In the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers went kaput and the economy plunged into a deep recession, Yash Gupta was scampering around the country trying to drum up support for a new business school at Johns Hopkins University. </img> </img> </img> </img> </img>


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Soweto - As pressure and anxiety mounts on learners before the exams, Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane warned them not to expect miracles, but to...

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Durban – Elaborate plans have been made to ensure the entire process for the matric examinations in KwaZulu-Natal go smoothly and securely.

The Basic Education Department in the province has roped in the South African National Defence Force, South African Police Service, local municipalities and non-governmental organisations to assist in the case of any disruption, including acts of natures.

MEC for Education Senzo Mchunu said every detail had been taken into consideration in the planning for the examinations, from how long it would take to deliver exam papers to schools to who would receive them on the designated days.

Mchunu reassured the province the department was ready for the examinations and had done its best to make up for time lost at schools during the World Cup and public sector strike.

“The Department of Education has left no stone unturned and taken all necessary steps and processes to ensure that exams are held with no glitches. I want to assure everyone that we have systems, personnel and determination for a successful session of the matric exams,” said Mchunu.

There are 130 458 full time and 20 388 part time candidates registered for the examinations in the province, which will be written from 25 October 25 until 3 December.

Thirty-two marking centres are available around the province, with 9 361 appointed markers who will start their jobs on 7 December.

Mchunu said all marking centres have locking rooms for the security of the learners’ answer scripts.

The exam paper printing process will be monitored by the management of the Chief Directorate.

The examination administration and assessment staff will oversee the delivery of question papers, while the district, province and national Department of Basic Education will monitor the conduct of the exams.

“As much as we try to close the leaks, there might be people who will try to cheat and we will be ruthless. We have systems to detect these potential problems,” said Mchunu.

The MEC visited a number of schools immediately after the recent strike was suspended and is convinced that recovery programmes have been completed.

He said during the World Cup, some schools continued with their syllabus.

“Besides teaching and learning that took place since January, the province had additional intervention programmes to support schools that obtained less than 60 percent in matric last year,” said Mchunu.

The department, in light of the disruptions this year, is not expecting dramatically higher pass rates but is convinced that it will be on par or slightly better than 2009. - BuaNews

Early on, in the 1950s, Robert Sternberg flubbed IQ tests, and his elementary school branded him a loser. "As a result of my low scores, my teachers thought I was stupid, and I did too," he writes in his passionate new book, College Admissions for the 21st Century. "They never came out and told us our IQ scores, but one could tell from the way the teachers acted I was a mediocre student, which made my teachers happy because they got what they expected." In a "self-fulfilling prophecy," Sternberg performed a little bit worse each year. But he lucked out in fourth grade when a teacher "had high expectations for me." He got A's and altered his "entire future trajectory."</img> </img> </img> </img> </img>


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Durban - The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education has dismissed 53 employees for submitting fake educational qualifications.

The employees were found guilty on charges of misconduct after the department carried out an internal control and risk management exercise earlier this year.

“This is part of a continuous and sustained campaign to identify individuals who have submitted fraudulent qualifications.

“This has dire consequences for the department, considering that some officials were holders of critical posts within the system,” said Cassius Lubisi, the KZN Education Department Superintendent-General.

He said the actions of the dismissed employees had cost the department a substantial financial loss, with an estimated R14 million lost for the period March 2004 to August 2009.

“The department will recover all monies and/or overpayments from the individuals concerned.

“A criminal investigation has been instituted with the assistance of the SAPS, as this is tantamount to fraud. The department is busy collating and verifying all information submitted by the more than 100 000 employees,” said Lubisi.

He added that the losses suffered by the department in terms of monetary value were immeasurable compared to how the education of hundreds of children had been compromised.

“These individuals did not only defraud the department… but they robbed children of the right to access quality education. They gambled with the future of many children, the majority of which hail from the most disadvantaged rural areas. For many of these children and their parents, earning a good education gives them hope for a better and brighter future,” said Lubisi.

