In Montessori, Angeline Lillard shows that science has finally caught up with Maria Montessori: Current scientific research provides astounding support for her major insights. Lillard presents the research concerning eight insights that are foundational to Montessori education and describes how each of these insights is applied in the Montessori classroom. In reading this book, parents and teachers alike will develop a clear understanding of what happens in a Montessori classroom and, more important, why it happens and why it works.

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This study compared reading and math achievement of over 1,000 students in grades one through five in public Montessori and non-Montessori schools in Texas. No statistically significant differences in reading or math achievement were found in grades one through three, but Montessori students in grades four and five performed significantly better in both subjects than their peers in traditional schools.

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Cursive writing is a complex and central cultural skill (Kersey and James, 2013; Kiefer et al., 2015), involving many brain systems and the integration of both motor and perceptual skills (Vinci-Booher et al., 2016; Thibon et al., 2018). The skill of cursive writing is often used as a tool for learning (Arnold et al., 2017), considering the depths of processing that note-taking by hand provides, even in the absence of a review of the notes (Kiewra, 1985). Thus, cursive writing has been considered an essential precursor for further academic success (Fears and Lockman, 2018), and the skill is typically acquired during childhood in societies with a strong literacy tradition (Kiefer et al., 2015). Children must learn how to coordinate their hand movements accurately and produce the shape of each letter, and they may take several years to master this precise skill (Van der Meer and Van der Weel, 2017).

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These authors examined the reading skills of low-income Latino students from a bilingual Montessori pre-K program compared to similar students from a traditional bilingual pre-K program. Students who had participated in the Montessori preschool scored significantly higher on both Spanish and English reading tests. This suggests that the Montessori pre-K fostered superior language skills in both languages than the traditional pre-K, even though both were bilingual.

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The studies conducted by Edouard Séguin and Maria Montessori, both physicians and educationists, have given us proof that children need sensory experiences to grow and learn. This is all the more true for children with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD). Carol Kranowitz (The Out-of-Sync Child) says that "Just as the five main food groups provide daily nutritional requirements, a daily sensory diet fulfills physical and emotional needs”. Studies have also shown that stimulation of the tactile (touch), vestibular (inner ear), and proprioceptive (muscle and joint) senses help develop and grow dendrites and synapses in the brain.

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To be successful takes creativity, flexibility, self-control, and discipline. Central to all those are executive functions, including mentally playing with ideas, giving a considered rather than a compulsive response, and staying focused. This review compares research results from various activities and curricula that have been shown to improve children’s executive function, including computerized training, aerobic exercise, martial arts and mindfulness practices, and classroom curricula including Montessori education. In a comparison of curricula and curricula add-ons, the Montessori approach is shown to meet more criteria for the development of executive function for a more extended age group.

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A new paper published in Frontiers in Psychology provides more evidence that a Montessori education may be superior to traditional methods of education, especially on measures relating to students’ long-term psychological health and well-being.

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