PSYC 190 Quizlet

vaccine

- a vaccine is a dead, purified, or severely weakened version of a pathogen that's known to cause a disease. Scientists isolate this pathogen, weaken or neutralize it, and then, perhaps surprisingly, they grow copies of this weakened version by injecting them into chicken eggs, although alternative and much faster methods are now being developed. -When you or your child gets vaccinated, these weakened copies of the disease are entered into the bloodstream and they work by taking advantage of the body's natural defenses within the immune system. Whenever you encounter any kind of germ or pathogen, your immune system reacts to counter the disease. Immune cells called lymphocytes respond by producing antibodies that are specifically tailored to that particular disease. -These antibodies hang around for months or even years and are ready to attack the real life version of the disease if it ever crops up. Critically, since vaccines are not full-brown strains of a disease, you never actually experience the illness itself when you get vaccinated. -Antibodies, microscopic immune warriors, are created by your own body in response to dead or weakened versions of a pathogen. -vaccines aren't necessarily 100% effective. -young infants can't be vaccinated for some important diseases, not because the vaccines aren't safe earlier, but because they aren't able to make use of them. Left over antibodies that infants inherit from their mother during pregnancy attack the vaccine before it can stimulate the growth of the baby's own antibodies, making it useless early in development. This is why some vaccines like measles are done only after one year.

Short-term effects of acceleration

- compared students, who were invited to participate in an accelerated program, but turned it down to students, who accepted. One study like this investigated a program in which groups of students completed all the 1st and 2nd Grade in a single year, while another group did one Grade per year. -at the end of the first year, the accelerated students performed much better on tests of math and reading, than their non-accelerated peers. -A similar study looked at middle school students and assessed the effect of an accelerated math program by creating groups of students with similar IQs and math scores and then assigning them to either an accelerated or non-accelerated program. The accelerated students scored higher on a standardized 9th Grade mathematics test. -So in both cases, we see that accelerated kids learned more in a particular amount of time, -but the sum of the evidence taken together seems to suggest that for the one or 2% of kids, who do accelerate, the academic results are generally positive. -it looks like kids who choose to accelerate generally benefit from doing so in academic achievement

Heritability estimates for autism

- heritability estimates for autism are quite variable across studies, -First, the plain old concordance rate in autism diagnoses for identical twins is very high, about 60 to 65% and sometimes more, which makes it much higher than for other traits -remember that simple concordance can't tell us the whole story, since this includes twins who are raised together, and have the same environments. When we look at heritability, which considers twins raised together or apart to compute the variability that's contributed by genes relative to environmental factors, we find the best evidence I know of for environmental effects. Although some studies in this literature find very high heritability estimates, as high as nearly 90%, other studies find much, much lower estimates. -Although everyone agrees that genetics make some kids more vulnerable to autism than others, studies like this raise the possibility that environmental factors also play an important role.

Tentative conclusions we can draw on effectiveness of acceleration

- home schooling students perform significantly higher on the SAT relative to their non-home schooled counterparts. This same pattern has been found across a variety of standardized achievement tests over the past two decades. -On all tests used, home schooling students scored between the 84th and 89th percentile nationally, whereas the national average rank is by definition the 50th percentile.

brain-scanning studies for bilingual advantage

- she and others have shown that when bilinguals switch between languages, they activate parts of the brain involved in executive function, in a way that monolinguals do not. That's evidence that bilingualism reorganizes these parts of the brain. -"Brain data seems to carry so much weight, but we can't infer an advantage from a difference in brain organization," he says. To do that, you'd have to show that neural differences align with behavioral improvements and, as he and Paap have argued, the evidence for the latter is weak

recommendations for safe co-sleep

-"supine positioning, use of a firm sleep surface, breastfeeding, room-sharing without bed-sharing, routine immunization, consideration of a pacifier, and avoidance of soft bedding, overheating, and exposure to tobacco smoke, alcohol, and illicit drugs."

what should parents and teachers do for learning styles?

-, the evidence suggests that we should use whichever method works best overall rather than tailoring our techniques to the preferences of individual students. -Until we have stronger evidence for learning styles, sticking to what we know works best for the group seems like the safest way forward.

Spanking effects on parent-child relationship

-- So, the effect of spanking on parent-child relationships isn't understood in a lot of detail. Part of the reason is that there are cultural differences in how spanking is viewed. On a group level, there are negative correlations between the use of corporal punishment and the long-term quality of the parent-child relationship. That doesn't necessarily mean that every parent-child relationship is sort of damaged if the parent spanks, OK, but there are consistent negative correlations found.

what does the evidence tell us about the effectiveness of spanking in shaping children's behaviors?

-- The immediate versus long-term consequences of spanking are that, in the short term, there are a few studies that suggest that it is equally or perhaps a little more effective at getting children to stop a behavior, but in the long term, there are consistent correlations found with a number of negative outcomes. For example, there is damage done to the parent-child relationship, children who are spanked more, even controlling for their prior tendency towards aggressiveness, show more aggressiveness long-term -It does not seem to help with long-term compliance, that is children who are spanked are not more compliant children in the long term. -spanking doesn't seem to have positive effects, and it may even have negative results.

Vaccines and autism journal article

-1) the combination measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism by damaging the intestinal lining, which allows the entrance of encephalopathic proteins; (2) thimerosal, an ethylmercury-containing preservative in some vaccines, is toxic to the central nervous system; and (3) the simultaneous administration of multiple vaccines overwhelms or weakens the immune system. We will discuss the genesis of each of these theories and review the relevant epidemiological evidence -However, both epidemiological and biological studies fail to support these claims that vaccines cause autism -Wakefield postulated that MMR vaccine caused intestinal inflammation that led to translocation of usu- ally nonpermeable peptides to the bloodstream and, subse- quently, to the brain, where they affected development -no change in the rates of autism diagnoses after the 1987 introduction of MMR vaccine was observed. Further, MMR vaccination rates of autistic children were similar to those of the entire study population. Also, investigators did not observe a clustering of autism diagnoses relative to the time that children received MMR vaccine, nor did they observe a difference in age at autism diagnosis between those vac- cinated and not vaccinated or between those vaccinated before or after 18 months of age. - First, the ex- plicit consideration of developmental regression among autistic children does not alter the consistent independence of MMR vaccine and autism. Second, these data argue against the ex- istence of a new variant form of autism -However, in 1990, a steady increase in the incidence of autism began in both countries and continued through the end of the study period in 2000, despite the removal of thimerosal from vaccines in 1992. -demonstrated no rela- tionship between thimerosal exposure and autism - The most prominent theory suggests that the simultaneous administration of multiple vaccines overwhelms or weakens the immune system and creates an interaction with the nervous system that triggers autism in a susceptible host. -Vaccines do not overwhelm the immune system. -Consistent with this theoretical exercise, combinations of vaccines induce immune responses comparable to those given individually -he average child is infected with 4-6 viruses per year -Multiple vaccinations do not weaken the immune system. Vaccinated and unvaccinated children do not differ in their susceptibility to infections not prevented by vaccines -herefore, the available data suggest that vaccines do not weaken the immune system. Autism is not an immune-mediated disease -Twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thi- merosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism

what does predict kids lying (2 ingredients)

-1. theory of mind -> tell what i know differs from what you know (seems to emerge around 2 years)-> earlier theory of mind ability tend to lie earlier 2. Executive function (ability to control your facial expression, body language, speech)-> advanced in executive functioning then you tend to lie earlier -if you develop these two ingredients earlier and better then you will be better lier -if you don't lie early or you don't lie at all there may be something wrong with the child bc can have defecits in these areas

Mothers IQ and breastfeeding

-A 2006 study examined over 5,000 children and found that quote, "the mother's IQ was more highly predictive "of breastfeeding status than were her race, "education, age, poverty status, smoking, "the home environment, or the child's birth weight "or birth order. -that mothers with higher IQs are more likely to breastfeed. -mothers with higher IQs are more likely to breastfeed and this accounts for almost all of the association between being breastfed and having a higher IQ as an adult.

effects of divorce on children have changed over time

-A large summary of 92 studies found that if you look at very early studies of this question, large negative consequences are found. But if you look at more recent studies, these find much smaller negative effects of divorce on children. Why might this be? Well, one thing that has changed over time in the US and elsewhere is that divorce has become much more common, and, studies show, much more accepted. What this means is that couples who divorced three or four decades ago were much more unusual than couples who divorce now, -Today, much smaller, though perhaps significant relationship problems may lead people to break up.

press article about spanking

-A new meta-analysis addresses several of the most contentious points in the debate and concludes that spanking does pose risks, but differences of opinion persist -They found that spanking was associated with 13 out of a total of 17 negative outcomes they assessed, including increased aggression and behavioral and mental health problems as well as reduced cognitive ability and self-esteem. -limited their meta-analysis to studies that evaluated the effects of spanking, slapping and hitting children without the use of objects, and found that spanking is still associated with negative outcomes. They also compared the results from cross- sectional studies with results from longitudinal studies, which track the kids' behavior over time and are better able to tease out cause and effect. Gershoff and Grogan- Kaylor found that spanking is associated with negative outcomes in both types of studies, which strengthens the argument that spanking poses risks. -Yet some researchers remain skeptical. First, although the new analysis did attempt to separate the effects of spanking from those of physical tactics that are considered harsher, research has shown that many parents who spank also use other forms of punishment—so "you're still not really isolating spanking from overall abusiveness," - It considered slapping and hitting children anywhere on the body as synonymous with spanking but these actions might have distinct effects. Some research also suggests that the effects of spanking differ depending on the reasons parents spank, how frequently they do so and how old children are at the time—so the conclusion from the meta-analysis that spanking itself is dangerous may be overly simplistic. - Are kids spanked because they act out or do they act out because they are spanked—or both? -To rule out the possibility that spanking is only associated with bad outcomes because poorly behaved kids are the ones getting -spanked, researchers can use statistical methods to control for the influence of temperament and preexisting behavioral characteristics—but these methods are difficult to employ in meta-analyses, and the new analysis did not attempt such a feat. Ferguson did try to control for the effects of preexisting child behavior in a 2013 meta-analysis he published of the longitudinal studies on this issue; when he did, "spanking's effects became trivial,-> when controlling for personality and temperament the effects of spanking became trivial -Still, a number of individual studies have found associations between spanking and negative outcomes, even after controlling for preexisting child behavior. - "Studies continue to find that spanking predicts negative behavior changes—there are no studies showing that kids improve," -there is a worrying body of research suggesting that parents who spank will later use harsher forms of punishment.

Executive function at 3 and 5 predicted later life outcomes

-A recent study by Moffit and colleagues traced 1000 kids from 1972 to 2005, a massive study and found that executive function tested at three and five years of age predicted important life outcomes more than 30 years later. Specifically they found that parent, teacher and self-reports of impulsivity, aggression, hyperactivity and lack of persistence on tasks was predictive of the following things. First, in teens, it predicted smoking, high school dropout and teenage pregnancy. Second, in adults it predicted substance abuse, poor physical health, low income, low savings and high rates of criminal conviction. In other words, childhood difficulties in paying attention, controlling impulses, planning and the ability to flexibly change tasks, predicted the same problems later in life, with stark consequences for health, wealth and wellbeing.

Ferberizing

-A sort baby training that is meant to help children self-sooth before receiving external comfort from the parent. -The technique is based on an old idea from Skinner's behaviorist science. A training regime that we called, extinction, in a previous video. If you'll recall, extinction involves removing a previously available reward in order to remove an association between a behavior, like crying, and a reward, like comforting embrace. By removing the reward, the reasoning goes: the behavior will also gradually decrease. Based on this, the technique proposes that parents should develop a sort of comfort schedule for the child. Where they don't simply rush to the room every time the baby cries. But, instead, parents are advised to go to the child at regular intervals. Which become progressively longer as the program continues. With the idea that the baby gets conditioned to self-soothing, rather than becoming overly reliant on the parent. It's critical to emphasize that the timing here is everything. Parents must adhere to the regular schedule. Since deviating from it can have disastrous consequences. (being random can make the behavior happen even more) -Some people have criticized this approach. Saying that it causes too much physiological stress for the baby in the short term. -at this time, there isn't actually any scientific evidence that Ferberizing or other similar extinction training approaches do long term physical or psychological damage to the child. In fact, some studies show that these approaches reduce the amount of time it takes children to fall asleep without undue stress and without any consequences for social or emotional wellbeing, up to a year later. Although infants suffer during the minutes that they are actually crying, stress hormones appear to drop almost instantly once they've stopped crying. And as infants are trained, they end up crying much less overall than infants who aren't sleep trained. Long term studies show that there are no long term negative consequences of Ferberizing and that sleep trained babies look similar to untrained babies even five years later. In the end, the most important thing seems to be that parents are consistent in their approach and that they go with the method they think will be most effective for their own child and situation

neurofeedback

-Another practice that has received some amount of scientific support and a recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics is called neurofeedback. This technique is remarkably similar to meditation, actually, but simply adds an external feedback. By placing non-invasive sensors on the child's head that measure electrical activity in their brain, a sound or a visual feedback can be created, and the child can attempt to change the shape of the feedback. For example, trying to achieve a particular sound by focusing on it. So unlike meditation where the child is asked to notice and modify their brain states on their own without feedback, this method tells you when you're succeeding, and when your mind is wandering

What are home school graduates more likely to do

-As adults, home schooled graduates are more likely than the average American to vote, to participate in community service, and to engage in political activities. -there are no major drawbacks to home schooling, and many potential benefits for those who are able to do it.

How should a good study looking at acceleration go?

-Because of this, research on acceleration needs to use carefully selected control groups. Ideally, a good study would compare students of the same ability, who either accelerate, or who don't, otherwise there's a real risk that any positive outcomes we see for accelerated students may arise just because the student was already destined to succeed, rather than because of how quickly they sped through the curriculum.

About that breastfeeding study

-Breastfed babies may grow up to have higher intelligence and make more money than their formula-fed peers -it's worth noting that we already know that breastfeeding is good for babies—breast milk is full of protective nutrients for infants at a time when they're especially vulnerable. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends mothers breastfeed their babies for at least the first six months of life. -contingency of babies who dropped out of the research group over time. The rate of what clinical researchers refer to as "loss of follow-up" is relatively high, which raises a host of questions about the validity of the study's conclusions. -In general, a follow-up rate has to exceed 60 percent to be considered acceptable, and reach 80 or 90 percent for it to be considered good-> their rate is 59 -So, in theory, the breastfed babies who wouldn't have ended up earning as much or performing as well on an IQ test could have been the ones lost to the study. Which is why these sorts of losses to follow-up are considered one of the main threats to validity in clinical trials -questions -> Like the fact that mothers participating in the study were required to recall their breastfeeding habits years after their babies were born. -Relying on a research subject's memory can be a major threat to validity, and breastfeeding mothers have provided inaccurate estimates to scientists before. -In other words, because mothers who breastfeed are also more likely to enjoy a higher socioeconomic status, maybe the breastfed babies have higher IQs and better income in life because of advantages—other than breast milk—associated with that higher socioeconomic status. -Measuring either—intelligence or success—is tricky because, like happiness, they're difficult to quantify in meaningful terms. And though breastfeeding may play a role in how a kid turns out, 30 years of parenting surely has more to do with what kind of adult a baby becomes.

options for feeding child in first 4 months

-Breastfeeding, pumping breast milk and feeding with a bottle using a liquid formula, or combining two or more of these options. -many organizations recommend that infants be exclusively breast fed early in life. Whether by a direct contact with the breast or by pumping and feeding it with a bottle. -"breastfeeding carries many health benefits "for infants and mothers, "like protection against common childhood infections, "better survival during the first year of life, "and a lower risk of sudden infant death syndrome." -The World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding for infants in the first six months of life -correlational data that breastfeeding is better

Do learning preferences actually matter?

