News for Week of August 29, 1999
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Getting Kids Ready for the New School Year
For many children, returning to school is a transition which generates fear and anxiety. A variety of sites have parenting tips to help prepare for the new school year including: America Goes Back to School, First Day Jitters, Schwab Learning Foundation Tips for Parents with LD Kids, Wired News Back-to-School Special Report, Family.com Back-to-School Guide, Parent's Talk.
The August 26 issue of the international journal Nature contains two articles challenging the "Mozart Effect" and a reply by Frances Rauscher, a researcher in the original study which found an improvement in spatial skills after listening to a Mozart piano sonata. Based on an analysis of over a dozen of these studies, Christopher Chabris of Harvard University contends that any cognitive enhancement is small. In the second article, a group of researchers at the University of Western Ontario claim that they were not able to achieve positive results in attempts to replicate the study. Rauscher notes that Chabris is challenging claims that their study never made, that the effect is only limited to spatial-temporal tasks involving mental imagery and temporal order. She also points out that there were differences in design in the replicated studies.
Related Topics: The Mozart Effect.
Updated August 29, 1999