Education goes far beyond the subjects we typically teach in school. Life skills like focus and perspective taking are essential to building human potential. Mind in the Making will be a powerful new resource for teachers and families.

— Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board

Making Connections

Making connections is at the heart of learning—figuring out what’s the same and what’s different—and making unusual connections is at the core of creativity.

In a world where information is so accessible,  it is the people who can see connections who are able to go beyond knowing information to using this information well. Think about your most recent “aha” moment—when you suddenly understood something that you didn’t understand before. Chances are this “aha” moment involved seeing a new connection.

Making connections involves putting information into categories as well as seeing how one thing can represent or stand for something else. Ultimately, it involves:

  • figuring out what’s the same or similar;
  • figuring out how one thing relates to another; and
  • finding unusual connections, often by being able to inhibit an automatic response, by reflecting, and by selecting something that is connected in a different way.

Making multiple connections is a skill that becomes possible during the later preschool and early school-age years and beyond as the prefrontal cortex of children’s brains matures. It calls on executive functions of the brain, including working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Making unusual connections is the basis of creativity.
 

The following articles are about Making Connections:

Got the Winter Blues? Time to Plan a New Project!

Featured article

January 25, 2012

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on January 22, 2012.

Two years ago, my son started a “365” project. He wanted to improve his skills as a photographer and made a pledge to himself to take at least one picture a day for the calendar year. On New Year’s Eve,  2010, we watched them as a slide show on our TV. We had had many sneak previews, including following along on his Facebook photo album. Yet the whole show, a year in pictures, was poignant in a new way.

There were some obvious things that made us smile, such as family blowing out birthday cake candles or the annual posed picture at our family’s summer vacation spot. Surprisingly, the more salient photos for me were the unexpected moments in daily life. There was the light switch in a darkened room at 11:59 p.m. (determination to keep the project afloat on a day he forgot to take a picture). There was the half full glass of water on a nightstand, from when he was sick in bed. There was a photo of a train window and another of car tail lights, as he traveled to interviews for graduate school.

Research on children’s memories, including interviews with children, often highlight the snapshots of our daily lives more than the center stage events. Memorable moments come in all shapes and sizes, yet the details sometimes tell the story better than the canvas. It isn’t as much about the trip to Disney World as discovering the little chocolate on a hotel pillow. It isn’t as much about a new bicycle as the moment a parent let go and you didn’t fall.

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Skill: Focus and Self Control
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The Moral Life of Babies: New York Times article

Featured article

May 05, 2010

 

Paul Bloom and his colleagues at Yale University are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of babies. In this forthcoming New York Times Magazine article, Bloom gives a fascinating account of this groundbreaking work. You can read the article online.
 
Click here to see one of our favorite experiments from Paul Bloom, Kiley Hamlin, and Karen Wynn: "Helpers and Hinderers."
 
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Skill: Making Connections
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Why I Am Concerned About Learning

Featured article

April 16, 2010

by Ellen Galinsky

Curiosity, according to Laura Schulz of MIT, is fueled by having two ideas that are at odds with each other.  Her research shows that when this happens, children typically will explore and experiment until they figure things out. That’s my story too. Having two images of learning that disturbingly conflicted with each other has led to eight years of exploration—so far.
 
The first image was from interviews I conducted with children a few years ago as background for a study we were planning on children and learning. In my travels around the country, I interviewed groups of children from the third through the twelfth grades, asking them about their experiences in learning—at home, in their neighborhoods, in school, in church, anywhere. Despite the fact that these children came from very different backgrounds and communities—they told me very similar stories.
 
They described learning as “learning stuff”—as the acquisition of facts, figures, and concepts. The learning experiences they described were primarily imposed—and their motivation was primarily extrinsic rather than also being intrinsic. 
 
I asked the children to finish this sentence: “It is important to learn so I can….”  And the children I interviewed all over the country said:
 
Get good grades.
Go to good schools.
Get a good job.
Support myself—have a good house—have a nice car.
 
Their reasons echo those of 81,499 students in a nationwide study conducted by the High School Survey of Youth Engagement from the University of Indiana. When asked why they go to school, 73% said because they want to get a degree and go to college, 69% said because of their friends, and 58% said because it’s the law. 
These are valid reasons, but there’s a major problem, too. In the High School Survey, only 39% said they go to school to learn. Likewise, I heard little connection to learning in the children I interviewed. Even worse, I found that there was little, if any, fire in their eyes when they talked about learning.
 
So I pushed. I asked children to finish the sentence, “When I am learning, I feel….” Those few children who had experienced a broader connection to learning said things like:
 

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Skill: Focus and Self Control
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Games that Help Children Make Connections

Quick tips

March 07, 2010

By Ellen Galinsky

Many of the tasks used by the researchers who are featured in Mind in the Making can be adapted as games you can play with your children. Remember, however, that executive functions are orchestrated by the prefrontal cortex of the brain, a part of the brain that doesn’t really begin to mature until kids are older preschoolers. So while you can play some of these games with younger children, it’s important not to push children beyond their developmental capacities— an experience that would be frustrating for you and even more frustrating for them.

Games must be fun in order to be effective, so if you find that your children don't want to play, stop and wait for a better time or a better age.

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Skill: Making Connections
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Daily Kid



Here is a list of Mind in the Making researchers and educators filmed to date

Community Schools: “Mind in the Making and Community Schools: Crossing Boundaries and Creating Strong Linkages for Children Birth through Eight and their Families,” is a collaborative project with The Children’s Aid Society’s National Center for Community Schools and the Institute for Educational Leadership. (Read more)

Learning Communities: Throughout the country, groups of parents, educators, and other family support and health professionals have joined together to learn more about the research on children’s learning from birth through the early elementary school years, and about how to use this research to promote better outcomes for children. (Read more)

Learning Modules for Educators: Mind in the Making Learning Modules for Educators is an 11-part, facilitated learning process designed to bridge the gap between research and teaching practice. (Read more)

Seven Skills Modules: We have created new Modules from the book, called the Mind in the Making Seven Essential Skills Modules. (Read more)

Experiments in Children's Learning DVD: This two-volume series of 42 videos take viewers on a series of virtual “field trips” to laboratories in the U.S. and abroad. (Read more)
View a crosswalk of the experiments to the seven essential life skills

Download a companion Catalogue to Mind in the Making: Experiments in Children's Learning

Have you seen the Marshmallow Test?

What does eating marshmallows have to do with how your kid does on the SAT?
Watch the video

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