Let's Have Lunch! Teachers Eating With Their Students Provides Nutrition Education Opportunities

How you "have lunch" could be important in enhancing these opportunities.

Much attention has focused on school meals, both in the United States and across the globe.

Researchers at Uppsala University, Sweden, evaluated teachers eating lunch with the school children.

In Sweden, this practice is referred to as "pedagogic meals" because it offers the opportunity of having children learn by modeling adults.

The researchers wanted to observe how the teachers interacted with the children during meals in order to better understand how to interpret results of this practice.

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Children Who Overestimate Their Popularity Less Likely to Be Bullies

Children who overestimate their popularity are less likely to be bullies than those who underestimate or hold more accurate assessments of their social standing, finds new research to be presented at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

“The more kids overestimated their popularity, the less aggression they displayed,” said Jennifer Watling Neal, an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “This means that kids who were more accurate in their assessment of their number of friends or who underestimated their quantity of friends compared to peer report were more aggressive.”

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FOR KIDS: Nature resets body’s clock

A short camping trip could help people rise and shine, researchers report.

After a week living in tents in Colorado’s Rockies, campers’ internal clocks shifted about two hours earlier.

It transformed even night owls into early birds.

“It’s a clever study, and it makes a dramatic point,” says Katherine Sharkey. A sleep researcher and physician at Brown University in Providence, R.I., she did not work on the new study.

People get much more light outside than they do indoors, she notes. And that can reset their internal body clocks.

A master clock in the brain controls the release of melatonin. This hormone prepares the body for sleep. Melatonin levels rise in the early evening and then taper off in the morning before a person wakes up.

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Centers Throughout the Brain Work Together to Make Reading Possible

A combination of brain scans and reading tests has revealed that several regions in the brain are responsible for allowing humans to read.

The findings open up the possibility that individuals who have difficulty reading may only need additional training for specific parts of the brain — targeted therapies that could more directly address their individual weaknesses.

“Reading is a complex task. No single part of the brain can do all the work,” said Qinghua He, postdoctoral research associate at the USC Brain and Creativity Institute, based at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences...

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Video games boost visual attention but reduce impulse control

A person playing a first-person shooter video game like Halo or Unreal Tournament must make decisions quickly.

That fast-paced decision-making, it turns out, boosts the player's visual skills but comes at a cost, according to new research: reducing the person's ability to inhibit impulsive behavior. This reduction in what is called "proactive executive control" appears to be yet another way that violent video games can increase aggressive behavior.

"We believe that any game that requires the same type of rapid responding as in most first-person shooters may produce similar effects on proactive executive control, regardless of violent content," says Craig Anderson, Director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University.

"However, this is quite speculative," he warns. But what is not so speculative is the growing body of research that links violent video games -- and to a certain extent, total screen time -- to attention-related problems and, ultimately, to aggression.

People's ability to override aggressive impulses is dependent in large part on good executive control capacity, as will be presented at a symposium at the American Psychological Association (APA) annual meeting in Honolulu.

And social psychologists are looking how a variety of factors – including media exposure, anger, and alcohol -- affect that capability.

Two types of cognitive control processes play a large role: proactive and reactive. "Proactive cognitive control involves keeping information active in short-term memory for use in later judgments, a kind of task preparation," Anderson explains. "Reactive control is more of a just-in-time type of decision resolution."

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Being Bullied Throughout Childhood and Teens May Lead to More Arrests, Convictions, Prison Time

People who were repeatedly bullied throughout childhood and adolescence were significantly more likely to go to prison than individuals who did not suffer repeated bullying, according to a new analysis presented at the American Psychological Association’s 121st Annual Convention.

Almost 14 percent of those who reported being bullied repeatedly from childhood through their teens ended up in prison as adults, compared to 6 percent of non-victims, 9 percent of childhood-only victims and 7 percent of teen-only victims, the study found.

When comparing rates of convictions, more than 20 percent of those who endured chronic bullying were convicted of crimes, compared to 11 percent of non-victims, 16 percent of childhood victims, and 13 percent of teen victims. Compared to nonwhite childhood victims, white childhood victims faced significantly greater odds of going to prison, according to the study.

