New students to the school are chosen from an annual pool of applicants on the basis

of character, talent, academic ability as well as parental background. The Junior and
Middle School, with around 190 students from classes 4 to 8, provides a flexible
curriculum, free from the pressure of examinations. This creates an atmosphere
conducive to innovative teaching and a rich range of learning.

iM proving Reading and Arithmetic Learning at Scale in India:

Pratham’s approach to teaching and learning
Background

Although well over 95% of Indian children in the age group six
to fourteen are enrolled in school, available data indicate that
even after five years in school, only half of all children in fifth
grade in India can read can read simple text meant for second
grade children.1 The situation with arithmetic is even worse.
The low levels of learning reported year on year, suggest that
India’s children are in a “big stuck”.2 Like many other systems,
the Indian school system is structured by age and grade; it is
expected that children will move through elementary school
grades meeting rising curricular expectations with each year.

But the reality is that most children do not get much support
for learning at home because parents are not very educated
and in school there is insufficient attention to children who do
not make adequate progress academically.
 As a result, a substantial proportion of children do not develop
basic skills like reading and arithmetic in the early grades. With
weak foundational skills, it becomes difficult for such children
to make progress in later years.

This trend is reflected in flat learning trajectories seen in

empirical work that tracks children longitudinally.3 Further,
there is growing evidence that learning levels are showing a
declining trend – meaning that in recent years, each
subsequent cohort is performing below the level reached by
the cohort before them.
Putting all these together, we are see that it is possible for
a child to complete five years of school without acquiring
fundamental skills in reading and math.4
While it is true that there are still children in India who are “left
out” or not enrolled in school, for the six to fourteen year old
age group, this figure for India as a whole is less than five
percent. Hence the big challenge in elementary education in
India is that of children who are enrolled in school but who are
getting “left behind”. These children are far below the level
that they are expected to be at given their age and grade.
laggard

Without a strong foundation of fundamental skills, it is

impossible for children to move ahead. To begin the journey of
learning, it is important that all children learn to read fluently,
to understand what they read, to express themselves and be
comfortable with basic arithmetic. This foundation needs to be
built durably in the primary school years. Regardless of how the
ultimate goals of education are defined and what the
expectations are of developing a broader set of skills and
concepts, basic reading, comprehension, expression and
arithmetic are the building blocks that will enable them to
make progress in school, as well as fuel independent learning
outside of school. Perhaps even more than ever before, we
need to prepare our children not only for what they will
encounter in school but for an increasingly more complex and
faster changing world around them.

Brain Wave Patent Optimization

All classroom activities are based on our own research on brain wave correction and
optimization (EEG). These classroom activities are supported by custom-developed computer-
aided training programs. Benefits of brain wave training (BWT) include achieving “Super
Learning State”, increasing memory power, and correcting Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)

Brainwave Pattern
Biofeedback: The “Little” Breakthrough In Learning

Brain Wave Study

Our brain is an electrochemical organ. When working, different regions of the brain emit
different frequencies called brain waves. After decades of measuring brain wave
patterns of natural leaders, artists, scientists and creative minds of all walks of life,
research has found that brain wave patterns are directly related to our behaviors,
capabilities and performances. The optimal pattern called “The Awakened Mind” was
released in 1979 by British psycho physiologist and biophysicist C. Maxwell Cade.
Brain Wave Pattern of Peak Performance
Combines the following all at the same time: – the intuitive, emphasis radar of the deltawaves – the
creative inspiration, personal insight, and spiritual awareness of theta waves – the bridging capacity
of relaxed, detatched, awareness of Alpha waves – the external attention and ability to consciously
process thought of Beta waves. This brainwave pattern can be found during “peak experience” or “peak
performance”, regardless of the content or intention, in all forms of tasks requiring creativity and high
performance. It is not “which” frequency, but “how the frequencies combine”, that determines our optimum
states of consciousness. The “Ah-Ha” Wave Pattern
The “Ah-ha!” experience — where we suddenly “get it,” gain an insight, or when a
great idea suddenly comes to us — produces a brain wave pattern very similar to the
“awakened mind” pattern. This pattern is characterized by the bursts of beta and alpha
waves.
When an “ah-ha” experience occurs, an association has been created between the
problem requiring resolution and the mass of unconscious learning that is available to
the subject. It is possible to train the brain to generate the “ah-ha” pattern.
The Super Learning State
The super learning state, which shares some characteristics with peak
performance brain wave pattern, occurs when alpha and thetaa waves dominate.
However, in the super learning state the beta wave is reduced. The result is a unique
state where the brain can accept a much larger volume of information than is normally
possible. This occurs because the normal conscious filter of the mind is by-passed;
instead, the knowledge is absorbed directly and in an unfiltered state.
Image Abacus and Brain Wave Pattern
The goal of the image abacus training system is to
provide the student with control over these brain wave
patterns. This control will allow the student to access the
desirable brain wave pattern for the learning which is
required. Employing the core “speed hearing” technique
and progressing through a carefully designed series of
graduated calculation exercises, the student is trained to achieve the optimal state of
mind for the task at hand.