-But the bigger issue is that very few studies have tested the idea using a good experimental method using random assignment of learners to different experimental conditions. How could we do this? A sensible proposal raised by the review article is that we begin by asking people what their learning style is, and then by creating different training conditions based on this preference. One condition might teach students new information visually. Another might teach it verbally, and so on. Then we could randomly assign learners to these different conditions so that some people are in a condition that matches their preferred style, and others are in a condition that mismatches their preferred style -Currently, although there are lots and lots of studies out there, the science is simply not strong enough to support the idea that learning styles exist and affect learning. It's also not strong enough to tell us that the idea is false, on the other hand. -is that we don't have a firm basis in science as parents or as teachers to use this idea when teaching.

family structure

-By family structure I mean something fairly specific: Whether the parents live together, whether they're married, and whether they're same-sex or heterosexual. -73% of kids in the US were living in two-parent households, with 65% of parents married. Around 27% lived with single parents, while just over 3% were being raised by a grandparent. So overall, about 25 million children, or one-third of all kids in the US were living in so-called non-traditional families, that is those without two married parents.

Who are the people currently the least likely to get vaccinated? Personal Belief Exemption

-Currently, the people least likely to get vaccinated actually come from relatively affluent and educated families where parents intentionally choose not to vaccinate. In many places parents are allowed to refuse vaccination for their child on the basis of what's called a personal belief exemption. -the counties with higher exemption rates also had much more sickness and deaths from preventable diseases.

Why do people chose not to vaccinate?

-First, among parents who choose not to vaccinate, about 50% believe that diseases like measles, mumps, rubella and so on, are not serious. And 50% believe that their child's own natural defenses can fend off serious consequences of these infections; however, according to the World Health Organization, measles is a leading cause of death among children in the world -Another reason why parents don't vaccinate is because they fear that vaccines may do more harm than good.-> like the fear of vaccines causing autism - vaccination is perceived to be contrary their religious beliefs or their view that individuals should have the right to control what happens to their bodies. For others, there's a deep distrust of the science behind vaccination, since some of it is funded by big pharmaceutical companies, and these companies have an interest in making money.

Demographics of homeschooling families

-First, homeschooling families look economically similar to other families. And make somewhere between 75 thousand dollars and 80 thousand dollars a year. However, as we'll see in a moment, most of this money is likely to come from just one member of the family, making an unusually high income rather than from two more modest salaries. -Second, parents who homeschool are substantially more educated than parents who don't. Over 60 percent of homeschooling parents have college degrees compared to fewer than 30 percent of other American households. Third, homeschooling families tend to be large. And two thirds have at least three kids. This is important because it may make private school an unaffordable option for parents who don't like their public school options. Fourth and finally, more than 97 percent of homeschooling parents are married.

pros of co-sleeping

-First, some suggest that mothers are able to get more sleep and breastfeed more easily when co-sleeping. Also, there's some evidence that co-sleeping early in life might confer physiological benefits to both the mother and child, like lower stress hormones, more stable body temperatures, more regular heart rhythms, and more consistent breathing patterns. -Some have even made the slightly wilder claim that co-sleeping can lead children to have higher self-esteem, social independence, and self-reliance. -a real benefit of co-sleeping is that it provides the infant much easier access to his or her parents. Potentially reducing time spent crying and being distressed, throughout the night.

what 2 findings does the research tell us about family structure?

-First, the fact that the effects of divorce on kids have become milder over time suggest that single parents can often do just fine, and that the key problem isn't single parenting, but instead the conditions in a relationship that lead to a divorce, which probably have become less severe over time as the bar for choosing to get divorced has been lowered over time. Second, the data suggests that children who are prone to behavioral problems may be more likely to have parents with problems controlling behavior and resolving conflict amicably, a trait which may be at least partly inherited.

Opinions of former Harvard president

-First, was that, in his view, women are less attracted by high-powered jobs, in part because of their preference to focus on family. Second in importance was that women are less likely than men to be exceptionally gifted in ways that favor careers in the Sciences. And, finally, third overall was socialization and discrimination. Being told that science is for boys, and being overlooked in favor of male candidates who may not actually be better. -Summers' key piece of evidence in defense of his thesis was a study of twelfth-grade SAT scores, which found that boys were more, or likely, to have both extremely high and extremely low scores, compared to girls. -he certainly didn't have the data required to show this, since many factors could explain why boys and girls perform differently on the SAT. And, worse, the SAT might not itself be a valid measure of Math and Science ability. -the answer is that in grade four, boys in the U.S. outperform girls on standardized tests of Math and Science, like the T.I.M.S.S. But, by grade eight, there was no significant difference between the groups. Further, and critically, the TIMSS results also show that boys perform substantially worse than girls in many countries. -differs over different cultures

Circadian rhythm

-For adults, our sleep is governed not only by the light but also by a collection of cells in our brain called the Suprachiasmatic nucleus. Which tick away even when we're trapped for days in a darkened environment or when we take a flight to a foreign country. -These cells wake us up roughly at the same time every day but for infants play a weaker role. For them the most important factor is eating which they need to wake up to do every few hours especially early on.

Baby feeding schedule

-Generally parents should begin giving their babies solid foods beginning some time around four to six months of age. At this age, babies begin to have enough coordination that they can effectively and safely swallow food. If you're not sure whether your baby is ready you can also ask whether they're able to sit and support their own body. Or grab objects in their hands. These abilities are also correlated with readiness for solid food. Infants develop dietary needs at this age that can't be satisfied with only formula or breastfeeding. So it's important to introduce a variety of foods. Until the age of eight to twelve months, food should be pureed. Initially they should be presented one at a time. Without mixing or adding ingredients. So that if you're baby has a reaction like diarrhea, rash, or vomiting you'll know what caused it. Also, keep in mind that some common foods and drinks shouldn't be introduced into your child's diet until much later. For example cow milk and soy milk shouldn't be introduced before 12 months. Also, the American Academy of Pediatrics or AAP recommends not giving fruit juices to infants younger than six months. Since they're high in sugar and contribute to weight problems and diarrhea. -Relatedly infants shouldn't be given honey, since it may contain spores that can cause a serious illness known as infant botulism. -One key to fostering this is to make sure that you provide a reasonable amount of variety to your child so that they're exposed to many different flavors and textures. But also so that they get adequate nutrients including a good balance of fats and proteins and vitamins.

advice for parents on family structure

-Getting separated may be better than staying together if there's conflict in the home, and is likely to have a smaller effect if both parents are financially stable and if they can support each other and stay friendly despite their differences.

Journal about adopted children and how they compare to siblings left behind and current peers

-Here again the researchers found that adopted children outperformed siblings or peers who were not adopted both in terms of IQ and academic achievement. This is presumably because kids who are adopted move from less stable, less economically prosperous households to the kind of wealthy, stable educated homes that tend to adopt children. It's notable that there were some small academic differences between adopted children and their new peers, but these differences disappeared if children were adopted before the age of 12 months, again suggesting that very early experiences before education even begins likely contribute to the educational achievement gap in the US. -Educational attainment is not just a question of natural ability. In case you had any doubts, the achievement gap in the US isn't just because Black and Hispanic kids are biologically predisposed to fail. Instead, educational attainment is hugely affected by the environment children grow up in.

Which countries have the strongest female advantages for achievement gap?

-In fact, most liberal democracies like those in Europe show no gender differences at all. Those with the biggest female advantages include Oman, Qatar, -If we look at Reading, there's a much bigger female advantage from the start, and girls dominate internationally.

Study with sharing stickers

-In one recent study children aged five to 12 were given a bunch of stickers and allowed to share as many as they chose with another child. What the researchers found is that non-religious children shared more stickers than Christian or Muslim children. Also, when they showed kids videos of people pushing or bumping someone else, Christians and Muslims said that the actions were meaner than did non-religious kids and recommended harsher punishments. The problem I have with this kind of study is that it's hard to know if religion played any role in children sharing and moral judgements at all, or if we would have found the same thing if we'd compared kids from wealthy families to kids from less wealthy families, for example. -although religious identification is a significant predictor, meaning that the effect would probably be found again if we did exactly the same study, the effect wasn't the biggest one the researchers found, and was actually smaller than effects of socioeconomic status or age, and just a little bit bigger than country of origin. And probably other differences between kids that they didn't measure also had some effect, which might even explain the effects of religion that they found.

What is most prescribed as treatment for ADHD

-In particular, most kids received stimulant drugs, including amphetamine and methylphenidate, sometimes known by its brand name, Ritalin. The use of stimulants to treat ADHD -However, in kids with ADHD, these drugs result in increased focus and behavioral control, as well as measurable long-term reductions in brain abnormalities that are associated with ADHD, with no serious long-term side effects. -What's maybe most striking about the CDC study, though, is how few of these same kids were receiving other forms of help.

Census-based model of funding

-In some states like California, a so-called census-based model of funding is used, where the state assumes that all schools will have roughly the same percentage of kids with disabilities, and therefore distribute funding to schools according to how many total students they have. -Adding to this, a greater awareness of ASD has led schools and governments to spend considerable money supporting children who receive autism diagnoses.

What does homeschooling allow parents to do

-In this case, parents are free to make all of the decisions regarding their child's learning. In public school, by contrast, parents have little control over what their kids learn. Homeschool allows highly customized and individual approach that many parents value. Not only because they believe it works, but also because it allows them to incorporate materials that may not be present in schools, including advanced or interactive methods, and also moral or religious content. -It's the responsibility of homeschoolers to invest the time and energy into making informed choices for their kid's education.

swedish study on single parents

-In total, they looked at data from almost a million Swedish families, a gigantic sample size. Around 900,000 of the kids in this sample were raised in two-parent households, while around 65,000 were raised by single parents, a somewhat lower rate than in the US. What they found is that children from single-parent families exhibited higher risk of psychiatric disease, suicide, suicide attempt, injury, and addiction to drugs or alcohol. These results were found even after adjusting for family income and the parent's own psychiatric status. Based on these data, the authors concluded that growing up in a single-parent family imposes significant risks upon children, with a major factor being access to economic resources, -Also, these negative effects appear to grow, the longer the child lives with a single parent, and is greatest for boys relative to girls. -But the issue here is that single parents as a group tend to be different from parents who stay together in many ways, making it possible that the parents, rather than the parenting, or single parenting, are what explain children's outcomes after economic factors are accounted for. -In other words, it's quite possible that the reason why children from single-parent families struggle has little to do with being raised by a single parent, and more to do with sharing the genetic predispositions that led their parent to get divorced in the first place.

adoption academic achievement

-Is the cognitive development of adopted chil- dren different from that of (a) children who have remained in institutional care or in their birth families or (b) their current (environmental) nonadopted siblings or peers? - meta- analysis of 62 studies including 17,767 adopted children. Compared to their nonadopted siblings or peers who stayed behind, adopted children scored substantially higher on IQ tests and they performed much better at school -Taken together, the findings document the positive impact of adoption on children's cognitive development and adopted children's remarkably normal cognitive competence but somewhat delayed school performance.

Andrew Wakefield Article

-It provided case histories for 12 children, exploring incidences of chronic enterocolitis, inflammatory bowel disease and regressive developmental disorder—as well as immunization with the MMR vaccine. "In eight children, the onset of behavioral problems had been linked, either by the parents or by the child's physician, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination, -Vaccination rates in the U.K. plummeted after publication of that paper, and the study helped launch the anti-vaccine movement in the U.S -I cannot support the continued use of the three vaccines given together. We need to know what the role of gut inflammation is in autism.... My concerns are that one more case of this is too many." -MMR= Mumps, rubella, measles -Merck decided not to resume production of the single vaccines and to focus resources on the combined MMR vaccine. -While he continues to champion the single vaccine and to blame government regulators for suggesting that it be discontinued, Wakefield is also pushing an MMR-autism connection -Almost all of the medical community disagrees with him. Several studies have put his hypothesis to the test and looked at thousands of children, not just 12. -id not support a causal association between MMR and autism -showed no association between MMR vaccination and encephalitis, aseptic meningitis or autism -"strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism, -"study after study after study has failed to show association. [It's] simply not there." -Ultimately, the review rejected a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Self selection

-It turns out that home schoolers score higher on the SAT than students who attend traditional schools. -Here's where the problem of self selection comes into play. The issue is that in public and private schools, standardized tests like the SATs are often mandatory or at least expected, but there is no federal or state requirement forcing all students to take these tests. So homeschooling families, many of whom, may already be dissatisfied with the educational status quo are free to opt out of the SAT. As a result, the home schoolers who do take the SAT are those who have chosen to do so perhaps in hopes of earning acceptance at a top college or university. In other words, those who are least likely to perform well may never take the test whereas in the public school system, even kids who despise them the very concept of the SAT may be forced to take it. What this means is that the average score of home schoolers includes a very different sample of kids than the average score of other kids, -Not only do home schoolers self select to take the SAT, but they also self select to participate in any research on its effectiveness. Complicating matters even further, the very choice to homeschool is an example of self selection. It maybe that people who decide to homeschool are overall more likely to excel regardless of what kind of education they pursue. For a variety of reasons, self selection makes studying the effectiveness of homeschooling an incredibly difficult task. -what we mean is that people who home school aren't random, but choose to do so themselves, and therefore may be different from other people in many ways,

recognition memory vs. recall

-It's very easy to recognize text we've already faced, or a detail in a movie we've already seen, but often incredibly difficult to spontaneously describe these same details when asked to. -Information that feels familiar as we consume it may be very hard to recall when we do a test. Based on this, we know that simply reading our notes before taking a test is far from effective. Instead, learners should try to recall information from memory as they would during a test, even if it seems ridiculously hard or hopeless. This technique is better not just because it's similar to real tests, but also because recalling memories actually makes them stronger, even if we recall something incorrectly and then are corrected. -These studies very consistently find that subjects have better memory for the information that is studied by retrieval than for information that is studied by re-reading. Flashcards are a great example of retrieval practice. As long as the learner makes an honest effort to remember the correct answer before peeking at the back of the card.

Does age of adoption matter?