"Previous research has examined bullying during specific time periods, whereas this study is the first to look at individuals’ reports of bullying that lasted throughout their childhood and teen years, and the legal consequences they faced in late adolescence and as adults"...

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Give Them a Hand: Gesturing Children Perform Well On Cognitive Tasks

 In the first study of its kind, SF State researchers have shown that younger children who use gestures outperform their peers in a problem-solving task.

The task itself is relatively simple -- sorting cards printed with colored shapes first by color, and then by shape. But the switch from color to shape can be tricky for children younger than 5, says Professor of Psychology Patricia Miller.

In a new study due to be published in the August, 2013 issue of Developmental Psychology, Miller and SF State graduate student Gina O'Neill found that young children who gesture are more likely to make the mental switch and group the shapes accurately.

In fact, gesturing seemed to trump age when it came to the sorting performance of the children, who ranged from 2 and a half years old to 5 years old. In the color versus shape task, as well as one that asked children to sort pictures based on size and spatial orientation, younger children who gestured often were more accurate in their choices than older children who gestured less. The children's gestures included rotating their hands to show the orientation of a card or using their hands to illustrate the image on the card, for example gesturing the shape of rabbits' ears for a card depicting a rabbit.

"Gina and I were surprised by the strength of the effect. Still, the findings are consistent with a growing body of research showing that mind and body work closely together in early cognitive development," Miller said.

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Ability to Learn New Words Based On Efficient Communication Between Brain Areas That Control Movement and Hearing

For the first time scientists have identified how a pathway in the brain which is unique to humans allows us to learn new words.

The average adult's vocabulary consists of about 30,000 words. This ability seems unique to humans as even the species closest to us - chimps - manage to learn no more than 100.

It has long been believed that language learning depends on the integration of hearing and repeating words but the neural mechanisms behind learning new words remained unclear.

Previous studies have shown that this may be related to a pathway in the brain only found in humans and that humans can learn only words that they can articulate.

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Singing helps students tune into a foreign language

Study provides the first experimental evidence that a listen-and-repeat singing method can support foreign language learning

Singing in a foreign language can significantly improve learning how to speak it, according to a new study published in Springer's journal Memory & Cognition.

Adults who listened to short Hungarian phrases and then sang them back performed better than those who spoke the phrases, researchers at the University of Edinburgh's Reid School of Music found.

People who sang the phrases back also fared better than those who repeated the phrases by speaking them rhythmically.

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Taste Rules for Kids and Healthy Food Choices

Sweet and salty flavors, repeat exposure, serving size and parental behavior are the key drivers in children’s food choices.

“Children’s decision making has few dimensions,” explained Dr. Adam Drewnowski (CQ), director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition and professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health, University of Washington, Seattle.

Not surprisingly, children lean toward sweets like cookies, chocolate, fruits and juices as well as salty foods that make them feel full like French fries and pizza.

But environment, peer groups, family, and exposure to a variety of menu items play a key role in children’s food choices.

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How to Keep Kids Engaged with Educational Games

If you want teams of students to stay engaged while playing educational games, you might want them to switch seats pretty often.

That’s one finding from a pilot study that evaluated how well middle school students were able to pay attention to game-based learning tasks.

Students at a Raleigh, N.C., middle school were divided into two-person teams for the pilot study.

Researchers from North Carolina State University then had each team test gaming concepts for an educational game called “Engage,” which allows only one student at a time to control gameplay.

The researchers were trying to determine how effective educational gaming tasks were at teaching computer science concepts, but were also monitoring how engaged each student was.

The researchers found that, for each team, the student actively performing the game tasks was much more likely to stay engaged – but that the second student would often lose focus.

“This is a very useful finding, because..."

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Educators Explore Innovative "Theater" as a Way to Learn Physics

In a study released last week, education researchers found that personifying energy allowed students to grapple with difficult ideas about how energy works.

Contrasted with more traditional lectures and graphs, this innovative instructional technique may be useful for teaching about other ideas in physical science, which commonly deals with things that change form over time.