The ABS Method

The power of the image abacus system consists of its manipulation of three key
variables: difficulty of the task, task duration, and the speed at which the task must be
accomplished. Manipulation of these variables requires sophisticated technology as
does measurement of the student’s response. Abacus Brain Study (ABS) is one of the
very few institutions in the world, and unique in North America, that provides the
equipment, training program and instructional support to guide your child through this
system. The outcome is that one goes far beyond the ability to perform fast
calculations. The lasting effect is the student’s acquisition of a tool that will support all
future learning experience
the purpose, the aim and drive of these schools, is to equip the child with the
most excellent technological proficiency so that the student may function
with clarity and efficiency in the modern world. A far more important
purpose than this is to create the right climate and environment so that the
child may develop fully as a complete human being. This means giving the
child the opportunity to flower in goodness so that he or she is rightly related
to people, things and ideas, to the whole of life. To live is to be related. There
is no right relationship to anything if there is not the right feeling for beauty,
a response to nature, to music and art - a highly developed aesthetic sense.

I think it is fairly clear that competitive education and the development of the
student in that process . . . are very, very destructive.

The Development of Cognitive Skills and Gains in Academic

School Readiness for Children from Low-Income Families
Janet A. Welsh, Robert L. Nix, Clancy Blair, Karen L. Bierman, and Keith E. Nelson

Copyright and License information ►

See other articles in PMC that cite the published article.

Abstract
Young children's preparedness to succeed at the academic and behavioral demands of school has
been a focus of developmental and educational research for many decades. Recently, legislation
such as the No Child Left Behind Act, which holds schools accountable for students' academic
performance, has resulted in a heightened interest in better delineation and understanding of the
diverse skills that contribute to children's academic success and failure. Of particular concern are
the delays in school readiness often experienced by children growing up in poverty. There are
substantial achievement gaps between middle-income children and low-income children at
school entry that widen over time and contribute to serious disparities in learning difficulties,
educational attainment, and long-term employment potential (Ryan, Fauth & Brooks-Gunn,
2006). Flagship programs, such as Head Start, and rapidly emerging programs, such as public
school pre-kindergarten, are designed to reduce these disparities by enhancing school readiness.
Significant questions remain, however, concerning optimal pre-kindergarten school practices for
economically disadvantaged children (Love, Tarullo, Raikes & Chazan-Cohen, 2006). On the
one hand, evidence that emergent literacy and numeracy skills are strong predictors of later
reading and math achievement (Duncan, et al., 2007) suggests that pre-kindergarten programs for
children from low-income homes might reduce school readiness disparities most effectively by
focusing more time on direct instruction designed to build skills in these specific domains
(Lonigan, Burgess & Anthony, 2000). On the other hand, developmental research suggests that
the preschool years represent a critical period for the development of the mental processes that
support effective, goal-oriented approaches to learning, particularly working memory and
attention control. These mental processes are often delayed in children growing up in poverty
(Noble, McCandliss, & Farah, 2007) and appear to play a central role in predicting school
adjustment and academic attainment (Blair & Razza, 2007; Li-Grining, 2007; (McClelland,
Cameron, Connor, Farris, Jewkes, & Morrison, 2007). Prior research conducted with elementary
school students has suggested that working memory and attention control play a key role in
supporting emergent literacy and mathematical computation and problem-solving skills (Fuchs et
al., 2005; Passolunghi, Vercelloni & Schadee, 2006; Swanson & Sachse-Lee, 2001). However,
educational research has rarely examined these skills in the context of longitudinal studies, nor
during early childhood when they are undergoing rapid growth.
The goal of the present study was to extend the existing educational research downwards
developmentally, and examine the early childhood precursors of reading and math achievement
in kindergarten. Specifically, we sought to understand the association between rapidly
developing executive function skills (particularly working memory and attention control) and the
acquisition of domain-specific emergent literacy and numeracy skill acquisition during the pre-
kindergarten year. Furthermore, we sought to and assess the degree to which growth in those
executive function skills during prekindergarten made unique contributions to kindergarten
achievement, when growth in domain-specific skills and language skills was controlled. We
followed a large sample of children in Head Start, measuring these cognitive skills at three time
points: beginning and the end of the pre-kindergarten year and end of the kindergarten year. Two
central hypotheses were tested: 1) that growth in working memory and attention control would
be associated concurrently with growth in emergent literacy and numeracy skills over the course
of the pre-kindergarten year, and 2) that growth of domain-general (working memory, attention
control) and domain-specific (emergent literacy and numeracy) skills during the pre-kindergarten
year would each make unique contributions to reading and math achievement in kindergarte