Are you setting your students up for success?

Check out some of the latest research about children, stress, and the use of today's technology.  What can you do to make sure your child or students is at their best for success?


American Psychological Association - Monitor Magazine:

In brief

Snapshots of some of the latest peer-reviewed research within psychology and related fields.

June 2013, Vol 44, No. 6

Print version: page 16

• In Brief  = Texting, social networking and other media use are linked to poor academic performance, according to research conducted at The Miriam Hospital's Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine in Providence, R.I. Scientists surveyed 483 female college freshmen about their use of 11 forms of media: television, movies, music, surfing the Internet, social networking, talking on a cell phone, texting; reading magazines, newspapers and non-school-related books; and playing video games. Participants also reported their grade point averages and completed surveys about their academic confidence, behaviors and problems. On average, the women spent nearly half their day engaged in some form of media use, particularly texting, listening to music, surfing the Internet and social networking, the research found. Media use in general was associated with lower GPAs and other negative academic outcomes. Newspaper reading and listening to music, however, were linked to positive academic performance (Emerging Adulthood, online March 26).

• In Brief  = Community-based prevention efforts may reduce prescription drug abuse among adolescents and young adults, suggests research by scientists at Iowa State University and Pennsylvania State University. The researchers looked at drug-prevention interventions aimed at middle school students and found that students who participated in them had a 20 percent to 65 percent reduced risk for prescription drug and opioid abuse, six to 14 years after the initial program implementation, compared with students in a control group that did not take part in a prevention intervention (American Journal of Public Health, April).
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• In Brief  = Children who avoid situations they find scary are more likely to have anxiety, according to a Mayo Clinic study of more than 800 children ages 7 to 18. Researchers asked the study participants and their parents to answer questions about the children's avoidance tendencies and measured the participants' anxiety levels a year later. They found that even after controlling for baseline anxiety children who described more avoidance behaviors at the study's onset tended to be more anxious a year later than those who didn't avoid — a trend that is consistent with how anxiety disorders often develop (Behavior Therapy, online March 4).

• In Brief  = We're much more distracted when we overhear a one-sided cellphone conversation than an in-person chat between two people, finds a study led by researchers at the University of San Diego. In the study, participants completed a task while researchers carried out short, scripted conversations in the background. Half of the participants overheard one side of the conversation carried out on a phone, and the rest overheard the discussion as a conversation between two people in the room with them. Not only did participants rate the cellphone conversation as more distracting, they also remembered more words and content from the cellphone conversations (PLoS ONE, March 13).

• In Brief  = Couch potatoes may be genetically predisposed to laziness, suggests a study of rodents conducted at the University of Missouri. The researchers put rats in cages with running wheels and measured how much each rat willingly ran on its wheels during a six-day period. They then bred the top 26 runners with each other and bred the 26 rats that ran the least with each other, and repeated that breeding process through 10 generations. The researchers found that the line of running rats chose to run 10 times more than the line of "lazy" rats. They also found 36 genes that may play a role in predisposing a rat to physical activity motivation (American Journal of Physiology: Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, online April 3).

• In Brief  = Mindfulness training boosts test scores, suggests research from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In a study, 48 undergraduates were randomly assigned to two weeks of meditation or nutrition courses.The researchers found that students who were given mindfulness training had significant improvements in performance on reading comprehension tests and working memory capacity (Psychological Science, online March 28).
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• In Brief  = Feeling powerful may protect against debilitating effects of negative stereotypes, suggests research conducted at Indiana University. Researchers conducted three experiments examining how feelings of power can protect women from decreases in cognitive resources when they are confronted by the stereotype that women are bad at math. The participants were asked to unscramble five-word sentences with words related to either high or low power — such as "dominant" and "controlling" vs. "subordinate" and "dependent." Each group was then given a math test in which the instructions either invoked the negative stereotype about women and math or were gender neutral. The women who were exposed to high-power words performed better in math than those exposed to low-power or neutral words (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, March).