Labels

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Annotated Bibliography/blog post 5



Annotated Bibliography

Gopnik, Alison. “What do babies think?” TED. July 2011. Web. 19 Nov. 2012.

                In this video, Gopnik talks about her research on children’s brains. She compares human babies to bird babies and found some similarities. She finds that in both cases, even when both human and birds are just babies, they pick up on their surroundings. If they see their parents doing something they assume it is good and apply it to their own lives. She also found that children pick up and learn complicated matters, such as statistics, better than adults. Overall, she comes to a conclusion that although people think babies and young children do not pay attention, they are actually paying too much attention. They pick up on everything whether we realize it or not. This was a great video for me to watch. I had actually stumbled upon it a couple weeks ago when I was just starting out, but I just had the opportunity to watch it in full today. It doesn’t fit in with my original inquiry question exactly, but it confirms my idea that children learn the most at an earlier age.

Kluger, Jeffrey, and Alice Park. "The Quest For A Superkid." Time. 30 April 2001. Web. 19 Nov. 2012.      
                This article focuses on how jumpstarting your children’s education will impact them later on in life. Kluger and Park collaborate in this article to back up their opinion that letting a child grow without added educational pressure is the best method. They research the differences between kids back in the day (before there were flashcards, intelligence games, parental pressure for a child genius, and etc.) and kids now. They find that as children grow up, they are smarter in the areas that their parents pinpointed. However, they are less able to adapt to other learning styles and are less social. I found this article incredibly helpful. I was struggling to narrow down my topic and this helped me do so. It helped showed me a different path that I can take with my topic, which is how early learning affects your child.

Kuhl, Patricia. “The linguistic genius of babies.” TED. October 2010. Web. 19 Nov. 2012.

                Like Gopnik, Kuhl researches how early babies learn and how it effects them later on in life. She finds that everyone is virtually a genius until they reach age seven. She focuses on how babies learn language and finds that babies that are taught multiple languages at once use “statistics” in their brain to separate the two. She finds that babies can learn almost any amount of language while under their genius stage and it will all stick. She also finds that babies need human interaction in order to learn new languages. This video did not help me out as much as I hoped it would. It was good information, but it was really similar to that of Gopnik’s so I did not learn anything new from it. 

Szalavitz, Maya. “Measure of a Mother’s Love: How Early Neglect Derails Child Development.” Time. 24                 May 2012. Web. 19 Nov. 2012.

                In this article, Szalavitz argues that early neglect hinders a child’s development. She begins by talking about how young monkeys that are left alone at a young age have trouble fending for themselves later on in life, while monkeys that are nurtured turn out great. From this, she goes on to talk about research that she did in orphanages. She found that the babies that were never nurtured when young showed slow mental and physical growth, even though orphanage owners denied it. I originally looked into this article because I wanted to look at my research topic from a different perspective. I have been looking into how intelligent children fare later in life, so I thought it would be helpful to see how neglected kids did as well. I am not sure if this article helped me in terms of my essay, but it was an interesting read.

No comments:

Post a Comment