-Later studies found that age of adoption really matters, and that children who receive poor nutrition or impoverished social interactions early in life struggle to recover later on. -age does matter

Effect of religion on homeschooling

-Many families who choose to educate their child at home report that they are motivated by religion. And especially Evangelical Christianity. In several studies conducted in 1990s and later, the percentage of homeschooling families who cited religion as a motivation range from 25 percent to 52 percent. Also, families who were rated as very religious were more likely to homeschool their kids. Religious motivation for homeschooling can be very direct, like wanting to teach your child the values and responsibilities of your faith. But may come from a desire to side-step the perceived moral hazards that students might encounter in formal education, like interacting with kids who have different values. -Perhaps as a result, families who homeschool for religious reasons are more likely to do so for all of the kids in the family. And also tend to continue homeschooling for more years than other families. Still, although a large percent of people report religion as a reason to homeschool, many homeschoolers are not religious. In fact, maybe surprisingly, homeschoolers are actually less likely overall to report being religious relative to the general population. -religious homeschoolers less likely to take the SAT

Mothers who breastfeed have other differences too

-National Survey of Children's Health which surveyed the parents of over 33,000 infants found that 72% of mothers breastfed their infants at least once. But that this number was much lower for American born Black mothers. Only 48%. But much higher for immigrant Black mothers and White mothers, 88%. The problem is that these groups also differ with respect of other important factors like income and education level. Not to mention access to quality healthcare. -that is why there are some problems with correlational studies that do not do randomized control trials

Education gap grows between rich and poor article

-Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period. -In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s. -Professor Reardon found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites - He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income — the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted — and children from the 10th percentile -One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children -while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. -, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families -"The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,

Iowa Acceleration Scale

-One effort to do this is survey called the Iowa Acceleration Scale, which was designed to help parents and educators decide who is likely to benefit from grade skipping. The survey which should be administered by a trained practitioner, examines a number of factors including the students IQ, their demonstrated achievement on material at their current grade level, and their performance on tests above their grade level. For these measures, good candidates are students with IQs above 115, but more commonly 125 or higher, grade level performance in the 95th percentile or better, and 50th percentile performance on tests that are two or more grades ahead. It's also important that this high level of ability, aptitude and achievement not be isolated to a single area or subject. If it is, less comprehensive strategies like accelerating the student for only reading, or only math, might be a better fit. -The IAS also tries to assess more nebulous constructs like interpersonal skills and attitudes. And finally it considers something that parents and teachers might sometimes overlook; How the child feels about acceleration. The IAS does not recommend accelerating students who would prefer to remain where they are. -any decision to accelerate should be done cautiously, with a careful consideration of whether the student is happy now. If they are happy and like going to school, it may not make a whole lot of sense to roll the dice on acceleration, even if the results are generally positive. However, if their child is teased for their academic performance, is bored at school, or unhappy with the level of study in their classroom, then the comparison of costs versus benefits may way in favor of acceleration.

Debate on what causes the achievement gap

-One side of the debate has somewhat notoriously argued that intellectual and academic differences between groups are partly due to genetic differences between White and Black students, for example. Others have argued that the evidence for IQ differences are based on tests that are culturally biased to favor White kids.

Some negative affects of acceleration

-Overall, most adults who accelerated, about 80% said their experience was positive. A bunch had a neutral impression and only about 3% said it was a negative. Some studies report that students experience some short-term negative effects when they first skip a grade including some anxiety, fearfulness and depression, all of which generally subside quickly. Some kids may also report embarrassment over lower grades or feeling regular

Social and Emotional effects of early entrance

-Overall, studies looking at the social and emotional effects of early entrance into the school system have generally found positive results. -In the Montreal study I mentioned in the last video where teachers rated their students' academic achievement, they also rated their level of so called psychological adjustment. -Like the results for achievement, children who entered school early were rated by their teachers as at least as well adjusted and happy in their environment as their classmates and better adjusted to their environments than the youngest classmates who are nevertheless older than the early entrance themselves. Other studies have also found positive effects on social development. -grade skipping was found to have consistent positive effects on academic, psychological and social measures. -One much smaller study found that these benefits may be biggest for students who are the most unusual. Specifically, it found that children who are classified as profoundly gifted and had IQs north of 160 were less likely to be rejected by peers if they accelerated and had better self-esteem. They also reported feeling less pressure to underperform in order to not stand out as much from their peers. In other words, among older kids, their intellectual abilities didn't make them seem quite so weird. -overall, students reported positive effects like increased confidence, improved self-image as smart and increased motivation. -Overall though the literature suggests the following conclusion. Kids who skip a grade outperform their age-matched peers academically and have similar social and emotional outcomes.

Why choose homeschooling

-Parents who identified as more conservative sought the freedom to teach their kids about religion as part of their schooling. And parents who identified as more liberal sought less formal methods that focused more on creativity and less drills, repetition and tests.

peanut allergy journal

-Randomized Trial of Peanut Consumption in Infants at Risk for Peanut Allergy -The prevalence of peanut allergy among children in Western countries has doubled in the past 10 years -Weevaluatedstrategiesofpeanutconsumptionandavoidancetodeterminewhich strategy is most effective in preventing the development of peanut allergy in infants at high risk for the allergy. -We randomly assigned 640 infants with severe eczema, egg allergy, or both to consume oravoidpeanutsuntil60monthsofage.Participants,whowereatleast4monthsbut younger than 11 months of age at randomization, were assigned to separate study cohorts on the basis of preexisting sensitivity to peanut extract, which was deter- mined with the use of a skin-prick test — one consisting of participants with no measurable wheal after testing and the other consisting of those with a wheal mea- suring 1 to 4 mm in diameter. The primary outcome, which was assessed indepen- dently in each cohort, was the proportion of participants with peanut allergy at 60 months of age. -Among the 530 infants in the intention-to-treat population who initially had nega- tive results on the skin-prick test, the prevalence of peanut allergy at 60 months of age was 13.7% in the avoidance group and 1.9% in the consumption group -Increases in levels of peanut-specific IgG4 antibody occurred predominantly in the consumption group; a greater percentage of participants in the avoidance group had elevated titers of peanut-specific IgE antibody. A larger wheal on the skin-prick test and a lower ratio of peanut-specific IgG4:IgE were associated with peanut allergy. -The early introduction of peanuts significantly decreased the frequency of the devel- opment of peanut allergy among children at high risk for this allergy and modulated immune responses to peanuts. -was a randomized, open-label, controlled trial -To be eligible for enrollment, infantshadtobeleast4monthsandlessthan11 months of age and had to have severe eczema, egg allergy, or both. -articipants were stratified into two study cohorts on the basis of the results of a skin-prick test for peanut allergy -articipants in each study cohort were then randomly assigned to a group in which dietary peanut would be consumed or a group in which its consumption would be avoided -Participants assigned to avoidance were to avoid the consumption of peanut protein until they reached 60 months of age. Adherence was assessed with the use of a validated food- frequency questionnaire, -The primary outcome was the proportion of par- ticipants with peanut allergy at 60 months of age and was determined in 617 participants by means of an oral food challenge. -The main weakness of the study was the lack of a placebo regimen -n addition, the study did not include low-risk infants and those who had large wheals - As we have proposed in our dual al- lergen hypothesis, early environmental exposure (through the skin) to peanut may account for early sensitization,31 whereas early oral exposure may lead to immune tolerance. -Our findings showed that early, sustained consumption of peanut products was associated with a substantial and significant de- crease in the development of peanut allergy in high-risk infants.

Religious basis for morality vs non-religious people

-Religious individuals find much of their meaning and moral guidance in their spiritual life, whereas non-religious individuals sometimes claim that human morality is rooted instead in universal human intuitions that we'd want to affirm whether or not we thought God was real.

Do people have personal preferences for how they learn information?

-Several studies have done just that and have shown that people do indeed have personal preferences about the presentation of information. They've also found that these preferences tend to be stable over time and that people will actually choose the type of presentation they say they prefer if given the choice, so that part appears to be real.

What can we conclude from data on religious vs non-religious

-So far we can conclude that there is no reason to believe that raising your kids without religion will have serious negative consequences. If anything, the evidence points to greater levels of generosity, less racism, and greater tolerance. This doesn't mean that these things are caused by non-belief, but it does suggest that these outcomes are possible without religion. -A fairly well-known result is that people raised in religious households report higher levels of happiness than their non-religious peers, despite the fact that religious households tend to be less affluent and less educated. -What these studies suggest is that if you believe in God, the way to maximize the benefits of religion for your child is to be active in your community's religious practices. And if you don't believe, what may be most important is to find ways for you and your child to become more connected to your neighbors and community, a way that builds strong connections and social support in your day-to-day life. The key to happiness may not be God himself but how God brings people together into cohesive community groups.

Role of gender in the achievement gap

-Some especially loud voices have argued that, in fact, boys and girls do have different intellectual predispositions, and that these differences explain why there are so many more men in fancy Math, Science, and Engineering jobs, especially at elite universities where these differences are most likely to matter. Perhaps, the most notorious defender of this view is former Harvard University President, Larry Summers,

executive function

-That is, how we select and focus on tasks, flexibly switch between tasks, and suppress unwanted impulses like violent behavior. -differences in executive function across different kids, are related to important life outcomes like health, income, and violent behavior. -The executive selects a course of action endorsing good ideas, suppressing bad ones and flexibly changing the direction of the organization, if things aren't going well. -It's the job of the executive to reject and suppress these bad ideas, to adopt good ideas, that lead to positive outcomes. -OK, first, number one, executive function involves attentional control, the ability to select and attend to important information, -Number two, second, it involves so-called working memory. This isn't really memory in the standard sense of the word. Instead it's more like an ability to keep track of things or juggle them in our mind's eye. This can include basic things like holding numbers in mind when doing mental math, or responding to a question, that has several parts, by keeping those parts temporarily activated in the background, without getting distracted by them. This is also sometimes called short-term memory. -Third, it involves inhibitory control, sometimes called self-control, the ability to inhibit or suppress unwanted thoughts or actions. This can also be thought of as the ability to stop a behavior, whether it's an old habit like smoking, or something that you're doing in the moment, like resisting an urge for a dessert. Fourth, executive function involves cognitive flexibility, the ability to quickly change tasks or to view an old problem in a new way, to apply a different strategy or to change your mind. Finally, it involves a bucket of other things, that we generally call thinking, reasoning, problem-solving and planning.

Autism

-The first is a deficit in behaviors related to social communication, such as not effectively reciprocating other's emotions, problems with non-verbal behaviors during social interaction and or issues with developing, maintaining, or understanding relationships. In short, people diagnosed with autism have significant difficulty with social interaction, with understanding people's thoughts and feelings. The second component has to do with a child's movement. Many kids diagnosed with autism exhibit movements that are highly repetitive, very restricted, or otherwise unusual given the context. -DSM-5 now refers to autism as a spectrum disorder, or ASD for short. This replaces the more categorical all-or-none characterization in the previous DSM. It reflects the fact that the symptoms of children with ASD fall on a continuum, with some individuals showing mild symptoms, and others having much more severe symptoms. Another key change is that to receive a diagnosis of ASD, individuals much show symptoms in early childhood. Even if those symptoms are not recognized until later. -diagnoses have increased fairly dramatically over the last several decades. -Although we know that ASD arises in the brain, we don't know exactly how and what might cause these problems.

What about kids with same-sex parents?

-The gender and sexual orientation of parents has no known effects on children. -There are no effects to be found. -"Many studies have demonstrated that children's well-being "is affected much more "by their relationships with their parents, "their parents' sense of competence and security, "and the presence "of social and economic support for the family "than by the gender or the sexual orientation "of their parents." -"Results of the research suggest "that qualities of family relationships "are more tightly linked with child outcomes "than is parental sexual orientation."

Desirable Difficulties

-The idea is that our experience of difficulty when trying to learn something does not give us very good information about whether we'll actually remember it in the future. That is, we're really pretty bad at predicting how well we'll remember things after a delay.

Cognitive Advantage in Bilingualism: An Example of Publication Bias? (De Bruin, Treccani, and Sala study)

-The idea of a bilingual advantage may result from a publication bias favoring studies with positive results over studies with null or negative effects. To test this hypothesis, we looked at conference abstracts from 1999 to 2012 on the topic of bilingualism and executive control. We then determined which of the studies they reported were subsequently published. Studies with results fully supporting the bilingual-advantage theory were most likely to be published, followed by studies with mixed results. Studies challenging the bilingual advantage were published the least. -file drawer basis -publication bias -To investi- gate whether and to what extent studies showing a bilin- gual advantage are more likely to be published than data challenging the bilingual-advantage hypothesis, we looked at a sample of conference abstracts on the topic of bilingualism and executive control. -category of mixed data partly challenge billingual advantage and mixed data support bilingual advantage both used neuroimaging and electrophysiological evidence -4 categories: support, do not support, mixed but support, mixed but doesn't support -We classified the results as being published if they had been accepted for publication by an interna- tional scientific journal (not book chapters or published conference proceedings) -3 factors that could confound the results: year of conference presentation, number of participants per language group, and number of executive-control tasks administered in the study -we found a significant difference between the publication outcomes (published or unpublished) of abstracts that challenge and support bilingual-advantage theories -no difference in terms of year published and number of participants -difference in terms of reported more executive-control tasks - We observed an effect of result type on publication: Studies were published relatively often (68%) if the data demonstrated a bilingual advantage. In con- trast, only 29% of the studies that showed no effect of bilingualism or even a bilingual disadvantage -found publication bias

Environmental and genetic affects to academic achievement and IQ

-These studies categorically do not show that adopted kids perform better because of better parenting. Although kids with more educated parents perform better at school, there is the huge confound, which is that educated parents send their children to schools in wealthy areas, which often have much better schools. Also, these studies don't show that genetics play no role in educational achievement or IQ. Twin studies show fairly convincingly that genetics does play a role in explaining differences between individual kids. What they show is that genetic differences aren't likely the source of the so-called achievement gap, however, though they may explain differences between individual kids. What adoption studies show us is the massive differences that we currently see between different groups of kids can all but be erased when children are raised in stable, affluent communities with strong schools. -environment is the cause of the achievement gap

Press release 5- morality

-They believe babies are in fact born with an innate sense of morality, and while parents and society can help develop a belief system in babies, they don't create one. -a series of studies on babies under 24 months to see how much these babies understand about good and bad behavior -Show a baby an example of good behavior, and then an example of bad behavior, then let the baby decide what she likes. -The green bunny is nice and helpful. The orange bunny is mean and unhelpful. -More than 80% of the babies in the study showed their preference for the good bunny, either by reaching for the good bunny or staring at it. And with 3-month-olds, that number goes higher, to 87%. -says these studies show that even before babies can speak or walk, they judge good and bad in the actions of others because they are born with a rudimentary sense of justice. -Although babies are born with an innate sense of morality, they are also born with flaws. -Skeptics of the studies say babies are not capable of making intelligent choices, and perhaps babies are drawn to a certain color, or they choose according to where the puppets are placed. -The team at the Baby Lab has been very careful in their studies to change the puppets, shirt colors and placement of the animals before presenting them to various babies, and they feel confident their published research is sound.

Herd Immunity

-They can give you 100% protection from a disease, even if they aren't 100% guaranteed to work in any particular person, so long as everybody, or even the vast majority of people get vaccinated. When most people in a group are vaccinated, something called herd immunity results. Herd immunity refers to the idea that in a group or herd, where not every individual is 100% immune from a disease, it's still possible for 100% of people to be protected from it. -Now imagine that every person has a 75% chance of dropping the ball. They have been vaccinated with a 75% effective basketball vaccine. After two to three passes the ball will be on the floor and no more passing will take place. The disease will be neutralized. -when nobody is vaccinated, many people get infected -50% -Now a lot of people have increased resistance to the pathogen, but what you can see is that it's still not enough. The disease quickly spreads throughout the group meaning that unvaccinated people, or people who didn't generate fully effective antibodies, will still be very likely to get the disease, almost as likely as when 0% of the group is vaccinated. It'll just take a little bit longer. -95% vaccination -Here you see that when a single person gets a disease, they try to pass it around, but it's got nowhere to go. People who are around this individual are resistant enough that the disease doesn't spread, and so vulnerable people are much much less likely to get sick. -herd immunity depends on a critical threshold of people getting vaccinated. When enough people opt in, even vaccines that aren't 100% effective can result in 100% of people being protected. But when enough people opt out, vaccination begins to lose its effectiveness at protecting unvaccinated or otherwise vulnerable individuals.

