An adolescent’s day can be filled with a dizzying array of digital technologies. For many teenagers, being online is a way to pass the time and communicate with friends. Cell phones and social media can also help teens cope with stressful events — as long as they strike the right balance between spending time online…

Kids with wildly popular YouTube channels are frequently promoting unhealthy food and drinks in their videos, warn researchers. Food and beverage companies spend $1.8 billion dollars a year marketing their products to young people. Although television advertising is a major source of food marketing, companies have dramatically increased online advertising in response to consumers’ growing…

Time on the internet can be informative, instructive and even pleasant, there is already significant literature on the potential harm caused by young children’s problematic internet use (PIU). A new study is one of only a few that examines PIU’s effects on older adolescents. As many previous studies have pointed out, and as many parents…

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…

Teaching big data to future scientists means having them think creatively about ways to harness the terabytes of information available to them. To that end, a systems biologist used his graduate course to host a classroom competition tasking students with detecting genes associated with schizophrenia. The winning technique was quick, flexible, and outperformed previously published…

A multi-national European study, looking at over 5,500 students, has found that a novel school intervention program can not only improve the mathematics scores of primary school children from disadvantaged areas, but can also lessen the achievement gap caused by socioeconomic status. Known as the Dynamic Approach to School Improvement (DASI), the program is based…

A new study demonstrates that increasing class size has the largest negative impact on female participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) classrooms, and offers insights on ways to change the trend. Using data obtained from 44 science courses across multiple institutions — including Cornell, the University of Minnesota, Bethel University and American University…

An international team of researchers has found the Internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations in specific areas of cognition, which may reflect changes in the brain, affecting our attentional capacities, memory processes, and social interactions. In a first of its kind review, published in World Psychiatry — the world’s leading psychiatric research journal,…

A recent study finds that an online intervention taking less than 30 minutes significantly increased interest in computer science for both male and female undergraduate students. However, when it comes to the intervention’s impact on classroom performance, the picture gets more complicated. «Our focus was on determining how and whether a ‘growth mindset’ intervention would…

A recent study revealed students at an international school in Finland significantly outperformed US students on tasks which measure digital literacy in social media and online news. The researchers suggest this may be due to the Finnish and International Baccalaureate curricula’s different way of facilitating students’ critical thinking skills compared to the US system and…