Childrens learning

Brain imaging of 49 children aged 9-10 has found that those who were physically fit had a hippocampus significantly bigger (around 12%) than those who were not fit. Animal studies and those with older adults have shown that aerobic exercise increases the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. Physical fitness was measured by how efficiently the children used oxygen while running on a treadmill. Fitter children also did better on tests of relational (but not item) memory, and this association was directly mediated by hippocampal volume.

A study involving 117 six year old children and 104 eight year old children has found that the ability to preserve information in working memory begins at a much younger age than had previously been thought. Moreover the study revealed that, while any distraction between learning the words and having to recall them hindered recall, having to perform a verbal task was particularly damaging. This suggests that their remembering was based on “phonological rehearsal”, that is, verbally repeating the names of the items to themselves.

‘Working memory’ is thought to consist of three components: one concerned with auditory-verbal processing, one with visual-spatial processing, and a central executive that controls both. It has been hypothesized that the relationships between the components changes as children develop. Very young children are more reliant on visuospatial processing, but later the auditory-verbal module becomes more dominant. It has also been found that the two sensory modules are not strongly associated in younger (5-8) American children, but are strongly associated in older children (9-12).

You may think that telling students to strive for excellence is always a good strategy, but it turns out that it is not quite as simple as that. A series of four experiments looking at how students' attitudes toward achievement influenced their performance on various tasks has found that while those with high achievement motivation did better on a task when they also were exposed to subconscious "priming" that related to winning, mastery or excellence, those with low achievement motivation did worse.

Data from North Carolina's mandated End-of-Grade tests (2000-2005), which includes student reports on how frequently they use a home computer for schoolwork, watch TV or read for pleasure, reveals that students in grades five through eight (c.10-13), particularly those from disadvantaged families, tended to have lower reading and math scores after they got a home computer. The researchers suggest that the greater negative effect in disadvantaged households may reflect less parental monitoring.

A study involving 163 overweight children and adolescents aged 10 to 17 has revealed that moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea was linked to both lower academic grades and behavioral concerns. None of the students with moderate to severe OSA had an "A" average, and 30% had a "C" average or lower. In contrast, roughly 15% of those without sleep-disordered breathing had an "A" average, and only about 15% had a "C" average or lower. The results remained significant after adjustment for sex, race, socioeconomic status and sleep duration on school nights.

A national study involving some 8,000 children, has revealed receptive and expressive language, phonological awareness, literacy and early math abilities were all better in 4-year-old children whose parents reported having rules about what time their child goes to bed. Having an earlier bedtime also was predictive of higher scores for most developmental measures. Recommendations are that preschool children get a minimum of 11 hours of sleep each night.

A study involving 629 12th-grade students from three Los Angeles-area high schools has revealed that, across both genders and all ethnicities, adolescents with more in-school friends, compared with out-of-school friends, had higher grade point averages. It’s assumed that this is due to the fact that in-school friends are more likely to support school-related activities, including studying.

A national Swedish study involving the 1.16 million children in a national birth cohort identified nearly 8000 on the country's Prescribed Drug Register as using a prescription for ADHD medication (and thus assumed to suffer from severe ADHD). These children were significantly more likely to come from a family on welfare benefits (135% more likely), to have a mother with only the most basic education (130% more likely than those with mothers with university degrees), and to come from a single parent family (54% more likely).

Data from the same long-running study (the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development), this time involving 1,364 youth (followed since birth), found that teens who had spent the most hours in non-relative child care in their first 4½ years reported a slightly greater tendency toward impulsiveness and risk-taking at 15 than did peers who spent less time in child care (21% were in care for more than 30 hours a week; 24% had had more than one year of care by 4 ½).