Study with early entrance students into kindergarten in Canada

-They compared the scores of early entrance students to the scores of other kids, broken down by age and what they found is that the students who started kindergarten early, ranked as high as the older students on average and higher than the youngest, non-accelerated students, even though those kids were older than them. By 2nd Grade, the early entrance ranked higher than classmates of all ages. -suggest that talented kids can fit in academically among older kids and even outpace them after a few years. -So, across many studies, children who participate in acceleration programs seem to perform at least as well as, and in many cases, significantly better than non-accelerated peers. -in short term these kids do ok

What to change to make US children perform better on these tests

-They point out that previous comparisons of the TIMSS and PISA neglect to account for the fact that these studies include very different countries and that in particular, the PISA includes more wealthy European countries that perform very well, which aren't included in the TIMSS sample. When we remove these added countries from the PISA what we find is that the US ranking is almost identical across the two studies, eighth in the TIMSS and ninth in the PISA. What this means is that our kids probably aren't lagging because of too little focus on applied math. Instead, the study suggests that we may focus too little on skills like geometry and measurement ability and that we require much less formal training of our teachers. -more focus on skills like geometry and measurement ability and more formal training for our teachers -What these comparisons tell us is that we're indeed lagging behind the top performing countries in the world as the PISA suggests, and that this is partly due to our curriculum, which spends too little time on important skills like geometry and measurement, but also in large part due to our failure to encourage teachers to seek out advanced training in mathematics. -analysis indicate that measures of teacher preparation and certification are by far the strongest correlates of student achievement in reading and in mathematics,

Achievement gap

-This gap is generally described as being one between rich and poor, between white students and students from Hispanic or African American families. -It's encouraging to see positive change overall in this group, but discouraging to see that it had slowed down in recent years and hasn't yet resulted in a large group of top-performing students. Finally, a similar picture emerges for students identified as Hispanic. These students resemble what we see with black students, lower scores in the 1970's which improve dramatically at first, and have leveled out in recent years, with about 10% more students in the middle tier relative to black students. -Also reading data look pretty similar, also showing a persistent performance gap over time between white children and other groups.

Research paper 5 on screen time (Zimmerman)

-To test the independent effects of televi- sion viewing in children before age 3 years and at ages 3 to 5 years on several measures of cognitive outcomes at ages 6 and 7 years. -Using data from a nationally representative data set, we regressed 4 measures of cognitive development at ages 6 and 7 years on television viewing before age 3 years and at ages 3 to 5 years, controlling for parental cognitive stimulation throughout early childhood, ma- ternal education, and IQ -each hour of average daily television viewing before age 3 years was associated with deleterious effects on the Peabody Individual Achieve- ment Test Reading Recognition Scale - There are modest adverse effects of tele- vision viewing before age 3 years on the subsequent cog- nitive development of children. These results suggest that greater adherence to the American Academy of Pediat- rics guidelines that children younger than 2 years not watch television is warranted. -1) Is television viewing among chil- dren who are younger (ie, 3 years) than the target age (3-5 years) for preschool educational programs harmful for children's cognitive development? (2) For children aged 3 to 5 years—for whom considerable educational programming exists—does television viewing on aver- age have positive effects for cognitive development? -Data from this study were drawn from the National Longitudi- nal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults -Our sample consisted of all children who were approxi- mately 6 years of age (5 years 6 months to 7 years 6 months) -Our primary predictor of interest was the hours of television watched per day prior to age 6 years. -• This study is using longitudinal • Are the data correlational? YES BC LOOKING AT RELATIONS BETWEEN TWO VARIBLES -• Modest adverse effects of tv viewing b4 age 3 so greater adherence to idea that children before 2 should not watch tv • Start with two questions but only have one answer -covariates= confounding factors; arental pref- erences and investment in cognitive outcomes, innate cog- nitive ability passed from parents to children -We also controlled for the child's race/ethnicity, since these have been shown to be correlated both with the out- come measures30 and with the type and quantity of television viewing. -Finally, we controlled for whether the child's parents were native speakers of Spanish or some other non-English lan- guage, -outcome measure= Our primary outcome measures were components of the Pea- body Individual Achievement Test (PIAT), assessed at or within 6 months of age 6 years. -outcome= PIAT test, predictor= tv watching, -Parents may believe that even at young ages television generally can be educational, yet this study suggests that television for very young chil- dren is not helpful for cognitive development and may indeed be harmful. -problems with study may be way got measurement of screen time (mom rating it is unreliable), only applicable to US, could be not actually screen time but what they are watching

What are some other reasons for why people homeschool

-Very often, they have an unfavorable opinion of local schools and believe a competent home educator can do better. Related to this, parents are more likely to homeschool their kids when they live in poorer areas with weaker schools. Also, some families use homeschooling as a form of acceleration, where they're able to exactly match instruction to the needs, preferences and pace of their child.

4 main findings against Wakefield's study that led to him losing his medical license

-Wakefield drew blood from typically developing children at his own child's birthday party, without ethical approval. Second, that he subjected autistic children to medical tests, including colonoscopy and lumbar puncture, without ethical approval. Third, he failed to disclose that he'd filed for a patent for his own vaccine, that was meant to compete with the MMR vaccine. Fourth, he began treating children with his own untested, experimental drug, without ethical approval. Finally, he failed to disclose a second conflict of interest, that he received approximately 100,000 dollars to act as a consultant to lawyers representing parents of autistic children, who believed that their children's problems were caused by vaccination, in other words, he directly benefited from his research claims and failed to make that clear, when the paper was published

comparing children of divorced parents to those who lost a parent to death

-What our large summary of studies tells us here is that kids who lose a parent due to premature death fall right in between those who live in two-parent households and those who live with a single parent. These kids have lower academic achievement, lower self-esteem, and poorer conduct than kids in two-parent families, but fare better on each of these measures than children in divorced families. What this suggests is that multiple factors are likely playing a role here.

Studies done against wakefield's study

-What's unique about this study is that in Japan, MMR was used between 1989 and 1993, but then discontinued, so it allowed a perfect, experimental test of whether the MMR was related to autism in a truly massive sample, not just 12 kids and what did they find, that if anything, the rate of autism diagnosis increased after the MMR was discontinued. -Well, some people in Denmark also had this type of fear and in 1992, thimerosol (because chemically similar to mercury) was removed from all vaccines, after nearly 50 years of use. What the researchers found is that the rates of autism diagnoses did not change. In fact, much like in the Japanese study, they found the opposite. The authors conclude that, quote, "From 1991 until 2000, the incidence increased "and continued to rise, "after the removal of thimerosol from vaccines, "including increases among children "born after the discontinuation of thimerosol." -Currently in the US, thimerosol is absent from almost every available vaccine and in the few cases where it's present, parents can opt for alternatives, but autism continues to affect our children as before. It's quite clearly not because of thimerosol. -did brain scans of 106 infants, who's older siblings had an autism diagnosis. - the researchers were able to predict which children would be diagnosed with autism, based purely on the brain scans at six and 12 months of age, well before most vaccines are given. In particular, the brains of these infants were significantly larger than the brains of typically developing infants. What this study tells us is that the signs of autism begin to emerge very early in life, even if not all the behavioral symptoms do,

Grade-based acceleration

-When a student performs well beyond grade level in all or most areas and not just one or two, another more comprehensive approach is sometimes used. According to that same National Work Group, Grade-based acceleration is defined as any acceleration effort that reduces the total amount of time a student spends in K to 12 education. This includes things like early entrance to Kindergarten or first grade, early acceptance to college, and grade skipping.

Study in Israel on peanut allergies

-Where infants are often given a popular peanut based snack called Bamba. -Remarkably this study began when the researchers noted that Jewish children raised in the U.K. were ten times more likely to develop a peanut allergy relative to Jewish kids in Israel. To test the role of eating Bamba snacks they followed 640 children beginning between the ages of 4 and 11 months until the age of 5. And asked the parents of half of these infants to avoid peanut-based foods, while asking the other group to give their children peanut products. At the end of the study 13.7% of infants who avoided peanuts were allergic. Compared to only 1.9% of the group that was exposed to peanuts -used a randomized control trial

How to avoid allergies?

-Whereas previously parents were advised to completely avoid allergens like peanuts. It's now believed that peanut allergies are significantly less likely if children get relatively early exposure. -Rather than avoiding allergy-prone foods, the National Institute of Health in the United States now recommends that parents should first do small tests to see if their infant has an existing allergy. And if they don't they should slowly introduce foods like peanuts, eggs, and so on from almost the beginning. -And it's now believed that allergies are generally less likely when infants receive early gradual exposure to a host of foods. Including rice, oats, vegetables, fruits, and certain meats. The idea here is that repeated exposure to potential allergens will allow the child's body to become slowly desensitized to it. Making future reactions less severe and sometimes non-existent. This should of course be done very carefully beginning with very small exposures. -And perhaps only contact with potential allergens for example by touching it to the child's skin and then providing a small amount of puree. Not just plain old peanuts or peanut butter which are both very difficult for infants to eat and potential choking hazards. And above all before you begin any of this you should talk to your doctor

Effects of vegetarian diet on kids

-With this in mind, the American Academy of Pediatrics states that a well-planned vegetarian, or even vegan diet, can support adequate nutrition in a growing child, but that stricter diets need to be carefully planned. -"Nutritional balance is very difficult to achieve "if dairy products and eggs are "completely eliminated," -One reason for this is that plant-based foods are less dense calorically than animal-based foods, meaning that it can be challenging for vegetarian and vegan kids to get enough calories, compared to their meat-eating peers, a claim that is supported by a fairly large number of studies. -Related concerns may arise for children's access to proteins and essential amino acids, which are needed for the structure, function, and regulation of the body's tissues and organs. Whereas most animal-based foods contain all of the essential amino acids, many plant-based foods either contain only small amounts of each, or lacks them entirely. Therefore, an effective vegetarian or vegan diet needs to be carefully planned, with a lot of variety in the foods. -The bottom line here is that alternative diets for children are quite possible, but require considerable amounts of thought and vigilance. If you have the time to read about vegetarian nutrition, as well as the time and interest to prepare a wide variety of different foods, then vegetarianism may make sense for your child. However, a failure to provide diverse foods, whether in a vegetarian diet or otherwise, runs the risk of nutritional deficiencies, unintentional caloric restriction, and potential for impairments to physical and cognitive growth.

Neurons: gray matter vs. white matter

-You probably know that the brain is made up of billions of nerve cells called neurons, about 100 billion in total, which form complex networks that do all of the amazing computations that drive our behaviors and form out experiences of the world. Also, it's important to understand that these cells communicate using electricity. Most nerve cells are pretty tiny and look a little bit like microscopic weeds with their roots acting as tendrills of communication with other nearby cells. These are the kinds of cells we like to call gray matter -because when we open up the brain, they kind of look grayish. But there's another kind of nerve cell too. Whereas many neurons communicate only with nearby cells, the second kind of nerve cell is incredibly long, and connects entire regions of the brain to one another. Also, these cells aren't gray, but instead are white. And the reason for this is that they're coated in a fatty tissue called myelin which acts as insulation -This insulation insures that signals that are sent across different areas of the brain are preserved, and aren't blurred by all of the other electrical signals in the brain that are happening along the way. If this insulation degenerates as it does in diseases like multiple sclerosis, signals can't travel efficiently, with negative results for movement and other important biological and cognitive functions. -Well first it turns out that both gray matter and white matter are slow to develop in the prefrontal cortex. -Second, it's important because if kids are going to control their behavior, they need to be able to formulate behavioral plans and execute them by sending signals from their frontal lobes to other parts of their brains.

-cost-based model of funding

-a cost-based model, where they only get funds if their students have established diagnoses. As you can imagine, this model creates a strong incentive for schools and parents to seek out a diagnosis even when it's not 100% clear that the child is autistic, per se.

DSM-5

-a handbook used by psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. The DSM-5, the current version, is used to diagnose psychiatric conditions ranging from schizophrenia to depression, and also ADHD. -It's a best guess based on the current scientific evidence of how different disorders cluster together, and is a starting point for clinicians, whose main goal is to help people now given what we currently know. -tends to assign patients to categories which has come under criticism since some scientists who have said that mental disorders exist on a spectrum rather than an all or none kind of thing and often have many different causes rather than being clear cut entities -starting point for treating patients

Homeschooling in the US

-about 2.3 million students were homeschooled in the 2015-2016 school year. For comparison, about 50 million attended public schools and five million attended private schools. So, while the proportion of all American students who homeschool is relatively small, it's not totally insignificant. Also, the percentage seems to be on the rise. -The brief history of modern American homeschooling began with fairly small groups who felt disenchanted with one or another aspect of public education in the 1970's and '80s. At that time, small but extremely vocal groups of parents mounted regional and national campaigns, and push for legal recognition of homeschooling. Over time they succeeded, and now all 50 U.S. states allow homeschooling. -Conservative Christians and 60s hippies

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

-aka national report card -It measures fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade math, reading and science, but it doesn't directly compare US kids to children overseas. Still, it tells us something pretty useful and maybe surprising to some people, that overall math and reading ability have not been getting worse over time, but in fact have shown some measurable improvement since the 1970s.

Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)

-and looks at thousands of children from 50 different countries, including the US. The TIMSS has repeatedly found that American fourth and eighth graders rank in the top 10 internationally in both math and science

What is one of the biggest concerns opponents have about homeschooling/ how do homeschooled kids do socially

-are home schooled kids missing out on opportunities to develop social skills and to engage their community? The research in this area is somewhat more clear actually than it is for academic achievement. Although studies report that home schooled kids have smaller social networks than their public schooled peers, the quality of these networks appears to be nevertheless quite high. Home schooled students engage with others through sports, religion and community service at least as much as public school kids. On measures of self esteem, home schooled kids also score at least as high as others. All of this suggests that on average, home schooling in itself does not hold students back socially, -it looks like home schooled kids do not do systematically worse off than public school or private school graduates.

Strategies that work better than spanking

-are to tie children's behaviors to natural consequences, OK, at every age, so it might be that, you know if the child doesn't get their homework done, they don't get to go out, because they still have to stay home and finish the homework that they didn't do, OK. A much younger child who doesn't clean up their place at the table, OK, would have the same consequence, they can't go watch TV or they can't go play in their room, because they haven't done this thing that they need to do.

based on scientific evidence what is the best treatment for ADHD

-based on clinical evidence, the CDC recommends behavioral therapy as a first line of treatment for ADHD, before prescription drugs. In particular, the study cited by the CDC recommend training for parents, not just for kids, especially in younger age groups, where there's some evidence that medications may have adverse effects. Studies which have a evaluated behavioral interventions actually find them to be more effective -meds can still be helpful though -For parents with a child who's struggling with behavioral control, a sensible approach is to start by getting a referral to a trained cognitive behavioral therapist who specializes in ADHD, rather than being satisfied by only a physician's advice.

Why is it tricky to do good research on the effects of acceleration

-because most students are necessarily ineligible. The pace of classroom instruction is designed to accommodate as many students as possible, which means that in most cases, the pace will be too slow for only a small number of students. This matters when it comes to the science, because the students who do end up accelerating are already very unusual and maybe not representative of the typical kid and so what we learn about these kids may not tell us about what's true for other kids. Another complication comes from the fact that the decision to accelerate or not, especially for the more radical approaches like grade skipping, is highly individualized. -Finally, acceleration is difficult to study, because the goal is to compare a student's academic outcome in a world where they get accelerated to the outcomes in a world where they don't, but in the real world, the student either does or doesn't accelerate. We can't know for sure what would have happened if the opposite choice was made.

