KC Compton

Not all adventurers wear rugged clothes and pith helmets; some carry laptops, notebooks and pens. But all are driven by the same impulse: They have a question and they won’t rest until they have an answer that satisfies them. ...In the case of Ellen Galinsky, author of more than 100 books and reports and a self-described “research adventurer,” the driving question in 2000 was, “How do we keep the fire burning in children’s eyes?”

For babies to have the best start in life, they need to form a deep emotional bond with the person who provides most of their care—usually their mother. Not every baby gets that chance. Sometimes it’s as simple as a mother wrestling with the “baby blues”—feeling so worried and fatigued she can’t think of much except when she’ll get some shuteye. About 80 percent of new mothers experience some version of baby blues, which subside on their own within a couple of weeks with both mom and baby no ...

The U.S. has the highest maternal and infant mortality rates among any comparable developed countries. In 2017, it ranked 55th internationally on infant mortality, a rate comparable to that of Serbia, despite spending nearly 20 times more per capita on health care.

When you see a baby gazing on the world, you might imagine a little sponge passively soaking up information. Don’t let that baby face fool you. What’s actually going on is computational wizardry so sophisticated that it outpaces any known machine, sorting multiple data feeds and running statistics millisecond by millisecond to extract and analyze essential information about the baby’s environment. Those little brains are busy. And a large chunk of that analysis involves cracking the complicat...

Founded in 1923 by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Amalgamated Bank in New York City was born of a belief that workers and their families had as much right to affordable banking as corporations and high rollers. The bank has continued to demonstrate its commitment to progressive causes and the needs of working people through modern times. ...

In 1985, poet Meryl Natchez was looking for a way to turn her writing skills into a viable business. As circumstances would have it, she launched her quest just as Silicon Valley was emerging as a hub for high-tech and scientific innovation. The poet soon parlayed her love of words into TechProse, a multimillion-dollar business with such clients as BART, Tandem, the State of California and Cisco. ...

The building block has been such a fact of American childhood for so long, it’s easy to dismiss the humble little cube as irrelevant, particularly in light of fancy newer digital toys that flash and whirr, sing ditties and announce “I love you” at random intervals. The fact is, those shouty toys can’t hold a candle to the building block and its equally modest cousin, the shape sorter.
“What those fancy toys don’t do is actually teach the child anything about spatial relationships,” says early...

Azolla filiculides is the tiny green embodiment of the old saying that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Some view Azolla, also known as water fern or red water fern, as an invasive pest and want to eradicate every last molecule of it — understandable, as its enthusiastic growth makes it able to cover the entire surface of a lake with a thick, sun-blocking mat in less than a year. This fern with leaves the size of a gnat is much more than a nuisance: Some say it could save the world.

When many daycare centers are closing shop for the day, Rosa Marie at Rochester’s Marvelous Mind Academy is just getting going. With operating hours from 6 am to 11 pm, the academy has moved from daycare—emphasis on “day”—to childcare. For the parents of young children in her Rochester community, those extended hours make all the difference.
“We have the University of Rochester Strong Memorial Hospital nearby, along with Rochester General Hospital,” says Rosa Marie, president of Marvelous Min...

When a baby peers into the face of an adult making the kind of goofy faces and noises most of us make when looking at an infant, they’re doing more than wondering what strange creature they’ve encountered. They’re listening, studying and observing, and when they coo back, a conversation has started—one that will lead to words and sentences and ultimately the language that will serve them for the rest of their lives.

The children attending Tiny Trees Preschool classrooms in Seattle and King County parks may look like they’re “just playing,” but those little boots are actually marching, climbing, stomping and squishing their way to a well-rounded preschool education. Reading, math and science come alive for the more than 315 students who splash and gallop their way around 12 outdoor classrooms throughout the Seattle urban area. Guided by wonder, the children explore their world with shovels, binoculars, ma...

Exciting research in artificial intelligence (AI) has found that computers programmed to “think” and then allowed to engage in unsupervised learning develop the capacity to teach themselves to do a variety of different tasks rather than sticking to the functions set up by their human programmers. The computers’ strength lies in their ability to make mistakes, then learn from them to make better-educated choices in the future.
Even for computers, says Dr. Alison Gopnik, author and internationa...

When the Onondaga Citizens League saw that only 9% of the students in the Syracuse City School District were reading on grade level, members of this Central New York citizens’ group knew they had work to do. Every year, the nonprofit, non-partisan group conducted studies to shine a light on issues of importance to the community. In 2013, the group selected early childhood as its topic, but few were prepared for the not-so-great news the study ultimately revealed.
When the report came in showi...

Amid the technological hustle and bustle of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Science (I-LABS), one research-assistant position requires a particularly specialized skill set: Toy Waver.
An especially important finding of this precise imaging technology has been that children apparently have no limit to their capacity for language learning.
Although it sounds like a sweet job almost anyone could enjoy, being a toy waver in this context is actually a tricky task invo...

Most U.S. schoolchildren know more about the Amazon rain forest than the ground beneath their feet and more about penguins than the little birds perched on their back fence. Although Peter Walsh doesn’t criticize the former, he and the rest of the staff of Little Peepers Forest Preschool are committed to remedying the latter.
Little Peepers is located at the South Shore Nature Center in East Islip, New York, and is a program of the Seatuck Environmental Association, an organization devoted to...