Parents
For You
Friday February 26, 2010 |
| CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (UPI) -- Finding affordable child care is always a challenge but it also can be the reason why some young parents drop out of college, U.S. researchers said.
Brent McBride, a professor of human development at Illinois, said the college dropout rates of traditional undergraduate students -- college freshmen who have just transitioned from high school -- who are also full-time parents is a growing problem, further exacerbated by the dearth of acceptable child care options for students pursuing a bachelor's degree.
Students who are new parents are three times as likely as traditional undergraduates to drop out of college, McBride said -- even though the number of hours needed for child care in college is much less than when a parent is working full time.
"If you're a student-parent, you're at greater risk of not succeeding at any type of institution of higher education simply because you're a parent, and the hardships and hurdles are that much higher," McBride said in a statement. "The vast majority of their peers are traditional undergraduate students, so there's no organization to support them, and no way for them to congregate and seek out others in their situation."
Marginalizing someone who is unable to complete a college degree simply because of a child care issue is, from a social justice perspective, a tragic mistake to make, McBride said.
Copyright 2010 by United Press International
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| EDMONTON, Alberta (UPI) -- Reading to kids is a crucial tool in English-language development, but not other languages, Canadian researchers said.
The study, published in Learning and Instruction, found a child learning to read English -- an orthographically inconsistent language where letters can have more than one sound -- need more help than a child learning to read in Greek -- a language with one-to-one correspondence between a letter and its sounds.
"We have found that in English, you need a rich home literacy environment -- reading lots of books to children," study leader George Georgiou of University of Alberta in Edmonton said in a statement. "It's absolutely necessary."
Lacking such support, English-speaking children run the risk of falling behind at least two years versus children learning to read in Greek, the researchers said.
Georgiou recommends English-speaking parents invest time in reading to their children or at least expose them to educational TV programs such as "Sesame Street" and multimedia tools such as spelling games.
Copyright 2010 by United Press International
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| SAN DIEGO (UPI) -- Cash-strapped school districts are making a mistake when they cut music from the kindergarten to 12 curriculum, a U.S. researcher said.
Nina Kraus of the Northwestern University said that music training has profound effects that shape the sensory system and should be a mainstay of K-12 education.
"Playing an instrument may help youngsters better process speech in noisy classrooms and more accurately interpret the nuances of language that are conveyed by subtle changes in the human voice," Kraus said in a statement.
"We've found that years of music training may also improve how sounds are processed for language and emotion."
Music training helps typically developing children as well as children with developmental dyslexia or autism more accurately encode speech.
Studies in Kraus's laboratory indicate music -- a high-order cognitive process -- affects automatic processing that occurs early in the processing stream.
"The brainstem, an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain, is modified by our experience with sound," Kraus said. "Now we know that music can fundamentally shape our subcortical sensory circuitry in ways that may enhance everyday tasks, including reading and listening in noise."
Kraus presented her findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Diego.
Copyright 2010 by United Press International
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