Contemporary Education Case Study

Examine a contemporary issue in education and critically reflect on the implications on structures, systems and policies

Education has long been a topic of debate; the world’s greatest thinkers continue to revolutionize methods to create a better generation an ideology only sound flawless until n newer one comes along. (1) A contemporary issue can be defined as any event idea opinion or topic in any given subject that is relevant to this present day (2)

Education means different things to different people, everyone gets some form of education in life formally or informally , In a broad sense education is seen to be about acquiring knowledge and developing skills and understanding , cognitive capabilities it can be claimed that we as humans

Children of all ages are ready to learn recent research using new techniques in developmental cognitive neuroscience has established that many of our cognitive processes are there and fully functioning at birth or mature quickly during the first 4-5 years of life, During this time the brain increases in size 4 times due to the rapid increase in number of synaptic connections between the neurons in the cerebral cortex , in this period basic executive functions are quickly established which in turn supports fundamental learning processes including statistical learning,7 learning by imitation, 8 learning by ananlogy9 and casual

Further neuroscience reveals that learning depends on neural networks distributed across visual, auditory and kinaesthetic brain regions for children to learn these factors need to be taken into account children given multi-sensory experiences while learning and playing and having the opportunity to repeat activities gives opportunity for expertise 9 Studies have shown that play is key to learning structured and unstructured play it improves social and academic learning, academic learning improved attentiveness when children were encouraged to do free play in comparison to the children who did not get any