Women exposed to successful and charismatic role models are more likely to follow them in choosing a university major. An experiment with undergraduates studying introductory economics classes at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in the USA, published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, revealed that female students were hugely more likely to study the subject…

Programs exclusively focused on petting therapy dogs improved stressed-out students’ thinking and planning skills more effectively than programs that included traditional stress-management information, according to new research. Programs exclusively focused on petting therapy dogs improved stressed-out students’ thinking and planning skills more effectively than programs that included traditional stress-management information, according to new Washington State…

People are more likely to blame violent video games as a cause of school shootings by white perpetrators than by African-American perpetrators, possibly because of racial stereotypes that associate minorities with violent crime, according to new research. Researchers analyzed more than 200,000 news articles about 204 mass shootings over a 40-year period and found that…

The more an academic discipline is perceived to require raw talent or ‘brilliance’ for success, the more both women and early-career academics feel professionally inadequate — like ‘impostors’ — finds a new study of U.S. academics by a team of psychology researchers. The results, which appear in the Journal of Educational Psychology, were especially pronounced…

Understanding sounds in language is a critical building block for child literacy, yet this skill is often overlooked. Researchers have now developed a new software tool to assess children’s phonological awareness — or, how they process the sound structure of words. The ATLAS, or Access to Literacy Assessment System, program — the first test of…

Students who attend the Georgia Prekindergarten Program are more likely to achieve in mathematics than those who do not attend pre-K, according to a new study. «Students who participated in the study were twice as likely to meet the state standards in their mathematics achievement,» said Neuharth-Pritchett. «School becomes more challenging as one progresses through…

Intelligent tutoring systems have been shown to be effective in helping to teach certain subjects, such as algebra or grammar, but creating these computerized systems is difficult and laborious. Now, researchers have shown they can rapidly build them by, in effect, teaching the computer to teach. Using a new method that employs artificial intelligence, a…

A recent study suggests that teaching children to understand other people’s perspectives could make it easier for them to learn how to forgive other people. The study also found that teaching children to make sincere apologies can help them receive forgiveness from others. «Forgiveness is important in children and adults for restoring relationships and limiting…

Children experiencing cognitive problems such as low attention, poor memory or lack of inhibition may later suffer mental health issues as teenagers and young adults, a new study reveals. Cognitive deficits are core features of mental disorders and important in predicting long-term prognosis — the researchers’ work indicates that individual patterns of such deficits predate…

Just how stressed are teachers? A recent Gallup poll found teachers are tied with nurses for the most stressful occupation in America today. Unfortunately, that stress can have a trickle-down effect on their students, leading to disruptive behavior that results in student suspensions. One of those overburdened teachers is Jennifer Lloyd, a high school English…