Preschool Children Who Can Pay Attention More Likely to Finish College

Early Reading and Math Not Predictive of College Completion

Young children who are able to pay attention and persist with a task have a 50 percent greater chance of completing college, according to a new study at Oregon State University.

Tracking a group of 430 preschool-age children, the study gives compelling evidence that social and behavioral skills, such as paying attention, following directions and completing a task may be even more crucial than academic abilities.

And the good news for parents and educators, the researchers said, is that attention and persistence skills are malleable and can be taught.

The results were just published online in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

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Students With Strong Hearts and Lungs May Make Better Grades

Having a healthy heart and lungs may be one of the most important factors for middle school students to make good grades in math and reading, according to findings presented at the American Psychological Association's 120th Annual Convention.

"Cardiorespiratory fitness was the only factor that we consistently found to have an impact on both boys' and girls' grades on reading and math tests," said study co-author Trent A. Petrie, PhD, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Sport Psychology at the University of North Texas. "This provides more evidence that schools need to re-examine any policies that have limited students' involvement in physical education classes."

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Early Relationships, Not Brainpower, Key to Adult Happiness

Social connection is a more important route to adult well-being than academic ability.
Positive social relationships in childhood and adolescence are key to adult well-being, according to Associate Professor Craig Olsson from Deakin University and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and his colleagues.

In contrast, academic achievement appears to have little effect on adult well-being.

The exploratory work, looking at the child and adolescent origins of well-being in adulthood, is published online in Springer's Journal of Happiness Studies.

 We know very little about how aspects of childhood and adolescent development, such as academic and social-emotional function, affect adult well-being -- defined here as a combination of a sense of coherence, positive coping strategies, social engagement and self-perceived strengths.

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New NASA Game Lets Players Build and Launch a Virtual Rocket

With NASA's Rocket Science 101, a new game designed for computers and iPad users, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to launch a spacecraft.

NASA's Launch Services Program (LSP), based at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, provides access to space for the studies of Earth and exploration of our solar system and the universe. Now, LSP is turning over the virtual selection, construction and launch of a mission to players who will decide the best rocket to assemble to launch a spacecraft. Rocket scientists in LSP do the same thing for real rockets and missions every day.

Players select their favorite NASA mission and choose from three skill levels for building a rocket to send the spacecraft into orbit. The Rocket Science 101 challenge provides players an opportunity to learn about NASA missions and the various components of the launch vehicles, including how rockets are configured and how they work together to successfully launch a spacecraft.

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Scientists Find Learning Is Not 'Hard-Wired'

Neuroscience exploded into the education conversation more than 20 years ago, in step with the evolution of personal computers and the rise of the Internet, and policymakers hoped medical discoveries could likewise help doctors and teachers understand the "hard wiring" of the brain.

That conception of how the brain works, exacerbated by the difficulty in translating research from lab to classroom, spawned a generation of neuro-myths and snake-oil pitches—from programs to improve cross-hemisphere brain communication to teaching practices aimed at "auditory" or "visual" learners.

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Immediate Rewards for Good Scores Can Boost Student Performance

Test performance can improve dramatically if students are offered rewards just before they are given standardized tests and if they receive the incentive immediately afterward, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

Educators have long debated the value of financial and other rewards as incentives, but a series of experiments in Chicago-area schools showed that with the right kind of rewards, students achievement improved by as much as six months beyond what would be expected.

The rewards apparently provide students with an incentive to take tests more seriously. One implication is that policymakers may underestimate students' ability in otherwise low-performing schools, according to the research team that conducted the experiments.

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Why K-8 May Be a Better Approach

Knowing that middle schoolers, even eighth graders, are still the children who played tag at recess a mere three or four years before, is not infantilizing, but humanizing to the young adolescent. Middle schoolers are proud, of course, of their new status as almost teens, but the almost is what most defines them.

When educators are unaware of how developmentally close the middle schooler is to elementary schooler, we miss the opportunity to teach the whole person, both the child who is leaving childhood behind, as well as the young adult who is looking forward to the challenges of independence.

