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First-Generation Students Unite
The New York Times: Ana Barros grew up in a two-family house built by Habitat for Humanity, hard by the boarded-up buildings and vacant lots of Newark. Neither parent attended college, but she was a star student. With a 2200 on her SATs, she expected to fit in at Harvard. Yet here she was at a lecture for a sociology course called, paradoxically, “Poverty in America,” as a classmate opened her laptop and planned a multicountry spring break trip to Europe. (Ms. Barros can’t afford textbooks; she borrows from the library.) On the sidewalks of Cambridge, students brush past her in their $700 Canada Goose parkas and $1,000 Moncler puffer jackets. (Ms.
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Word Gap? How About Conversation Gap?
The Huffington Post: The Clinton Foundation sponsors an initiative called Too Small to Fail, which aims to help low-income parents better prepare their children for school. Many children who grow up in poverty enter school already far behind, and this achievement gap often persists into adulthood. Much of this achievement gap can be traced back to poor language skills, including stunted vocabulary development -- the so-called "word gap." It's estimated that poor children, by the time they hit kindergarten, have heard 30 million fewer words than their more fortunate classmates.
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Why Babies Love (And Learn From) Magic Tricks
NPR: To survive, we humans need to be able to do a handful of things: breathe, of course. And drink and eat. Those are obvious. We're going to focus now on a less obvious — but no less vital — human function: learning. Because new research out today in the journal Science sheds light on the very building blocks of learning. Imagine an 11-month-old sitting in a high chair opposite a small stage where you might expect, say, a puppet show. Except this is a lab at Johns Hopkins University. Instead of a puppeteer, a researcher is rolling a red and blue striped ball down a ramp, toward a little wall at the bottom.
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How Children Develop the Idea of Free Will
The Wall Street Journal: We believe deeply in our own free will. I decide to walk through the doorway and I do, as simple as that. But from a scientific point of view, free will is extremely puzzling. For science, what we do results from the causal chain of events in our brains and minds. Where does free will fit in? But if free will doesn’t exist, why do we believe so strongly that it does? Where does that belief come from? In a new study in the journal Cognition, my colleagues and I tried to find out by looking at what children think about free will. When and how do our ideas about freedom develop? Philosophers point out that there are different versions of free will.
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Study: Your Voice Is The Secret To Getting Hired
Forbes: If you want the job, you better speak up: Your voice carries a personal power that assures people of your intelligence and competence in a way that mere written words can’t. A new study by University of Chicago Booth School of Business researchers, to be published by the Journal of Psychological Science, found that job candidates were more likely to be hired if they make their pitch using their voice rather than text. ... The Booth School researchers, Professor Nicholas Epley and Ph.D. candidate Juliana Schroeder, asked recruiters and hypothetical employers to rate candidates on their qualifications.
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Tweeners Trust Peers More Than Adults When Judging Risks
NPR: If you are the parent of a preteen, you are all too aware that they suddenly seem to value the opinions of their peers far more than yours. The good news, if there is any, is that you're not alone. Young teenagers ages 12 to 14 are more influenced by their peers' opinions than they are by adults', a study finds. That's true only for that age group, not for older teens, children or adults. Researchers asked 563 people visiting the London Science Museum to rate the riskiness of activities like crossing the street on a red light, biking without a helmet, or bungee jumping. The study was published last week in Psychological Science. Read the whole story: NPR