Sharing and fairness

-beginning in childhood humans are guided by a strong sense of fairness -we like to share more with ppl whoa re like us (same gender, ethnic group, religion) -little kids can be very selfish -not clear that adults are much less selfish than kids (teacher doesn't like the idea that kids are born selfish and then learn) -maybe we share easier because we have easier access to things -kids apparent selfishness may be partly due to the relative value fo the things we are asking for them to share

Cracker and broccoli example

-between ages of two and three children begin to figure out that different people have different desires -kids around age of three realize that although they prefer crackers over broccoli, other people would sometimes rather have brocolli -younger kids on the other hand always reward other people with crackers it they like them despite evidence that those people would actually prefer broccoli

Why has autism become more prevalent?

-changes in diagnostic criteria and general awareness of autism -For one thing, after the original estimate in the 1940s it took another 20 years 'till autism was included in the international diagnostic systems. So for this reason alone, we should expect a sudden increase in diagnoses. Second, in the 1940s another syndrome was described by a scientist named Hans Asperger. Children that Asperger identified exhibited some of the social delays found in autistic children, but also had relatively high IQs and were often highly verbal. -the Centers for Disease Control estimates that autism prevalence has more than doubled between the years 2000 and 2010. From one in 150 to one in 68, making it what some have called the fastest growing developmental disability. -Over time, the increasing awareness in changing diagnostic criteria for ASD may result in a greater number of diagnoses. -This suggests that the increase in autism may not be due to kids having more problems, but just to changes in how they're being diagnosed. -it's critical to keep in mind that these changes don't necessarily mean that autism itself has become more frequent. These prevalence rates indicate how often children are diagnosed, not how frequent autism actually is.

Andrew Wakefield study

-claimed that autism is caused by vaccines -the researchers claimed to show evidence for a connection between the combined measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, or MMR, and a new disease that they claimed to have discovered, called autistic enterocolitis, a form of bowel disease. -reported on just 12 children who had developed disorders, eight of whom they claimed had begun showing behavioral symptoms within two weeks of vaccination. -Wakefield claimed that autism was caused by the combination of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines.-> made this claim stronger in press conferences after the publication of his study -he then argued against combined vaccines (MMR) and said that only when combined they create a risk of autism -- Andrew Wakefield's controversial study linking autism to what he called autistic enterocolitis -0 of Wakefield's studies' original authors, not including Wakefield, issued a statement retracting the paper. In the author's own words, quote, "We wish to make it clear that in this paper, "no causal link was established "between the MMR vaccine and autism, "as the data were insufficient." -Next, the paper was retracted by the editorial team of The Lancet in 2010,

cons of co-sleeping

-co-sleeping increases the risk of SIDS when the infant shares a bed with his or her parents. -In fact, one study analyzed over 8,000 different infant deaths from 24 states between 2004 and 2012, and found that almost 75% of child deaths younger than four months occurred when an infant shared a bed with a parent. To repeat this, this study found that 3/4 of infant deaths were due to co-sleeping in babies under four months. -Another study from the American Academy of Pediatrics reports that bed-sharing makes death from SIDS almost three times more likely, while others estimate that this risk is actually fivefold. -Part of this risk is due to increased risk of accidental suffocation and strangulation, which becomes even more risky with certain soft-quality bedding.

Autism and vaccines

-decisive evidence that autism is not related to vaccination.

ADHD

-diagnosis called ADHD, which is defined by problems of paying attention, hyperactivity, and difficulty controlling behavior. In a nutshell, problems with executive function, as well as above-average activity levels. -ADHD stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, --in these diagnostic criteria include behaviors like difficulty sustaining attention to tasks, a tendency to make careless errors in schoolwork, problems listening when spoken to, problems following through on instructions and finishing tasks, being easily distracted, often losing things, fidgeting a lot, talking excessively, having problems with hyperactivity, having trouble waiting -What's important is that, to receive a diagnosis of ADHD, these problems have to be sufficiently serious that they're disrupting the child's life, making it difficult for them to function. -the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that ten to 11% of kids in the U.S. actually receive a diagnosis of ADHD, with boys being about three times more likely than girls to receive the diagnosis. Interestingly, this level of diagnosis has increased in recent years -In the case of ADHD, some researchers believe that labeling kids as having ADHD at all is a mistake, because it medicalizes natural differences between kids.-> there's a range of variation that we find in nature that isn't caused by pathologies, per se. -According to some researchers, the same logic should apply to ADHD. If you think that attention, planning, working, memory, and so on all vary naturally from one individual to the next, then by definition, simply due to this natural variability, there are just gonna be kids with relatively high abilities and others with relatively low abilities. This doesn't make the kids on the low end of the spectrum sick. -First, researchers have very little understanding of the specific workings of ADHD, or even if it is one thing, though we do know that it's highly heritable -genetics accounts for about 77% of the variability between children's ADHD symptoms. Second, partly because we're still figuring out what ADHD is, we also haven't perfected it's treatment,

Golden Rule

-do unto others as you would have them do to you -incredibly powerful -set of moral training wheels -gets us to think deeply about how other ppl might feel not by thinking deeply about them, but ironically by thinking about ourselves and our own feelings

Kids that skip a grade are more likely to later on

-earn an advanced degree, to author a scientific publication and even to register a patent. Also they achieved these things at younger ages on average, than equally accomplished students who did not skip a grade. -found that among advanced math performers, those who were involved in more accelerated classes were more likely to achieve success in science and engineering fields. -that it probably won't hurt an advanced learner to accelerate and might even yield benefits, both short-term and long-term, however the evidence for benefits is deeply imperfect, because in most cases, kids who accelerate are self-selecting, in other words, some kids and their parents and teachers decide to go faster and others decide not to.

When are the most negative consequences of divorce found?

-found that the most negative consequences of divorce were found for what they called high-conflict families where there was the highest amount of animosity between parents before and during the divorce. In fact, the amount of conflict leading up to the divorce was one of the strongest predictors of how kids fared after the separation.

how is executive function tested

-go no go task -You might remember that in this task, you had to clap for one thing, like frogs, but not for another thing, like flowers. So it required stopping, or inhibitory control. -Another popular method tests cognitive flexibility. This is called the Multi-dimensional Card Sort Task, because it involves sorting cards, according to multiple dimensions. -kids good at understanding that at first red cards go with red cards and blue cards go with blue cards so understand color game -shape game then need to put trucks with trucks and flowers with flowers even if colors are different and kids aren't good at this -kids are good at following first rule but then not good at switching to other rules -is that young kids don't have any trouble learning the rules of the game. They pick it up right away. Instead, their problem is switching from one rule to another. It's like they're completely incapable of doing this. -marshmallow task -In the task, the child is presented with a single marshmallow and then is left alone with it for up to 10 minutes and told that if they can wait, and not eat the marshmallow, then they will receive two marshmallows in exchange. -is that Mischel found that it predicted important life outcomes many years later. For example, kids who could wait longer performed significantly better on their SAT,

Biggest factor that explained how well home schooled students did on academic tests

-he biggest factor, which nevertheless explained only a small amount of the performance, was that home schooled students with parents who graduated from college scored higher than kids whose parents did not attend college, although both groups earned much higher scores than the national average. It's notable that few other factors were strongly related to performance. For example, the achievement gap that presents such a problem for public education, disappears in home schooling. Neither class nor race have been linked to differences in home schooled student achievement.

schedule of studying

-how to schedule studying -I'll note that if you have a limited amount of time that you can devote to studying, you're far better off breaking that study time into chunks and leaving time between each session than just continuously studying. -you're better to do one or two rounds of flashcards and then return to the task a day later than to do the same amount of studying all in one sitting. Also, as you leave gaps between repetitions of the same material, you can study other topics during that gap, which makes for a really efficient study schedule. Many, many studies have shown that the longer you wait before restudying something, the better you remember it later on. -learners remembered retrieved faces far better than restudied faces, and they remembered spaced-out faces far better than faces that were presented repeatedly all in one chunk. And when faces were both spaced out and learned with a retrieval practice, students did best of all! -longer schedule of studying and retrieval is best -both spaced repetition and retrieval practice really shine when there's some delay between when the information is studied and when it's tested. -The reason you'e studying is because you want to store that information for more than a day, cramming just isn't effective. -cramming works just fine if you only need to know something for a brief time, like if you'll be tested very soon after you study.

Freud's view of morality

-humans are born savages and that in absence of society we act according to basic primitive instincts instincts that begin with F like feeding, fighting -for freud all these innate urges live in the id -we need to temper our urges and desires to conform to the constraints placed on them by society -society is the system of norms and conventions that guide human behavior and hopefully allow us to avoid conflict -superego= basis of morality -morality isn't an innate instinct, it's imposed by society and its institutions -for freud the id and superego are polar opposites at war -ego is in between id and superego trying to choose the best compromise between our urges and what society tells us is right -psyc disorders all arise from the ego's impossible job of satisfying the id and superego

Is there a biological edge for boys?

-if there is a biological edge for boys, it doesn't show up in the international data, despite any influence of other factors like discrimination or stereotypes, that boys are better at Math than girls. If there is a biological difference, it is swamped by other cultural factors. -they again suggest that culture likely plays a large role in who studies Math at high level. Among White students, men are about 50 percent more likely than women to major in Math. About 1.5 percent of White men major in Math, compared to only .9 percent of White women. However, when we look at Asian students, there is no gender difference at all. -What these data tell us, especially when combined with international data that find a big female advantage by grade eight, is that we need to be extremely cautious when looking at test scores from one culture, like the U.S. to make general claims about the biology of boys and girls across cultures. -can't really make this claim -it all differs for different cultures

examples that young kids do have some understanding of what other ppl are thinking

-imitation: stick out tongue when caregiver does it -children just under the age of three begin to engage in pretend play, imagining what it might be like to be someone else and to have their thoughts, desires

tools of the mind

-involves changing entire classrooms to improve executive function in all kids, not just in those who struggle the most. This curriculum, designed by Adele Diamond at UBC in Canada, involves teaching kids tools that externalize their thoughts, and thereby allow them to become much more aware of them, and better able to control them. One of these tools is private speech, talking to oneself while doing a difficult task, to remember what comes next. In other words, creating an external set of instructions that guides the behavior. Another tool is the use of physical objects to remind kids of which task they're currently doing. -but above all, tools of the mind promotes the idea that children learn best when they direct their own energies and learn through active play, rather than being forced to constantly suppress their desires in accordance with the teacher's classroom goals. -and there are some large studies that find evidence that the program actually improves executive function, there are also studies that have failed to find the same results.

why are infants up all night?

-it's not the case that they sleep less than adults. Quite the contrary, a child's sleep requirements change significantly with age, declining steadily from infancy to adolescence. Newborns sleep 14 to 18 hours a day and older infants sleep between 10 and 16 hours a night. With an average of around 13 hours. By 12 years of age the average is nine hours.

lying

-kids are terrible liars -most compelling reason for kids to tell lies is to hide their transgressions because they have difficulty inhibiting their actions -> sometimes do things they aren't supposed to do so lie about them -white lie: lies we tell to spare others' feelings -> we are socialized or taught to do these lies with increased age, they do not come naturally to us -blue lies= lies we tell to conceal the transgressions of a group (team cheats to win, don't tell anyone)

Other techniques: positive reinforcement and open communication

-like positive reinforcement, praising and rewarding kids for positive outcomes, but beyond this, parents can go a step further. -The first step is we teach our child through repeated examples that when she does something bad she can talk to us, and we won't get mad or violent. This we hope will encourage her to talk to us when things are going badly, and discourage lying and covering up behaviors to the extent possible. Similarly when she does something that we find a little mean or bad, we try to avoid telling her this in a judging way, to make sure that she's willing to share again in the future. The more our kids talk to us the more we can help them reshape their behaviors in the future, -The second thing we do is help our kid to imagine alternative ways to behave in the future, so that when she encounters a similar situation, she has different ways to respond. So if she lashes out at one of us because she's frustrated, we ask her to calm down, give her some time alone, so that everyone can regain composure and then we rehash what happened and think, hmm, I wonder what we could have done to make that work better? -Besides this, we use plenty of incentives in our house, that reinforce positive behaviors. Dessert comes after you finish dinner, hot chocolate comes after homework, -A consistent and firm application of positive rewards like these, that are removed when behaviors don't comply, can be much more effective ways of shaping behavior, that don't risk shutting down communication between parents and kids.

how can parents reduce the chance their child dies of SIDS

-like using a co-sleep crib that latches onto the side of the parents' bed while securing the infant and protecting them from the bodies and soft surfaces of their parents' bed. Also, children should be placed on their back to sleep, since sleeping in the prone position, that is on the stomach, significantly increases SIDS risk. Turning on a fan in the infant's room and insuring that the air is free of smoke are also important. Finally, there's some mixed evidence that breastfeeding may also decrease the risk of SIDS.

Prefrontal Cortex

-located right up front -slow to develop and slower to become connected up to other parts of the brain -Our prefrontal cortex plays a huge role in making plans and deciding what to do, and our white matter is important to enforcing these plans, sending out signals for action, suppressing thoughts and impulses that are contrary to them.

risk factors for SIDS

-main risks are environmental -is that SIDS is due to some underlying biological vulnerability that's triggered by certain environmental conditions like parental smoking, sleeping on the belly, or sleeping on soft surfaces with lots of soft stuffed toys -In fact, it's estimated that around 75% of all SIDS deaths are attributable to accidental suffocation or strangulation because of unsafe sleeping environments. -factors like education, race, ethnicity, and poverty appear to be associated with SIDS. -SIDS is more than twice as common among Native Americans and African Americans compared to Caucasian infants, whereas Hispanic and Asian infants have the lowest rates of SIDS. -but one possibility is that environmental risks for SIDS, like smoking and sleep practices, also vary across groups. Another related possibility is that economic disparities between groups make it harder for some families to afford materials to create a safe sleeping environment, like a proper crib featuring a firm surface and narrowly spaced bars. -Turns out that SIDS can be all but eliminated by some simple changes in parenting practices. Evidence for this is that the rate of SIDS has dropped substantially in the US since 1994, likely as a result of public education programs. -Recent analyses suggest that sharing a bed or co-sleeping, as we'll later discuss, substantially increases the risk of SIDS, suggesting that parents who want to sleep close to their infant should consider other practices,

The New Counterculture

-new counterculture= christian -It is modern in some superficial ways, such as in its use of the Internet -to pass along curricula and teaching tips and to create instant support networks. And it is modern in some deeper ways—for example, in its capacity to fulfill needs that could have arisen only in our present social circumstances. Those include the need many parents feel to shield their families from a commercial culture they regard as soulless, acquisitive, overly sexualized, and corrosive of family ties. -former sixties radicals and christians -These first home educators were suspicious of institutions, Rousseauvian in their pedagogy, and big on learning by doing, whether it was milking goats or weaving a wall hanging or digging a well - Schools, they argued, were factory-like places, from which the "instinctual" knowledge and casual intimacy of family was coldly, and disastrously, excluded -Unlike Holt and his followers, they were religious conservatives who worried that schools undercut the authority of parents and forced children to face peer pressure before they were able to withstand it - With Dobson's immense reach, the Moores' message found an eager audience among the evangelicals and fundamentalists of the new Christian right. For these converts home schooling offered the possibility of editing out evolutionary theory, secular humanism, and other knowledge they abhorred, while reviving or reinventing a model of learning that encouraged children to cleave to their families and keep the blandishments of consumerism at arm's length. Conservative Christians understood that it was easier to strengthen the influence of families against that of pop culture if families had something explicit and comprehensive to do, and education was the obvious function. -It was thanks to them, and particularly to the Home School Legal Defense Association, that home schooling earned the legal status it enjoys today -By 1993 home education was legal in all fifty states, subject to varying degrees of regulation. - Home-schooling parents are not, as a rule, any wealthier than the American norm, but they do tend to have more years of education. -And their families are larger than average: the majority have three or more children. Conservative Christians have become the new counterculture, far more vital than what remains of the 1960s version, and home schooling is their most successful alternative institution. -The news that home-schooled kids had been dominating national spelling and geography bees, and that several surveys showed them scoring higher than the national average on standardized tests, including the SAT -they felt the attractions of using their minds and education in systematic, diligent ways; of possessing a sense of purpose independent from their husbands'; and of avoiding the tedium of housecleaning -Home schooling was in some ways the perfect solution—a souped-up domesticity with higher stakes and more respect -hough it did not afford economic autonomy, it did offer an intellectual outlet. And it provided social, political, and even entrepreneurial opportunities -The unschoolers, in contrast, tended to celebrate the creativity of the child over the labors of the mother. -n the end, Kingdom of Children suggests that the benefits of home schooling may be greater for women than for children or for society in general -Home-schooled kids, I think it's fair to say, are all right. They do well on tests, and they go on to fancy colleges when they want to; admissions officers and professors like them because they are self- motivated and have good study habits. -most home-schooled kids make friends through the Scouts or church groups or volunteering. -hey are more likely, for example, to have voted in the previous five years, participated in an ongoing community-service activity, or gone to the public library. And the few psychological studies that have looked at categories such as "self-concept" and sociability have detected no problems and some advantages for home-schooled kids. It would be ill-advised to set much store by such studies, given the difficulty of measuring something like self-concept, but at least they don't raise any alarms.

far transfer

-newly ability transfers to something that is far from it behaviorally

what does not help kids to lie less?