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Keep Them Part of an Elementary School

Other than the critical early years of child development, there may be no more essential time in a child’s education than adolescence. All too often, however, these adolescent years are spent in poorly designed middle school settings, which increase the likelihood that students will succumb to peer pressure and fall off the academic track.

The question to consider, therefore, is “what approach and educational design are needed during these years to give students the environment and academic program they need to complete 8th grade poised for success in high school?

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Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It

Spurred by growing concerns that American students lack the skills to compete in a global economy, school districts nationwide are packing engineering lessons into already crowded schedules for even the youngest students, giving priority to a subject that was once left to after-school robotics clubs and summer camps, or else waited until college.

Supporters say that engineering reinforces math and science skills, promotes critical thinking and creativity, and teaches students not to be afraid of taking intellectual risks.

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Studies Illustrate Plight of Introverted Students

Educators often look for ways to bring quiet children out of their shells, but emerging research suggests schools can improve academic outcomes for introverted students by reducing the pressure to be outgoing and giving all students a little more time to reflect.

"Whoever designed the context of the modern classroom was certainly not thinking of the shy or quiet kids," said Robert J. Coplan, a psychology professor and shyness expert at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. With often-crowded, high-stimulation rooms and a focus on oral performance for class participation, he said, "in many ways, the modern classroom is the quiet kid's worst nightmare."

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Playful Games Promote Reading Development

Short but intense training sessions in the form of structured language games from the age of four can stimulate children's early language development and may also make it easier for children to learn to read. This is found in a current research project at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Previous research has shown that children's reading development can be stimulated with structured and playful language games from the age of six. In a current three-year study, researchers at the University of Gothenburg are exploring the effects of having children as young as four participate in such games. The hypothesis is that young children who are actively stimulated in their development of so-called linguistic and phonological awareness end up better prepared for dealing with written language.

Linguistic awareness means that the child is aware of his or her own language, what it sounds like and how it consists of words and sentences. Phonological awareness implies an awareness of the sound structure of the language, which is important for the early stages of reading development and for understanding the connection between letters and sounds.

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US Students Need New Way of Learning Science

American students need a dramatically new approach to improve how they learn science, says a noted group of scientists and educators led by Michigan State University professor William Schmidt.
After six years of work, the group has proposed a solution.

The 8+1 Science concept calls for a radical overhaul in K-12 schools that moves away from memorizing scientific facts and focuses on helping students understand eight fundamental science concepts. The "plus one" is the importance of inquiry, the practice of asking why things happen around us -- and a fundamental part of science.

"Now is the time to rethink how we teach science," said Schmidt, University Distinguished Professor of statistics and education. "What we are proposing through 8+1 Science is a new way of thinking about and teaching science, not a new set of science standards. It supports basic concepts included in most sets of state standards currently in use and complements standards-based education reform efforts."

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When Gaming Is Good for You

Videogames can change a person's brain and, as researchers are finding, often that change is for the better.

Love them or hate them, online videogames are a treasure trove for researchers who are studying how all those keyboard taps, mouse clicks and joystick moves may affect behavior, perception and even cognitive skills. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports.

A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability.

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How Do Children Learn to Read Silently?

When a beginning reader reads aloud, her progress is apparent: Hunched over a book, little index finger blazing the way, she moves intently from sound to sound, word to word.

• I do not like green eggs and ham!
• I do not like them, Sam-I-am!

 But when that same child reads silently, it's much harder to measure how much she is reading -- or understanding. Yet as she advances through school, teachers will expect her to learn increasingly through silent rather than oral reading.

Researchers at the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) at Florida State University will tackle that paradox over the next four years. Funded by a $1.6 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, a team headed by FCRR researcher Young-Suk Kim will examine a poorly understood area of literacy: the relationship between oral and silent reading, and how those skills, in turn, relate to reading comprehension.

