil Artin, who had discovered the most general reciprocity law, so solving Hilbert’s ninth problem. By 1920, the German school of algebraic number theorists (Hilbert, Weber, . . .) together with its brilliant student Takagi had succeeded in classifying the abelian extensions of a number field K: to each group I of ideal classes in K, there is attached an extension L of K (the class field of I); the group I determines the arithmetic of the extension L/K, and the Galois group of L/K is isomorphic to I. Artin’s contribution was to prove (in 1927) that there is a natural isomorphism from I to the Galois group of L/K. When the base field contains an appropriate root of 1, Artin’s isomorphism gives a reciprocity law, and all possible reciprocity laws arise this way. In the 1930s, Chevalley reworked abelian class field theory. In particular, he replaced “ideals” with his “idèles” which greatly clarified the relation between the local and global aspects of the theory. For his thesis, Artin suggested that Tate do the same for Hecke L-series. When Hecke proved that the abelian L-functions of number fields (generalizations of Dirichlet’s L-functions) have an analytic continuation throughout the plane with a functional equation of the expected type, he saw that his methods applied even to a new kind of L-function, now named after him. Once Tate had developed his harmonic analysis of local fields and of the idèle group, he was able prove analytic continuation and functional equations for all the relevant L-series without Hecke’s complicated theta-formulas. Received by the editors September 5, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 01A75, 11-06, 14-06. c ©2017 American Mathematical Society

The collected works

Cognitive control skills important for success in school and life are amenable to improvement in at-risk preschoolers without costly interventions.

/pdf/preschool-program-improves-cognitive-control-2iidi5u0bo.pdf

Preschool Program Improves Cognitive Control

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18121/w18121.pdf

Hard evidence on soft skills

This chapter discusses several of the main principles of Vygotsky's cultural historical theory that are found most important for understanding of the relationship between play and literacy. It also discusses a set of new instructional practices based on these principles that are developed to promote play and literacy development in preschool and kindergarten-aged children. For Vygotskians, the purpose of learning and teaching is more than acquiring and transmitting a body of knowledge; it involves the acquisition of mental tools. The changes in the human mind that Vygotsky associated with the use of mental tools include the transition from "reactive" behavior consisting of a response to the environment to behavior that is intentional and deliberate. Over a half-century since the Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) became known to Western educators, multiple attempts have been undertaken to apply this idea to classroom instruction.

Play and Early Literacy: A Vygotskian Approach

Literacy Standards for Preschool Learners.

Play has always been considered an essential part of childhood. Philosophers and 
educators alike have used such terms as ‘spontaneous’, ‘inevitable’ or ‘natural’ when 
describing the playful activities of young children which implies that play is something 
that all children do in one form or another (Isenberg and Quisenberry, 2002; Elkind, 
2007). However, with increasing pressure for formal pedagogies in early childhood 
classrooms, it is opportunities for the most elaborate forms of play, the ones that take 
longer for children to develop that are most at risk. For example, while most toddlers 
still engage in playful exploration of objects, in some cultural contexts it is increasingly 
hard to find preschool and school-aged children creating fantasy worlds together and 
enacting these self-generated elaborate scenarios without adult participation (Levin, 
2008; Rogers and Evans, 2008). This heterogeneity of play as well as differential 
effects of different types of play on child development and learning means that questions about the pedagogy of play should be answered differently for different types of 
play. Here we will focus on only one kind of play – make-believe play also known as 
role-play or dramatic play – and the role of adults in scaffolding this play in preschooland kindergarten-aged children. We will view this kind of play from the perspective of 
Cultural-Historical Psychology by first revisiting Vygotskian insights into the nature 
of play and then by discussing post-Vygotskian contributions to research on play and 
their implications for Early Childhood Education.

Revisiting Vygotskian perspectives on play and pedagogy

/pdf/tools-of-the-mind-a-case-study-of-implementing-the-1w6bfawgaq.pdf

Tools of the Mind: A Case Study of Implementing the Vygotskian Approach in American Early Childhood and Primary Classrooms. Innodata Monographs 7.

As pre-kindergarten and kindergarten programs upgrade their instruction in early literacy and numeracy, there is a dawning recognition that many children who are having problems learning to read, write, and work with numbers fail to learn despite the teachers’ best efforts. One of the reasons may be that most early childhood programs focus on outcomes that are narrowly defined in terms of “COSH” (COncepts, Skills, and Habits) and don’t pay enough attention to underlying cognitive and social emotional competencies. “COSHing” preschoolers and kindergartners may yield short-term results but does not seem to translate into sustainable academic achievement. But there is another factor to be considered. The cause of failure to learn academic skills may in fact be due to the children’s lack of selfregulation.

Deborah J. Leong

Papers

Play and Early Literacy: A Vygotskian Approach

Literacy Standards for Preschool Learners.

Revisiting Vygotskian perspectives on play and pedagogy

Tools of the Mind: A Case Study of Implementing the Vygotskian Approach in American Early Childhood and Primary Classrooms. Innodata Monographs 7.

Self-regulation: A Foundation for Early Learning