In 2006, the department opened a window of opportunity for all those who had submitted bogus qualifications to come forward in exchange for reprieve. Those who did not do so are now facing the consequences. - BuaNews

Pretoria – With just one week to go before the start of the final exams, most matriculants and teachers in Pretoria say they are prepared and raring to go.

“Our learners are ready for the examinations and everything is in order,” said SA College Deputy School Principal Herbert Hughes.

Speaking to BuaNews, Hughes said the school had held two weeks of winter school and the attendance was very good. He is expecting good results.

One of the learners at the school, Thabang Thulare,18, said she was confident she was going to pass with flying colours. “I have been working very hard throughout the year, I’m confident I’m going to make it,” she said.

Jaco de Klerk, head boy at Waterkloof High School, has set his sights high and is hoping for distinctions in all his subjects. “I’m just going to stick to what I’ve been learning throughout the year which is practise, practise, practise - especially when it comes to maths,” he told BuaNews.

De Klerk admitted to being “just a little bit anxious” but added that he was well prepared for the exams.

Extra maths classes every week, winter school, weekend classes and plenty of revision has left him feeling confident about the exams.

“The support I received from my family and teachers has been phenomenal. I would not have been able to do it without them,” said De Klerk, who also managed to squeeze athletics and rugby into his hectic schedule during the year.

Tshegofatso Baloyi, however, said she was nervous about putting pen to paper in this year’s finals. Her first exam, Afrikaans Paper 1, kicks off on 28 October followed by Maths Paper 1 on Friday the 29th.

“I’m very nervous. I study at every chance I get,” said the 18-year-old Hillview High School pupil.

Tshegofatso, who wants to study nursing next year, said her message to other matrics was that “they must study very hard in order to make it”.

She added that the recent teacher strike had no impact on her studies as her teachers were present on school days.

Jomari Miller, vice principal of academics at St Mary’s Diocesan School for Girls, said the 89 Grade 12 girls at the school were well-prepared the exams.

“I think they are ready and I have faith that it will go well…We certainly expect a 100% pass rate,” she said, adding that the girls were currently on study leave.

Miller added that the teachers and pupils had put in hard work throughout the year, even sacrificing a week of their holidays earlier in the year to brush up on science and maths. Teachers had also completed the syllabus early in the year, leaving the girls enough time for revision.

She said those who list music and information technology among their subjects would start their exams on Tuesday.

Dansa International College Grade 12 learner, Bafana Nxumalo,19, told BuaNews he could not wait to start with the exams. “I’m prepared for the examinations and I’m confident I’m going to make it,” he said.

About 642 691 learners across the country have registered to sit for the exams, which start on 25 October. Exams will end on 3 December and marking will start the following day at 8000 centres countrywide. – BuaNews

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[SIZE="5"][/SIZE]Illustrations Of Incredible Brain Processes In Early Baby Brain Function
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2010) — [SIZE="5"]Northwestern University researchers have found that even before infants begin to speak, words play an important role in their cognition. For 3-month-old infants, words influence performance in a cognitive task in a way that goes beyond the influence of other kinds of sounds, including musical tones.
The research by Alissa Ferry, Susan Hespos and Sandra Waxman in the psychology department in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, will appear in the March/April edition of the journal Child Development. In the study, infants who heard words provided evidence of categorization, while infants who heard tone sequences did not.
Three-month-old infants were shown a series of pictures of fish that were paired with words or beeps. Infants in the word group were told, for example, "Look at the toma!" --- a made-up word for fish, as they viewed each picture. Other infants heard a series of beeps carefully matched to the labeling phrases for tone and duration. Then infants were shown a picture of a new fish and a dinosaur side-by-side as the researchers measured how long they looked at each picture. If the infants formed the category, they would look longer at one picture than the other.
The results, say the authors, were striking. The researchers found that although infants who heard in the word and tone groups saw exactly the same pictures for exactly the same amount of time, those who heard words formed the category fish; those who heard tones did not.
"For infants as young as three months of age, words exert a special influence that supports the ability to form a category," said Hespos, associate professor of psychology and one of the authors of the study. These findings offer the earliest evidence to date for a link between words and object categories."
Participants included 46 healthy, full-term infants, from 2 to 4 months of age. Half of the infants within each age bracket were randomly assigned to the word group. All infants in the language group were from families where English was the predominant language spoken in the home. The remaining infants were in the tone group.
"We suspect that human speech, and perhaps especially infant-directed speech, engenders in young infants a kind of attention to the surrounding objects that promotes categorization," said Waxman, a co-author and professor of psychology. "We proposed that over time, this general attentional effect would become more refined, as infants begin to cull individual words from fluent speech, to distinguish among individual words and kinds of words, and to map those words to meaning."


ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2008) — Although babies typically start talking around 12 months of age, their brains actually begin processing certain aspects of language much earlier, so that by the time they start talking, babies actually already know hundreds of words. While studying language acquisition in infants can be a challenging endeavour, researchers have begun to make significant progress that changes previous views of what infants learn, according to a new report by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Daniel Swingley.
The report, published in the October issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, describes an increasing emphasis among researchers in studying vocabulary development in infants.
Infants have a unique ability to discriminate speech-sound (phonetic) differences, but over time they lose this skill for differentiating sounds in languages other than their native tongue. For example, 6 month old babies who were learning English were able to distinguish between similar-sounding Hindi consonants not found in English, but they lost this ability by 12 months of age. Since the 1980s it has been known that infants start focusing on their language’s consonants and vowels, sometimes to the exclusion of non-native sounds. More recently, researchers have increasingly focused on how infants handle whole words.
Recent research has shown that during infancy, babies learn not only individual speech sounds but also the auditory forms of words; that is, babies are not only aware of the pieces that make up a word, but they are aware of the entire word. These auditory forms of words allow children to increase their vocabulary and help them to eventually develop grammar. Although they may not know what the words mean, children as early as 8 months start learning the phonological (sound) forms of words and are able to recognize them—and just being familiar with the words helps increase the children’s vocabulary. Studies have shown that 18 month old children who are familiar with a word’s form are better at learning what it means and are also able to differentiate it from similar sounding words.
Knowing word forms may also contribute to children’s inferences about how their language works. For example, 7.5 month olds do not recognize words as being the same if they are spoken with different intonations or by a man and a woman. However, by 10.5 months of age, babies recognize the same words despite changes in the speaker or the intonation used. Another interesting finding was that although children learning a language can distinguish between long and short vowels, they interpret this difference according to the rules of their language. For instance, Dutch 18-month-olds considered tam and taam to be different words, while English 18-month-olds did not—showing children’s early learning of how each language uses vowel length.
How can researchers find out what young children know about words and the forms of words while children have only just begun to talk? One method takes advantage of the fact that even young toddlers like to look at images or objects that we name. In these experiments, the children’s eye movements are tracked while they are looking at two objects (for example, an apple and a dog). The researcher will say the name of one of the objects and see if the child’s eyes move to that object. In this way, researchers can change the sound of the words slightly (for example, instead of “dog” say “tog”) and see if the baby will look at the dog the same amount, as if indifferent to the change, or less, as is the case with adults who know that “dog” cannot be said as “tog.” The results of those studies showed that the children were less likely to look at the correct object when it was mispronounced, indicating that by one year of age, children are able to recognize mispronunciations of words.
This new research in language acquisition indicates that infants learn the forms of many words and they begin to gather information about how these forms are used. The author notes that “these word forms then become the foundation of the early vocabulary, support children’s learning of the language’s phonological system, and contribute to the discovery of grammar.”
In addition, there is a relationship between young children’s performance in word recognition and their later language achievement. The author concludes that “testing very young children’s ability to interpret spoken language, whether by identifying novel words as novel or by comprehending sentences, may prove a more sensitive predictor of children’s language outcomes than simpler tests of speech-sound categorization."[/SIZE]