A new study finds children not only reap the benefits of working with therapy dogs — they enjoy it too. «Dog lovers often have an assumption that canine-assisted interventions are going to be effective because other people are going to love dogs,» says Nicole Harris, who conducted this research while a master’s student in the…

Promising new education interventions are potentially being ‘unnecessarily scrapped’ because trials to test their effectiveness are insufficiently faithful to the original research, a study warns. Researchers ran a large-scale computer simulation to examine how much ‘fidelity’ compromises the results of school-based trials of new learning innovations and strategies. ‘Fidelity’ is the extent to which these…

According to a recent study, open learning spaces are not directly associated with the physical activity of students in grades 3 and 5, even though more breaks from sedentary time were observed in open learning spaces compared to conventional classrooms. The findings are based on the CHIPASE study, carried out at the Faculty of Sport…

During neuropsychological assessments, participants complete tasks designed to study memory and thinking. Based on their performance, the participants receive a score that researchers use to evaluate how well specific domains of their cognition are functioning. Consider, though, two participants who achieve the same score on one of these paper-and-pencil neuropsychological tests. One took 60 seconds…

With pandemic lockdowns still in place last summer, The Ohio State University couldn’t host its in-person Summer Success Program to help preschoolers from low-income families prepare for kindergarten. Staff and teachers quickly pivoted to a fully virtual program, but they were worried: Could this really work with 4- and 5-year-olds who had no previous experience…

Researchers calculate that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from over 170 million Americans alive today, more than half of the population of the United States. A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million…

Adolescents who stopped studying math showed a reduction in a critical brain chemical for brain development. This reduction in brain chemical was found in a key brain area that supports math, memory, learning, reasoning and problem solving. 133 students between the ages of 14-18 took part in an experiment run by researchers from the Department…

Students who rarely ate breakfast on school days achieved lower GCSE grades than those who ate breakfast frequently, according to a new study. Researchers, from the University of Leeds, have for the first time demonstrated a link between eating breakfast and GCSE performance for secondary school students in the UK. Adding together all of a…

Even for infants just beginning to speak their first words, the way an object is named guides infants’ encoding, representation and memory for that object, according to new research. Encoding objects in memory and recalling them later is fundamental to human cognition and emerges in infancy. Evidence from a new recognition memory task reveals that…

A recent study analyzing the impact of a shorter school week for high schools found that 11th-grade students participating in a four-day week performed worse on standardized math tests than students who remained on five-day schedules. The effect was amplified among students in non-rural schools and was limited to math; no significant gap appeared in…