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To Perform With Less Effort, Practice Beyond Perfection

Whether you are an athlete, a musician or a stroke patient learning to walk again, practice can make perfect, but more practice may make you more efficient, according to a surprising new University of Colorado Boulder study.

The study, led by CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Alaa Ahmed, looked at how test subjects learned particular arm-reaching movements using a robotic arm. The results showed that even after a reaching task had been learned and the corresponding decrease in muscle activity had reached a stable state, the overall energy costs to the test subjects continued to decrease. By the end of the task, the net metabolic cost as measured by oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide exhalation had decreased by about 20 percent, she said.

"The message from this study is that in order to perform with less effort, keep on practicing, even after it seems as if the task has been learned," said Ahmed of CU-Boulder's integrative physiology department. "We have shown there is an advantage to continued practice beyond any visible changes in performance."

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Good Relationship With Teacher Can Protect First Graders from Aggression

Children who have a good relationship with their teacher may be protected from expressing aggression and being the target of aggression at school. That's the key finding in a new study of Canadian first graders that appears in the journal Child Development.

The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Quebec at Montreal, Laval University, the University of Alabama, the University of Montreal, and University College Dublin.

"Aggressive behavior in middle childhood is at least partly explained by genetic factors, but genetic influences on behavior usually don't operate independently of environmental influences," notes Mara Brendgen, professor of psychology at the University of Quebec at Montreal, who led the study.

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Two-Year-Old Children Understand Complex Grammar

Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have found that children as young as two years old have an understanding of complex grammar even before they have learned to speak in full sentences.

Researchers at the University's Child Language Study Centre showed children, aged two, sentences containing made-up verbs, such as 'the rabbit is glorping the duck', and asked them to match the sentence with a cartoon picture. They found that even the youngest two-year-old could identify the correct image with the correct sentence, more often than would be expected by chance.

The study suggests that infants know more about language structure than they can actually articulate, and at a much earlier age than previously thought. The work also shows that children may use the structure of sentences to understand new words, which may help explain the speed at which infants acquire speech.

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Like Humans, Chimps Are Born With Immature Forebrains

In both chimpanzees and humans, portions of the brain that are critical for complex cognitive functions, including decision-making, self-awareness and creativity, are immature at birth. But there are important differences, too. Baby chimpanzees don't show the same dramatic increase in the volume of prefrontal white matter in the brain that human infants do.

"One of the most marked evolutionary changes underlying human-specific cognitive traits is a greatly enlarged prefrontal cortex," said Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University in Japan. "It is also one of the latest-developing brain regions of the cerebrum."

That built-in developmental delay, now shown to be shared with chimps, may provide an extended period of plasticity, allowing both humans and our closest evolutionary cousins to develop complex social interactions, knowledge and skills that are shaped by life experiences, the researchers say.

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Learning Science : Actively Recalling Information from Memory Beats Elaborate Study Methods

Put down those science text books and work at recalling information from memory. That's the shorthand take away message of new research from Purdue University that says practicing memory retrieval boosts science learning far better than elaborate study methods.

"Our view is that learning is not about studying or getting knowledge 'in memory,'" said Purdue psychology professor Jeffrey Karpicke, the lead investigator for the study that appears January 20 in the journal Science. "Learning is about retrieving. So it is important to make retrieval practice an integral part of the learning process."

Educators traditionally rely on learning activities that encourage elaborate study routines and techniques focused on improving the encoding of information into memory. But, when students practice retrieval, they set aside the material they are trying to learn and instead practice calling it to mind.

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Math That Moves: Schools Embrace the iPad

A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through “Jeopardy”-like games and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems.

As part of a pilot program, Roslyn High School on Long Island handed out 47 iPads on Dec. 20 to the students and teachers in two humanities classes. The school district hopes to provide iPads eventually to all 1,100 of its students.

The iPads cost $750 apiece, and they are to be used in class and at home during the school year to replace textbooks, allow students to correspond with teachers and turn in papers and homework assignments, and preserve a record of student work in digital portfolios.

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