-no need for you to talk to your child about importance of honesty and negativity of lying -do not read kids stories about boy who cried wolf or pinocchio

things that do not predict kids lying

-parental socio-economic status, religion, education, culture, children's temperament, parenting styles -very usual, very common for children to lie a lot -from four on majority of children will lie

what can we do to help our kids lie less?

-parents bad at seeing when kids lie (50%) -make sure not to punish your child severely when you discover they lied -yourself model honesty -ask child to promise you to tell the books

Press Article 4-> pediatricians tweak outdated screen times suggestion

-pediatricians are tweaking their long-standing recommendation for children younger than 2, as well as the recommendation that older children and teens get no more than two hours of recreational screen time a day. -The latest neuroscience research shows that the more a digital experience approximates live two-way communication, the more a child younger than 2 will understand and process it -If you sit down and play with them on that screen, on that technology, they're going to get more out of it. -parents do homework to find educational apps -As for kids age 2 and older, pediatricians are moving away from the recommendation of no more than two hours of entertainment screen time per day and instead suggest setting limits on recreational screen time. -t's also important to know when to turn the screens o . "There's a time and place that's appropriate and you want to have tech-free zones, -The quality of content your child engages in is also more important than the platform or the time they spend with it,

Diseases that have been eradicated through vaccines

-polio -measles -> although outbreaks have become more common in western countries recently as small but increasingly large groups of people decide not to vaccinate their children

Pre-register

-pre-register all their experimental plans and agree to publish the results no matter what, so there could be no accusation of questionable research practices or publication bias • Decide on total number of participants before data collection • Decide on all the measures and variables before data collection • Decide on which analysis will be run • Platform where researchers need to already plan out hypothesis, different variables, analysis, number of participants so design the whole study and put this online available on the internet and then it is accessible to ppl • Already accepted by journal so less likely for researcher to change data and publisher will publish no matter what the results are • See this as step that will allow us to have more ethical practices

Why have ADHD diagnoses increased?

-probably because of changes in how doctors diagnose it

landmark study in Journal of the American medical Association

-reported that breastfeeding had significant impacts on intelligence in children. However, critics noted that mothers who breastfeed are also more likely to have higher socio-economic status. Such that better outcomes later in life could also be driven by higher income in education level rather than breastfeeding. In the original study, the authors tried to account for these effects. In particular, they claim that these associations between breastfeeding and a child's adulthood IQ remained after controlling for the following variables. Marital status, social status, breadwinner's education, mother's height, mother's age, mother's weight gain during pregnancy, mother's cigarette consumption during the third trimester, number of pregnancies, estimated gestational age, birth weight, birth length, pregnancy complications, and delivery complications. Pretty impressive. Unfortunately however, they fail to control for probably the best predictor of the child's IQ in adulthood. That is the IQ of their biological parents.

compassion/ early signs of compassion

-sensitivity to other ppl's mental states and a desire to resoect them - 2 parts to compassion: caring about other ppl's states and being able to guess what those states are in the first place -evidence that relatively young infants don't like to see other ppl suffer -also young infants prefer ppl who help others over those who hurt them -empathic behavior of newborns towards other babies crying-> contagious crying -infants have sensitivity to expressions of suffering around them although maybe not full compassion and that they can use these cues to guide their own behaviors -by 6 months infants prefer ppl who help over ppl who are mean -14 months infants try to help other ppl accomplish tasks that they can't do themselves -infants remain bad at guessing what other ppl are thinking though because struggle to develop a theory of mind

Kids and adults concern for reputation

-share resources usually out of concern for our own reputations -adults and children give more to other ppl when they're being observed by an onlooker than when they are given the chance to share anonymously -kids care about reputations too but in different way than adults -private giver of crayons and public giver of crayons: ask kid who was nicer? ask adult who was nicer? -kids younger than nine say public giver is nicer and said they would do the same thing in that situation -adults say private giver is nicer -adults thought it important that motives be clear and pure and that actions with ulterior motives are not as nice -kids seem to either be insensitive to ulterior motives or think that getting credit is perfectly fine and doesn't diminish the value of the generous act -only by age 9 do they start to distrust ppl who act with ulterior motives

Implicit attitude task

-subjects are shown a series of trials where there are two phases, one form each of the two groups, and they're told that they should pair a positive stimulus with one group and a negative stimulus with another -then have to correctly categorize faces by putting blue shirt kids with blue shirt kids -found when positive word is paired with their own group they are much faster at the task then when positive word is paired with other group -show this effect for skin color too -adults and children are the same on this study -explicit associations may go away by age 10 but implicit associations don't go away

SIDS

-sudden infant death syndrome -sudden unexplained death of an infant during the night -it can affect otherwise healthy newborns without any real warning signs -exact cause is unknown but have uncovered some risk factors

study by Pew Research center (religious vs.; non religious)

-surveyed 35,000 Americans in all 50 states to study differences between religious and non-religious individuals. What they found is that religious faith differs by age, by marital status, by income and so on. Here are some highlights. First, younger people are much less likely to believe in God than older people. -What you can see here is that the youngest people surveyed are twice as likely to be atheist or agnostic. Similarly in this figure you can see that religious belief differs by income. People who earn $30,000 or less, the people near the top of the figure, are about 13% more likely to have absolute belief in God relative to individuals who earn over $100,000. Differences related to education looked almost identical. People with PhDs are 14% less likely to have absolute belief in God relative to people with high school or less. -when we compare religious and non-religious families, we need to be aware that religion isn't the only thing that differs between these groups, almost everything does.

intentional vs unintentional

-take time to learn the differenve between actions that have unintended negative consequences from those actions that have intentionally negative effects (for little kids both of these are equally bad) -when we judge the actions of others, we don't just care about the effects of their actions, we also care about whether they were intention

Why can scientists detect autism early?

-that although genetics surely plays a big role in making some children more susceptible than others, many scientists believe there are important environmental factors, that we don't know exactly which are most important, or even if there is a single factor at all. Autism quite likely can be caused by many different things. -"The most powerful proof-of-concept evidence "derives from studies specifically linking autism "to exposures in early pregnancy "- thalidomide, misoprostol and valproic acid, "maternal rubella infection, "and the organophosphate insecticide, chlorpyrifos. "There is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism." -No one single cause seems likely. Second, in each case, what seems to be important is exposure to these elements in the first trimester of pregnancy, perhaps before mothers even know they're pregnant. -the concordance rate of autism is in fact higher for dizygotic twins, than for non-twin siblings. This difference might just be due to the fact, that autism is caused by stressful events, that occur early in the pregnancy, rather than events, that occur after birth, like vaccination.

Why might breastfeeding be beneficial?

-the very first breast milk that a mother produces called colostrum contains immunoglobulin IGA, which protects the infant's intestinal tract as its immune system gains strength early in life. This might plausibly explain why a breastfed infants have fewer infections and fewer respiratory problems. But it's hard to see why this might affect intelligence. -there's no good evidence that combining breastfeeding with formula has negative effects.

theory of mind and Mountain Task

-theory of how other ppl think -perspective taking -description of this shown by Jean Piaget's Mountain task -child sits across a table from someone else and on the table is 3d model of three different sized mountains -child asked to show experimenter how the mountains would look to the other person -piaget found children under 6 were unable to reason about the perspective of the doll and instead selected the photo that reflected their own view of the model -after age 6 performance improved and by age 8 kids consistently select the correct photo -children appear to struggle with theory of mind early in life and often have trouble guessing what other people believe

Freud impact on view of children

-thought children begin as selfish creatures who are concerned with eating and sleeping who don't know how to share and who don't think about other people's needs

New research about morality of young children

-very young children and in fact infants have many of the same moral preoccupations as adults -children's brains are different from those of adults -prefrontal cortex involved in supressing urges and selecting behaviors isn't fully adult like until at least age of 20 -humans are probably not born savages but learning to put these intutitions into action is hard as it is for adults is much harder for toddler brains -developmental scientists have recently uncovered evidence for early-developing and possible innate moral intuitions

Sally Ann task

-way to test theory of mind -ann has a toy dog she shows to sally and while sally is present ann puts the toy into a basket so Sally knows where it is, then sally leaves temporarily and while she is gone Ann secretly moves the toy from the basket to a box and then sally returns and the question is where do you think sally will look for the toy -young kids predict that sally should look in the box since that's where the toy is (this is answer you would give if you weren't thinking about Sally's beliefs at all) -to be successful in this task have to know what other people think and how their thoughts and desires differ from our own -called a false belief task -young children below the age of 3 struggle to predict sally's behavior whereas older children age 4 and above do pretty well and often pass the false belief task -children on autism spectrum are delayed in their ability to do the false belief task suggesting that they're slower to develop a theory of mind, a possible explanation of their troubles understanding and interactng with other pople -some say kids younger who aren't even two may already be able to reason about false belief but that standard sally ann task is too difficult for other reasons

What causes the achievement gap?

-what we find is that factors like wealth and parental education are hugely correlated with children's academic achievement. This could be because parents pass on successful genes, or it could be because they provide a supportive learning environment either by virtue of their parenting, or simply because adopted kids tend to move from poorer neighborhoods with weaker schools to more affluent neighborhoods with better schools.

Morality

-what's right and wrong -seems hardwired into our brains -we all have an opinion on what's good or bad -although kids have seeds of morality from early in life, preferring generous ppl and sometimes acting wth compassion, they're not fully adult life -children more likely to rely on rules and conventions to guide their judgements like what the law says or school rules and only relatively late in life are able to reason about sticky gray areas

co-sleeping

-when parents sleep near to, if not in the same bed with, their child. -The practice of co-sleeping was partially born from a philosophy called attachment parenting, -Attachment parenting aims to promote secure attachment in the infant, through continuous empathy, closeness, and touch. -and there's actually no data to suggest that co-sleeping affects attachment at all. Nevertheless, co-sleeping is a popular practice in the U.S. (between 10-50%) -it's extremely common in other countries (some estimate over 90% in India) -Overall, higher rates of co-sleeping for Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans appears to be driven by parents' worries about separating from a child. Whereas Europeans and North Americans are more likely to worry about lack of privacy.

TIMSS vs PISA

-whereas the TIMSS focuses on formal mathematics like algebra, trigonometry, and so on, the PISA takes a more applied problem-solving approach,

PISA- Program for International Student Assessment

-which tests math, science, and reading ability in 15 year olds. That's ninth and 10th graders across 41 different countries. This is the study that you've maybe heard most about because it's the one that finds the poorest performance by American students. Although both the TIMSS and the PISA find that Singapore, China, Hong-Kong, South Korea, and Japan are at the very top in math, American children rank 10th on the TIMSS and 35th on the PISA, which is below the international average. Likewise, on the PISA, the US is below average in science overall, and while the TIMSS doesn't measure reading ability, on the PISA, the US is again below the international average.

Spacing Effect

-you should take advantage of the spacing effect, which is what scientists who study learning and memory have named the idea that adding breaks in between repeatedly studying the same or similar information ends up improving your long-term recall for that same information. -may be something to do with the forgetting and having to re-remember it -need to know when the test is to be able to space it out -spacing is that research suggests that a little extra spacing goes a long way in terms of retention benefits. -A useful principle seems to be that you should wait until you've almost, but not quite forgotten what you've learned. The extra effort that you'll have to put in to restudy when the material's not so familiar, appears to be helpful for long-term memory. -Spread out your study as much as you can, and give yourself a chance to refresh on the material right before you need to take the test. If you're giving yourself six hours total to study for that test in two weeks, an effective schedule might be something like three hours today, day one, two hours on day eight in about a week, and one hour review a day or two before the test. -If you leave some time, even a few seconds or minutes before reviewing material you've already covered, you'll improve your long-term memory for that material. - that any spacing is better than no spacing.

What is one of the problems with trying to figure out if family structure affects kids?

-you'll realize that understanding the effects of single parenting on kids is a scientific hornet's nest. This is because we're dealing with purely correlational data where cause and effect are especially hard to pull apart. There are no experimental studies that force people to get married or get divorced, and single parents probably differ from other parents in all kinds of ways that has changed a lot over time as our cultural norms relating to marriage and family structure have changed.

Kids who perform well on executive functions tasks outcomes

1. increased cooperation in classroom settings 2. better focus on tasks 3. fewer problems with behavioral issues at school 4. better academic achievement 5. better health and financial outcomes later in life

goals of the class

1. train scientific reasoning 2. encourage informed citizen decision-making 3. these things in context for parenting -science doesn't tell you how you should act but may influence your actions

Academic acceleration

Academic acceleration is not the same thing as a gifted and talented education program. Rather, the option for acceleration is one component of a broader program for educating students with especially high abilities for their age. -An acceleration is often a case by case decision. About one third of high school students in the US take at least one AP test, while only 1.5% have ever skipped a grade. -A common fear is that accelerating students may take them away from kids their own age. There by impeding their social and emotional development. On the other hand, proponents argue that acceleration is the best option for students who act out, lose motivation, or distract other kids when the curriculum is too slow for them.

