Education

New research shines light on how parents who talk more to their infants improve their children's brain development. Scientists used imaging and audio recordings to link early language skills to caregiver speech, delivering an affirming message that parents can greatly influence their child's linguistic growth in ways that are trackable in brain scans.

Young babies make many squeals, vowel-like sounds, growls, and short word-like sounds such as 'ba' or 'aga.' Those precursors to speech or 'protophones' are later replaced with early words and, eventually, whole phrases and sentences. While some infants are naturally more 'talkative' than others, a new study confirms that there are differences between males and females in the number of those sounds.

A researcher is cautioning that a person's poor eating habits established during post-secondary studies can contribute to future health issues including obesity, respiratory illnesses and depression.

Repeatedly heading a soccer ball has been previously associated with negative long-term brain health for professional players. However, a new study found that a small number of repeated soccer headers equivalent to a throw-in did not cause immediate neurophysiological deficits for teens, suggesting that limited soccer heading exposure in youth sports may not result in irreversible harm if players are properly trained.

Researchers at the University of Bath surveyed over 4,000 people to test social ability and found that being female and educated are some of the best predictors for how well you get on with and understand others.

As cities are densified at a fast pace, there is now construction very close to roads and thoroughfares. It is already known that noise can have a negative impact on human health, but new research shows that as little as 40 decibels of traffic noise -- the typical level of background noise in an office environment or kitchen -- has a detrimental effect on cognitive performance.

For three years at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of students spent an estimated 56,000 hours analyzing the behavior of hundreds of solar flares. Their results could help astrophysicists understand how the sun's corona reaches temperatures of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

A new study finds that incoming students who participated in an online belonging exercise completed their first year as full-time college students at a higher rate than their peers, but only when their institution had strong strategies and resources in place to support diverse students' belonging.

This year and next, Americans will have the extraordinary opportunity to witness two solar eclipses as both will be visible throughout the continental U.S. Both occurrences promise to be remarkable events and teachable moments but preparation is essential. Astronomers provide a practical playbook to help teachers, students, and the general public prepare for the eclipse events.

Attending a high school with a high number of teachers with graduate training was the clearest predictor of the impact of school quality on late-life cognition, researchers found.

Neuroscientists have uncovered how exploratory actions enable animals to learn their spatial environment more efficiently. Their findings could help build better AI agents that can learn faster and require less experience.

Your native language could impact your musical ability. A global study that compared the melodic and rhythmic abilities of almost half a million people speaking 54 different languages found that tonal speakers are better able to discern between subtly different melodies, while non-tonal speakers are better able to tell whether a rhythm is beating in time with the music.

ChatGPT faced off against students on accounting assessments. Students scored an overall average of 76.7%, compared to ChatGPT's score of 47.4%. On a 11.3% of questions, ChatGPT scored higher than the student average, doing particularly well on AIS and auditing. But the AI bot did worse on tax, financial, and managerial assessments, possibly because ChatGPT struggled with the mathematical processes required for the latter type.

A set of recent studies demonstrates for the first time that learning multiple new tasks carries benefits for cognition long after the learning has been completed. One year after they learned new skills, the older research subjects tested higher for certain cognitive tasks than prior to the learning. Consistently, the scores for cognitive functions increased on average by at least two to three times, sometimes more.

A new study investigates where toddlers look when they learn new words. It finds that children with larger vocabularies looked quickly towards objects when learning new words. Meanwhile, children who knew fewer words looked back and forth between objects and took more time. The research team say that their findings could help identify children with delays in language development at an earlier stage. Importantly, it means these children could be given earlier support to build their best vocabulary before starting school.

Researchers have documented wide fluctuations and racial disparities in school discipline -- and ways educators might be better able to prevent incidents altogether.

When a person reads a sentence, two distinct networks in the brain are activated, working together to integrate the meanings of the individual words to obtain more complex, higher-order meaning, according to a new study.

Normal aging is associated with progressive cognitive decline. But can we train our brain to delay this process? A team has discovered that practicing and listening to music can alter cognitive decline in healthy seniors by stimulating the production of grey matter. To achieve these results, the researchers followed over 100 retired people who had never practiced music before. They were enrolled in piano and music awareness training for six months.

In the first Australian study of its kind, University of South Australia researchers found that when primary school children are on holidays, they're less active, more likely to be on screens, and tend to have a worse diet than during the school term.

Students whose brainwaves are more in sync with their classmates and teacher are likely to learn better than those lacking this 'brain-to-brain synchrony,' shows a new study by a team of psychology and education researchers.

As teacher shortages continue to worsen across the United States, a new study gives insight into why so many stressed and burnt-out teachers are leaving the profession. The study found teachers who struggle to cope with the stress of their job report far lower job satisfaction compared to teachers who find ways to manage the pressure.

In a new study, researchers had 28 high school students create their own machine-learning artificial intelligence (AI) models for analyzing data. The goals of the project were to help students explore the challenges, limitations and promise of AI, and to ensure a future workforce is prepared to make use of AI tools.

Bioinformaticians are focusing on the topic of creativity in research. They advocate teaching the importance of creative processes for the advancement of science especially in graduate study programs.

Sleep scientists' analyses show associations between early classes, less sleep, poor attendance and reduced grade point average. Studies in secondary and junior college students have shown that later start times can have positive impacts on grades.

Researchers found that preschoolers prefer learning from what they perceive as a competent robot over an incompetent human. This study is the first to use both a human speaker and a robot to see if children deem social affiliation and similarity more important than competency when choosing which source to trust and learn from.

Language that is easier to process encourages continued reading, as does language that evokes anxious, exciting, and hopeful emotions.

Collaborative research across the country has shown that strengthening the relationship between the student and advisor can increase retention rates in engineering doctoral studies.

IQ scores have substantially increased from 1932 through the 20th century, with differences rangingfrom three to five IQ points per decade, according to a phenomenon known asthe 'Flynn effect.' But a new study has found evidence of a reverse 'Flynn effect' in a large U.S. sample between 2006 and 2018 in every category except one. For the reverse Flynn effect, there were consistent negative slopes for three out of the four cognitive domains.

A new study suggests the rise in mental health disorders in children and teens is attributed to a decline over decades in opportunities for them to play, roam and engage in activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults. Although well intended, adults' drive to guide and protect children has deprived them of the independence they need for mental health, contributing to record levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people.

A new global study, which takes a gender-sensitive approach, has found that a mother's educational status plays an increasingly important role in shaping their children's educational status, while the importance of the father's educational status has declined. Education expansion was expected to create greater social mobility around the world, but new global evidence from Lancaster University and the University of British Columbia challenges this assumption and shows how gender really matters.