Energy is a very important concept across many fields of science, and is a key focus of the new national science standards.

Energy is also a central player in several global issues, such as climate change and fuel economy.

However, energy is a challenging concept to fully understand.

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Bilingual Children Have a Two-Tracked Mind

Adults learning a foreign language often need flash cards, tapes, and practice, practice, practice.

Children, on the other hand, seem to pick up their native language out of thin air.

The learning process is even more remarkable when two languages are involved.

In a study examining how bilingual children learn the two different sound systems of languages they are acquiring simultaneously, Ithaca College faculty member Skott Freedman has discovered insights that indicate children can learn two native languages as easily as they can learn one.

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Dip, Dip, Hooray -- Kids Eat More Veggies With Flavored Dips

Many parents have a difficult time persuading their preschool-aged children to try vegetables, let alone eat them regularly.

Food and nutrition researchers have found that by offering a dip flavored with spices, children were more likely to try vegetables -- including those they had previously rejected.

"Less than 10 percent of 4- to 8-year-olds consume the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) recommended daily servings of vegetables," said Jennifer S. Savage, associate director of the Center for Childhood Obesity Research at Penn State. "

Even more striking is that over one-third of children consume no servings of vegetables on a typical day. We wanted to figure out a way to increase vegetable consumption."

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Place Matters in Analyzing Students’ Performance

Where a child lives makes a difference in how demographics and other factors influence algebra performance, and policies should take into account local variation, research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests.

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Head Start children and parents show robust gains in new intervention

An eight-week intervention involving 141 preschoolers in a Head Start program and their parents produced significant improvements in the children's behavior and brain functions supporting attention and reduced levels of parental stress that, in turn, improved the families' quality of life.

The findings — from the first phase of a long-term research project by University of Oregon neuroscientists that will monitor the families over time — appear this week online in advance of regular publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Kids’ Reading Success Boosted by Long-Term Individualized Instruction

Students who consistently receive individualized reading instruction from first through third grade become better readers than those who don’t, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

These findings come after a three-year study that followed several hundred Floridian students, who received varying amounts of individualized instruction, from first to third grade.

“Our results show that children need sustained, effective instruction from first through third grade if they are going to become proficient readers,” said psychological scientist Carol McDonald Connor of Arizona State University, who led the research team.

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Language Intervention Levels Playing Field for English Language Learners

A new approach to teaching pre-kindergarten could take a bite out of the achievement gap and level the playing field for America’s growing population of English language learners, according to a recently published study by researchers at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development.

“We are excited that we have helped teachers develop ways of teaching that result in such remarkable gains among children,” David K. Dickinson, professor of education and one of the project's leaders, said.

“Our teachers are committed to continuing using the approaches that are working, which means that many more children will benefit from being in their classrooms.”

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Giving children non-verbal clues about words boosts vocabularies

The clues that parents give toddlers about words can make a big difference in how deep their vocabularies are when they enter school, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

By using words to reference objects in the visual environment, parents can help young children learn new words, according to the research.

It also explores the difficult-to-measure quality of non-verbal clues to word meaning during interactions between parents and children learning to speak.

For example, saying, “There goes the zebra” while visiting the zoo helps a child learn the word “zebra” faster than saying, “Let’s go to see the zebra.”

Differences in the quality of parents’ non-verbal clues to toddlers (what children can see when their parents are talking) explain about a quarter (22 percent) of the differences in those same children’s vocabularies when they enter kindergarten, researchers found.

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Student Engagement More Complex, Changeable Than Thought

Pitt research paves way toward giving educators tools to recognize, correct disengagement among students

“Enhancing student engagement has been identified as the key to addressing problems of low achievement, high levels of student misbehavior, alienation, and high dropout rates.” – Pitt professor Ming-Te Wang

A student who shows up on time for school and listens respectfully in class might appear fully engaged to outside observers, including teachers.

But other measures of student engagement, including the student’s emotional and cognitive involvement with the course material, may tell a different story—one that could help teachers recognize students who are becoming less invested in their studies, according to a new study coauthored by a University of Pittsburgh researcher.

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