Does teaching a child earlier have lasting effects

Although some kids learn to read very early, it turns out that there's no evidence that teaching a child earlier has any lasting long term effects at all. In fact, there are huge data sets, including a 2007 study with data from 54 countries, which finds no association between school-age entry and reading achievement at age 15. In other words, if you read to your child and they go to a school with a solid curriculum, you probably don't need to panic about getting them to read at the age of two. On the other hand, if you love to read and your child does too, then you may want to teach them

2 most popular systems of teaching reading

Both realize that kids need to learn how to map the letters in the alphabet to the phonemes in their language, but they disagree about how to approach that problem. In phonics, kids are explicitly taught the sounds that each letter can make. As they get better, they begin to combine sounds and eventually learn to read whole words and phrases. On the other hand, whole language methods emphasize learning to recognize entire words at a time. In this approach kids are encouraged to guess and use context to figure out what a word is. -phonemic works better -All of this suggests that phonics is probably a stronger approach but also that some children can learn just fine with the whole language method. In fact, what's likely is that most kids naturally use both techniques spontaneously, learning to identify some longer words automatically and breaking down other ones sound by sound. But when it comes to classroom instruction, it looks like being explicitly taught which letters make which sounds in which contexts is overall better than an approach focusing on understanding whole words from their context.

Journal article on self-control by Moffitt

Following a cohort of 1,000 children from birth to the age of 32 y, we show that childhood self- control predicts physical health, substance dependence, personal finances, and criminal offending outcomes, following a gradient of self-control. Effects of children's self-control could be disen- tangled from their intelligence and social class as well as from mistakes they made as adolescents. In another cohort of 500 sibling-pairs, the sibling with lower self-control had poorer out- comes, despite shared family background. Interventions addressing self-control might reduce a panoply of societal costs, save tax- payers money, and promote prosperity. -Behavioral geneticists have shown that self-control is under both genetic and environmental influences -Health researchers report that self-control predicts early mortality (9); psychiatric disorders (10); and unhealthy behaviors, such as overeating, smoking, unsafe sex, drunk driving, and noncompliance with medical regimens (11). Sociologists find that low self-control predicts unemployment (12) and name self-control as a central causal variable in crime -opt-out schemes that make the default the good behavior and since it takes time and planning to opt-out of default good behavior, ppl stay in the good behavior -ur study design is observational and correlational; -we report findings from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a longitudinal study of a complete birth cohort of 1,037 children born in one city in a single year, whom we have followed from birth to the age of 32 y with 96% retention -studied health outcomes, wealth outcomes, and crime outcomes -Dunedin study data allowed the requisite statistical controls for IQ and social class. We also exploited another longitudinal study, a birth cohort of siblings, to ask whether the sibling in each pair who had lower self-control subsequently developed worse outcomes, despite both siblings having the same home and family. This design disentangles the individual child's self-control from all other features on which families differ (and which siblings share while growing up) -as adults, children with poor self-control were not at elevated risk for depression. They had elevated risk for substance dependence -health, wealth, public safety (crime) -Childhood self-control also foreshadowed the study members' financial situations. -Childhood self-control predicted whether or not these study members' offspring were being reared in one-parent vs. two- parent households -At the age of 32 y, children with poor self-control were less financially planful -Children with poor self-control were more likely to be convicted of a criminal offense, even after accounting for social class origins and IQ -We observed a self-control gradient in which boys and girls with less self-control had worse health, less wealth, and more crime as adults than those with more self-control at every level of the distribution of self-control -howed that children with poor self-control were more likely to make mistakes as adolescents -Differences between individuals in self-control are present in early childhood and can predict multiple indicators of health, wealth, and crime across 3 decades of life in both genders. (3 to 5 yrs old) -ur findings imply that innovative policies that put self-control center stage might reduce a panoply of costs that now heavily burden citizens and governments -Children's self-control during their first decade of life was measured using nine measures of self-control: observational ratings of children's lack of control (3 and 5 y of age) and parent, teacher, and self- reports of impulsive aggression, hyperactivity, lack of persistence, in- attention, and impulsivity (5, 7, 9, and 11 y of age). The nine measures were positively and significantly correlated

Mindfulness meditation

For example, there's a growing literature on the use of mindfulness meditation to help children train executive function. Using this technique, kids sit for short periods, once or twice a day, maybe five minutes, with instructions to notice breathing, to notice one's own body, to notice thoughts come and go, to become aware of one's own mental states. In this sense, it actually resembles tools of the mind, which also tries to promote awareness of one's own mental processes

phonemes and phonemic writing system

In English and in many other languages, we use what's sometimes called a phonemic alphabet. Phonemes are just the sounds that a language uses, and a phonemic writing system represents those sounds. So when you see a letter like T in English, sounds come to mind not things. A huge advantage of this system is that with only a small number of letters, we can write down any word that we can say by just combining the letters in different ways. -

What should parents do for math and learning

In both the cases of math and reading, parents should focus foremost on creating positive experiences around learning, rather than turning their home learning experiences into dreaded lessons. Probably the best thing that parents can do to encourage reading at home is to simply do lots of it,

Paap argument

Recently, Paap (2014) raised the concern that the literature on bilingualism and executive control might be affected by a confirmation bias to report positive results only. -. According to Kenneth Paap, a psychologist at San Francisco State University and the most prominent of the critics, bilingual advantages in executive function "either do not exist or are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances." -couldn't replicate extremely famous studies with these findings -"There's a tendency to conduct multiple, small-sample studies that are underpowered," he says. "That increases the likelihood of false positives. The problem is compounded by confirmation biases, or motivations to report only the studies that work. -This publication bias, a common problem in psychology and science as a whole, means that the evidence for the phenomenon seems stronger than it actually is. -He found that a bilingual advantage only shows up in one in six tests of executive function, and mostly in small studies involving 30 or fewer volunteers. The largest studies, involving a hundred or more, all found negative results. -Any of these "confounding factors" could explain why bilinguals sometimes perform better in tests of attention or mental control, and very few studies satisfactorily account for them. -'it's not clear what those tests are actually measuring

Bialystok argument

She also accuses Paap of selectively focusing on studies of young adults, who are least likely to show a bilingual advantage; they're already at the peak of their cognitive powers and are unlikely to improve significantly further, bilingualism or no. When you look at what she describes as "the actual literature," you see "an enormous amount of evidence from studies across the lifespan, using a wide variety of research methods, which show that bilingual minds and brains are significantly different from those of monolinguals."

Content-based acceleration

Some acceleration programs focus on supplementing an existing curriculum with more advanced material for students who advance more quickly than most others. This type of acceleration, which the National Work Group on Acceleration calls Content-based acceleration, can often accommodate students who excel more in some areas than others, by enriching only a subset of subjects. Some examples of this type of acceleration include so-called AP or Advanced Placement classes, which allow a sixth grader to take a seventh grade math class, or might involve busing a small group of elementary students to the local middle school for language arts for example.

how to improve reading skills

The more you are exposed to it, the more you'll learn. Big reviews of many large correlational studies find that language growth and reading ability are related to parent preschooler reading, in part because it exposes kids to what researchers call the written language register, what I called the writer's dialect earlier. These are weird ways of talking that writers use only in books that can be a barrier to kids who don't get early frequent exposure to reading.

3 important principles to teach

first that numbers should be recited in a specific order, like one, two, three, four, five, six, not two, one, four, five, three, six, seven, second, that for each object we count, we should add one number, and finally that the last number in a counting routine labels the total number of things in a collection.

Zimmerman paper

looked at approx 1,800 six year olds (actually 5, 6, and 7) and asked how screen time was related to math and reading abilities, as well as digit span -main type of screen time was tv -study found that each hour of additional tv viewing before age three was associated with worse perforamnce on tests of reading ability and digit span memory, two rsults that support the original APA recommendation -study also found tat slightly older kids may have actually benefitted from more screen time -but correlation does not equal causation -researchers tried to take into account confounding factors of income, edu level, parental cognitive ability, but we still can't be sure what causes what -it's possible it is not the screen time itself but what is being watched (Sesame street tailored to older kids so benefit more than younger kids)

We are more likely to share with ppl in the same group as us

study where we break ppl up into groups and they quickly come to prefer ppl in their own group and think that these ppl are smarter, more attractive, more trustworthy, more talented -this is true even if groups are totally meaningless -ask ppl which painting they prefer and group them into that group -randomly assign ppl to groups and after short delay will think ppl in their group is better -same thing found for young kids -kids assigned randomly to groups red or blue and then asked to put t-shirt on to remind them of their group and then shown pictures of ppl with colored shirts and asked to make judgements about how much they liked the kid -> subjects gave more favorable ratings to whichever child was in the same group as them

What factors best predict which kids will learn and which techniques of instruction are most important? (phonemic awareness)

that something called phonological awareness is important. This refers to a child's grasp of phonemes, those pieces of sound we mentioned before which make up a language. It may seem obvious to an adult, but recognizing that words and sentences are composed of smaller units of sound is not necessarily obvious to children. We can measure phonological awareness by testing how well kids can identify rhymes or we can see how they pronounce non-words like wug or blicket, which they haven't ever seen before but which are pronounceable by adult speakers. Scores on these measures of phonological awareness are correlated with early reading ability.

spanking

the risks of spanking are substantial, and the possible benefits are pretty much non-existent. Roughly, what the data tell us is that spanking is correlated with a host of very negative outcomes, the most significant of which is that children who get spanked are later more violent, which in turn leads them to get spanked even more, -that 90% of parents in the US report having spanked their child at least once, and about 60% of mothers have done so within the last week. On average, children are spanked three times a week, -Frequent spanking is more common among African American parents than among Hispanic or Caucasian parents, and also, Protestant parents are more likely than parents of other religions to spank their kids. Finally, boys are more likely to be spanked than girls. -recent studies suggest that the same outcomes exist, children from all groups are more likely, not less likely, to act out and become violent if they are spanked, than if they are not spanked. -Techniques like spanking and even more moderate techniques like time-outs, might reduce a specific behavior in the short term, but overall they fail to produce positive outcomes in the long term.

Study of how adoption from Lebanese orphanage affects academic achievement

who looked at how children adopted from a Lebanese orphanage performed on IQ tests and how their performance compared to non-adopted children who remained in the orphanage. What Dennis found was that the adopted children had IQs comparable to typically developing children, somewhere around 100, whereas non-adopted kids who remained in the orphanage scored substantially lower, around 65, a score that at the time

Concordance

• Concordance= if take two of you in room and ask you do you smoke cigs and you both say yes, then there is concordance, if both say no, then there is concordance, if one says yes and other says no, then no concordance • Concordance means being the same • Concordance is higher for identical twins than non identical twins -childhood disorders like autism have a high degree of concordance for monozygotic twins -concordance rates for monozygotic vs. dizygotic twins help us see if it is more based on genes -if concordance rates go down when monozygotic and dizygotic twins are raised apart rather than together, this suggests that parents have an effect and it tells us how much

genotype

• Genotype= genetic information -genes that determine your eye color comprise your eye color genotype

H squared

• H squares is variance and phenotype accounted for by genetic factors

Brunnelman et. al

- a study on how praising children can cause them to become little narcissists -jump conclusion of results to: parents who overvalue children are more likely to produce narcissistic children -researchers summarize their study as follows: when children are seen by their parents as being more special and more entitled than other children, they may internalize the view that they are superior individuals, a view that is at the core of narcissism -565 kids ages 7 to 11 were given a personality test that measures narcissism -at the same time parents were given a questionnaire that tested whether they overvalues their children -what they found was that parents who scored higher on the overvaluation questionnaire had kids who scored higher on the narcissism test -claim= narcissism in children is cultivated by parents -A causes B interpretation is given despite no actual evidence that this was in fact right -parents who praised too much have narcissistic children -"parents who praise too much have narcissistic children" -self-esteem was predicted by parental warmth not by parental overvaluation -measure using narcissism test

variable intervals vs. variable ratio

- variable intervals= rewards come willy nilly at random times regardless of how many times you press -rats will press the lever very little -variable ratio= most effective way of encouraging a behavior -> used by casinos where you get a reward based on repeating a behavior but the number of times you need to respond it random -both rats and slot machine players go wild and pull the lever without stopping -being slightly random may be the best way (not consistent) to encourage positive behaviors -we reward happy moods with smiles, but maybe not when we're tired -variable reinforcement can be negative for getting rid of bad behaviors though-> for that need consistency -for negative behaviors practice extinction where cut off rewards completely for bad behaviors -worst to give into whining sometimes, want to never give in to it

3 steps of Harris article

-1. show it's just an assumption: look at historical roots -2. show its unwarranted: learning languages (child of immigrants speaks english w/o accent like parents), train kids not to imitate us, upper class kids raised at boarding schools resemble their parents -3. replace it with another idea (social groups) -genetics plays huge role but only half of the equation

Operant Conditioning

-B.F Skinner -cats escaping puzzle boxes -escape from box required cat to randomly explore and discover sequence of steps that opened the box -over time random behaviors that resulted in positive outcomes became associated with these outcomes, behaviors that didn't work gradually decreased in frequency -ex with kids: 6 month old looking up at mobil, initially randomly moves limbs around and accidentally hits mobile noticing it makes a sound and moves, if this is rewarding to the infant then they might repeat the action which is no longer random but now goal-oriented

chromosomes

-DNA is spread over 23 pairs of chromosomes so 46 in total

John. B Watson

-John B. Watson that he could make any baby achieve virtually any outcome depending on their environmental experiences -Little Albert: tried to prove that babies could learn just about anything -infant was presented with white lab rat, and standing behind the baby watson banged a steel bar with a hammer, causing him to cry and fear-> after repeating this sequence several times, Watson then presented albert with only a rat and found he cried and crawled away even though there was no loud noise -albert also became distressed when presented with things that look like a rat (bunny or santa clause mask) -tells us about classical conditioning

Classical Conditioning

-Pavlov's dogs -gong was struck each time before a dog received food, merely striking the gong would eventually cause the dog to salivate, even when no meat was present -unconditioned stimuli= certain stimuli in the world babies and dogs respond to automatically without previously learning; no learning or conditioning is required to get a from them (innate) -unconditioned responses= innate responses to these unconditioned stimuli -little albert the gong is the unconditioned stimulus and fear is the unconditioned response -pavlov's dogs meat is the unconditioned stimulus and drooling the unconditioned response -learning comes in when gong or bell or some other stimulus becomes associated with the unconditioned stimulus-> little albert rat becomes associated with loud noise (rat is conditioned stimulus, fear= unconditioned response that becomes conditioned response) -important bc it is one of the mechanisms that allows us to predict what's likely to happen next in our environment and thus make us better able to navigate life -one problem with classical conditioning is that in its pure form it is limited to describing how stimuli become associated with unconditioned responses, however not all behaviors humans are capable of are reflexes (we engage in many multi-step goal-directed behaviors

file-drawer

-a tendency of researchers to submit positive results but not negative or non-confirmatory results for publication

Measurement of total error

-add up residuals as measurement of total error -to do this have to first square each residual first before adding them together (squaring it makes negative residuals positive so you can then add them all together) -measure distance from each point to best guess line -> measurement of how spread out our data are, around that line

adopted families

-adopted families are heavily vetted so they are not an accurate representation of the population -adoptive families tend to be a select subset of the population

Why the rise of parenting

-advent of scientific research on child development and parenting

how can a child become bilingual

-age of acquisition and peer group are important -the earlier you begin to learn a second language the more likely you are to learn it with full native competence -children who begin younger than age 10 are especially likely to attain full fluency -learning a second language doesn't have a negative impact on a first language -initially the child may have fewer words in each language since their language exposure is divided up across the different languages but by adulthood this difference is likely to disappear -total number of words the speaker knows across the two languages will be more vocab than monolingual ppl -language of the child's peers-> kids prefer to speak language of other kids around them -factor that best predicts whether the children of immigrants will keep their language is whether there is a host community in the country that also speaks that language -single best way to ensure that a child becomes fully bilingual is to place them into an immersion school

dominant alleles

-alleles that have much more influence than others when determining phenotype -represented with capital letters -even a single dominant allele is enough to determine the phenotype for the trait even if the other allele is not dominant -if have dominant allele then getting that trait

