September 9th, 2020 – 13:00-20:00 IDT
Faculty of Education in Science and Technology, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Chairs: Dr. Tzipi Horowitz Kraus and Dr. Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim
This international conference took place on September 9th 2020 and its aim was to share the most recent research findings regarding parent-child interaction from different complementary perspectives: neuroscientific, psychological, educational, socio-linguistic… The main focus was on literacy and numeracy, we brought together some of the most brilliant researchers on the topic in order to answer the general question:
What do we know about adult-child interactions and how can neuroscience, psychology and linguistics inform each other on this issue?
The conference included talks from researchers specialized in different disciplines, each of them using different techniques and approaching differently the same topic.
We had the chance to understand the influence of shared book reading on socioemotional development with the beautiful speech of Prof. Dorit Aram, from Tel Aviv University. The talks of Dr. Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim (Technion), Dr. Irit Lavie (Oranim College) and Prof. Bert de Smedt (KU Leuven) focused on mathematical learning and illustrated the ontogenetic development of arithmetic skills from different perspectives. Dr. Hadar Netz (Tel-Aviv University) and Prof. Simone Shamay-Tsoory (U Haifa) presented their findings in the complex phenomenon of social interactions between kids and adults, focusing on very different topics such as brain-to-brain synchrony and the effect of student-tutor instructing methods. Dr. Tahli Frenkel (Baruch Iver School of Psychology) pointed out the importance of the early caregiving environment in the kid’s neural development. Drs. Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus (Technion) and Michal Zivan (Technion) expounded their ideas about the influence of joint storytelling (i.e., dialogic reading) on the child’s cognitive and neural development.
We were very lucky to have Dr. Melissa Libertus, from the University of Pittsburgh, as our Keynote Speaker. She presented multiple innovative (for their ecological validity) techniques and the findings of her research team on the development of the kids’ mathematical abilities in relation with parental input.
Finally and after an interesting poster session, we had the chance to participate in a very fruitful discussion, with our presenters and participants, on the relations between the research topics and the new approaches to assess this growing field of research.