What does research tell us about learning language

-almost certainly something special about how humans learn language but along the way we often use simpler forms of learning too to associate with their meanings

early learning of mathematics

-although humans ultimately learn amazing mathematical abiltiies, this knowledge doesn't come easily to children -learning to count if a formidable challenge

Correlation

-as parents' height increases, the corresponding values for children's heights also increase

Height

-both genetic variability and differences have a huge effect on person's adult height -height of children is strongly correlated with height of their parents -can't perfectly predict child's height from parent's height though

heritability estimates

-calculations of how much genetic relatedness can explain differences between ppl and also estimates of how shared and unshared environment affect traits and behaviors too -calculation of how much variability in a behavior or trait is due to genetic variability, as compared to environmental variability

Sex cells

-called gametes -sperm and eggs -only contain one of each chromosome -that's because when we form one of these cells, one or the other copy of each gene is passed on to that specific sex cell -eventually when a sperm fertilizes an egg, each chromosome pairs up with its counterpart, forming a full set of 23 pairs --the new cell has one copy of each gene from the mother, the allele that randomly made it into that particular egg, and another copy from the father, the one that randomly made it into the sperm -helps explain why any two children from the same pair of parents share 50% of their alleles on average -> for any particular genes both siblings will get one allele from their mother, with a 50-50 chance they both get the same one, and one from their father again with a 50-50 chance its the same

Correlation

-can't assume if you find correlation it is causation but it could be -or could be no causation -or could be 3rd thing causing both -can't just infer it will always be causation when have a correlation --almost all of parental research is correlational -it is possible that A caused B -it is possible that B caused A -it is possible that C might have caused both A and B (outside factor causing both) -it is possible that there is no causation

Children: understanding words vs. using words

-children often understand more words than they can use -kids are enormously variable in learning language -at 24 months the median child uses 300 words -some kids use more, some kids use less -slight advantage in vocab size for girls than boys

recommendation from APA for screen time for kisd

-children under 2 not be exposed to screens at all -older children use screens no more than 2 hours a day -claim that excessive media use can lead to attention problems, school difficulties, sleep and eating disorders and even obesity -use correlational data to support this

Jean Piaget

-revolutionized the study of child development -

Ability to read and do math

-clearly learned behaviors that are not universal and haven't always existed in human culture -although practically every human learns a natural language, not everyone learns how their language is expressed in text, and the same thing goes for numbers -humans are predisposed to learn math but this doesn't mean that if left to their own devices they will learn math -heritability of reading math= about 50%

Francis Galton

-coining term nature versus nurture -advocated idea of eugenics -natural and innate biological variation between different organisms and therefore between people and from this reasoned we should be able to perform artificial selection and proposed the selective breeding of humans with what people deemed to be desirable traits while preventing ppl with less desirable traits from breeding -eugenics is not a scientific proposal -eugenics is a proposal for how to act based on a human judgement -science tells us humans vary but doesn't tell us that we should intervene and exploit this variability and doesn't dictate which traits, if any, are more desirable than others

Nature vs. Nature debate

-debate is do we turn out the way that we do because our destiny is written in our genes or because we were shaped like clay by our environment?-- this wording leads to misunderstanding -dates back to ancient times with Aristotle and Plato -debate is often misunderstood because describe opposite and equally implausible extremes -misunderstanding: debate is framed as either/or question -it's always a little bit of nature and nurture -Ex: to learn language an infant needs a human genome which makes them able to learn language but also need to be exposed to words and sentences in their environment

alleles

-different possible DNA sequences for any given gene -sometimes there are two, three, or more possibilities -for each gene on each chromosome we have to copies, one from mom and one from dad-> these two copies could be two different alleles or two copies of the same allele

When is screen time best for kids?

-effects on verbal, reading, and general knowledge scores are most positive for children from households where english is not the primary language, for children whose mothers have less than a high school edu, and for non- white children

Example of Environment affecting height

-egalitarian countries like those in northern europe income and nutrition are fairly evenly distributed across the population so differences in height are somewhat unlikely to come from differences in nutrition for the simple reason that there aren't major differences in nutrition-> in such places genetics plays a stronger role -when enviro is more the same, genetics plays a larger role -when enviro is more different, genetics plays a smaller role and environment plays a larger role -in less egalitarian countries where some are very rich and some are very poor leading to nutritional inequality, differences in nutrition may play a stronger role -egalitarian country where everyone is rich ppl will have same high level of nutrition so ppl should be taller but still have variability of ppl so this is from genetics not enviro since enviro is similar -taller parents tend to have taller kids but environment also plays a role -for height genes matter but as parents we can only really control what they eat

extinction

-ending behaviors by continuous non-reinforcement -reduce a behavior by removing rewards that are generally associated with it -trying to minimize whining by never responding to it

representation

-ex: a map -shrunken, idealized copy of the world that focuses only on things we care about -map doesn't have all the detail of the real world -can think of brain as a representational system-> it tries to make shrunken idealized copies of things, places, and experiences that capture just the information that the learner finds important, throwing out lots of useless information -brain's copies aren't exactly like images, but through the firing of circuits of brain cells, patterns of activation represent patterns int he real world -sometimes there is a sensitive period for learning-> like with languages how little kids are better at learning languages than adults

fixed interval vs. fixed ratio

-fixed interval= reward behavior after fixed amount of time -fixed ratio= reward behavior after a fixed number of repetitions of the behavior -fixed ratio= pushing lever will caus food to be released every 30 pushes -fixed interval= you get a reward every 30 seconds as long as you push the lever at least once -expect fewer lever presses

What school should you look for

-focus on learning in the classroom -ratio of students to teachers -what kind of training teachers -required to update teacher training

Behaviorism

-focused on the role of learning in human psychology -key pioneer= John B. Watson -Watson notorious claim that human nature was almost entirely malleable and said "give me a dozen healthy infants and i'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist" -said he could train a child to become doctor, lawyer, artist -Skinner walden two: assumed human traits and behaviors were fully determined by the environment and thus could be controlled through behavioral engineering-> all there is for skinner is stimulus and response, environmental triggers and behaviors

Swedish study on drinking habits of adopted children

-found that drinking habits of adopted children more related to biological parents drinking habit than adoptive parents -did find some affect of other environment forces outside the home though so biology isn't destiny-> who their friends are -means that parenting actually has very little affect over this (parents don't play a critical role here) -added risk of drinking if biological parents drink, but you aren't doomed -can't always do these studies with adopted kids because a lot of times biological parents stay anonymous and without this info it is almost impossible to separate effects of nature and nurture

DNA

-genetic information that acts as developmental blueprint is stored in your cells as DNA

Heritability of top 5 personality traits

-heritability estimates have found that 40-50% of the differences we find across people on these traits are due to genetic differences between us -effects of parents on variability= 0 to 10 percent -all the rest is explained by unshared environment

heritability

-heritability of traits changes -can sometimes be determined more by genes or enviro at different stages in our lives -heritability of a trait can change over time -• Estimating with heritability what expression of variability in phenotype is from variability in genotype -genetic influences underlying variation in particular traits -use twins to estimate the degree of heritability on traits -see a relatively high genetic influence or high heritability, this means that the individual differences from person to person have the high genetic influence, but a single person in that particular population could have that trait that is almost exclusively environmentally influenced -heritability is not a fixed estimate but its something that varies from time to time based on historical and environmental events -heritability can change if the environment changes: it isn't fixed

twin studies that grew up together

-holding environment constant so looking at monozygotic vs. dizygotic and if something is more likely for monozygotic than dizygotic that means that it is more based on genetics since monozygotic twins have extremely similar genetic makeup

go/no go task

-how to test stopping and inhibition -child is told to make a response whenever a particular stimulus occurs -clap for flowers, but not for frogs-> when frog pops up you have to stop yourself -test of executive function -bilingual kids perform better on tests like these-> but critics of this because say most studies are correlational and not experimental -absolutely no evidence that if there is a correlation it must be because bilingualism causes better executive function

Cohabitation

-humans have long period of cohabitation with their offspring which is unlike other animals

genes

-hundreds to thousands of genes are contained in chromosomes -a gene is just a sequence of DNA at a specific location on the chromosome -the location determines what the gene controls, that is what trait or traits it influences -the specific DNA sequence determines exactly what effect it has on the trait -for each gene on each chromosome we have two copies, one from mom and one from dad

Rise of Parenting

-idea of parenting nonexistent up until 1960s/70s -huge rise in language of parenting after 1970s -we are currently obsessed with parenting

monozygotic twins

-identical twins -rose from the same fertilized egg or zygote and therefore basically have all the same genetic material

heritability of IQ

-increases as we age and especially after we leave home and finish school -by the end of our life genetic differences between us explain almost 100% of the differences between us by adulthood

Noam Chomsky

-infants must have special learning mechanism that is devoted specifically to learning language

Benefit of screen time

-issue isn't about screen time but about the relative benefit of screen time, what you are watching, and how much of the content you can actually pull out of it compared to the benefit of other things that the child could be doing

Does preschool have an educational advantage?

-it depends -preschool programs can make a big difference in kids lives -kids that go to preschool so advantages in kindergarten but these advantages decrease after kids enter kindergarten since now the preschool attendees and their peers are getting the same treatment -but this early advantage doesn't completely disappear -kids who attend quality preschool programs appear to gain a permanent advantage over those who do not -benefits are greater for economically disadvantaged kids -> staying at home for some kids means getting enriching enviro and for others means getting no enriching enviro -all benefits only apply when preschool is high quality -2 major factors determine effectives: edcational philosophy; and professional development of teachers-> ongoing and supportive on the job training for preschool teachers

What things are infants really bad at

-jigsaw puzzle, identifying rhyming words or searching for a lost object in a systematic way -much better than adults at languages though

near transfer

-learning a skill only affects other almost identical skills

Spanking

-likely to make some behaviors less likely in the short term, but the child will come to associate the negative consequences not only with the behavior but also with the person doing the punishment

Harris article

-main thesis= nurture assumption is just an assumption -disagrees with idea of nurture as environment so parenting being same as environment -disagreed that environment is through parenting -way parents raise their kids doesn't lead to definitive lie outcomes

Perfect correlation

-means that knowing thee value of one measurement, should let you predict with 100% accuracy the value of the other -Ex: an individual's name in years is perfectly correlated with their age in days -perfect correlations fall on a perfect straight line - to be perfectly correlated it is not necessary for both numbers to b the same, only that knowing one allows you to figure out the other with 100% accuracy and whenever this happens data will be arranged neatly on a line

R squared

-measure that lets you quantify the strength of a correlation -characterize amount of variability predicted by height (IV) -how much does parent's height pull you from average height of kids -tell you how much height of parent account for variability

social learning theory vs. psychoanalytic theory

-social learning= narcissism is cultivated by parental overvaluation -psychoanalytical= narcissism is cultivated by lack of parental warmth

secure attachment

-measured using strange situation task in which children, generally between ages of 12 and 18 months, are brought into a lab with their caregiver and then are left alone in the room with an unfamiliar person -the researcher records the infant's response to the strange situation -> whether they show anxiety and distress or a willingness to explore and interact with the new person and based on this the infant is classified into one of several attachment categories -attachment categories: secure attachment, ambivalent attachment, avoidant attachment -60 to 70 percent of 12 to 18 month old infants are classified as securely attached -securely attached infants avoid a stranger when alone but will approach them if their caregiver is present -ambivalent fears the stranger regardless of whether the caregiver is present -avoidant tends to approach the stranger regardless of caregiver -securely attached infants show little distress -this measures separation anxiety as well as maternal sensitivity -secure attachment important because it is correlated with a variety of later outcomes -securely attached children with sensitive and responsive mothers performed better in school, had higher IQs and were less prone to behavioral problems

Residual

-measurement of prediction error -residual= 2.5 in case of where father was 62.5 inches tall, we'd predict height of 64 inches, turns out child is actually 66.5 inches, a difference of 2.5 -subtract prediction height from true height, gives you residual

How much does music training affect things that aren't music?

-music training has clear affect for things that are related to music -one possibility is simulate the brain with music training there are all kinds of spill over effects where unrelated abilities are also improved by virtue of sharing brain real estate with music -possibility 2= brain changes in highly specific ways, they're so specific that they could only ever benefit music and nothing else -some studies have found that it has an effect and others have found that it hasn't -music training is an excellent way to learn music; however, even if there are small gains to be had for some kids, these gains probably aren't large enough to warrant music lessons for this reason alone -if a parent's goal is to help a child improve a task like math, science, reading or writing, the most direct way to do this is probably to provide them with activities that explicitly support learning f those things rather than music or chess or learning an extra language

Nicaraguan Sign Language

-no schools for deaf children so deaf children stayed home with their hearing an speaking families and were isolated from other deaf children and from ppl who might expose them to a sign language -such children did develop their own idiosyncratic signs that they used with their families called homesign, they never developed full-fledged languages with all its bells and whistles -eventually schools for deaf children were created but they didn't teach kids and establish a sign language ->. in a space of a few years kids came together to create Nicaraguan Sign Lanaguage -over time the language changed and gradually incorporated the types of sophisticated grammatical rules that we see in other languages -it was the youngest children who appeared to change the language and impose more and more structure on it over time -learning wasn't simply a process of soaking up info from the environment-> instead it was a process of imposing structure on iput that apparently can only be imposed if children get language exposure relatively early in life -nature of input is important as well as age -humans have a special sensitivity to language early in life

recessive alleles

-non-dominant allele -lower case -only way to show a recessive phenotype is for both alleles to be recessive

dizygotic twins

-non-identical -come from two distinct eggs and share only half of their genetic material

phenotype

-observable outcome -fact that you have brown eyes= phenotype

Phenotype

-observed variability in the world -end result of genes and environment interacting -a person's observable traits

Effect of parenting according to Dr. Segal

-parenting does have an effect but the data show that despite the fact that identical twins are raised apart in two different families they end up very much alike -parenting doesn't have as big of an effect as previously thought -she always tells parents that your children bring you up, you don't bring them up -parents aren't going to make major shifts in one's basic personality composition but can help a rambunctious child tone down a bit -parents are really responding to the genetic inclinations of their children

components of executive function

-planning -flexibility -stopping or inhibition -the ability to stop this automatic response= prepotent response -have to stop prepotent tendency and switch to alternative, less automatic response

positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement and positive punishment and negative punishment

-positive reinforcement= rewarding of a behavior to encourage its repetition -negative reinforcement= encouraging a behavior by removing a stimulus -positive punishment= adding something (like scolding)-> punishing a behavior by introducing an aversive stimulus (shocking animals) -negative punishment= something is removed to punish the individual (like when child is grounded or misses out of dessert)-> removing a reward to discourage the repetition of a behavior -most parents prefer to use positive punishment

Perfectly uncorrelated variables

-provide no information at all about each other -age is not correlated with number of aunts and uncles you have

Randomized Control Trial

-randomized: we create groups by taking a sample and randomly assignment them to groups -this ensures that random differences between individual people are evenly spread out across the groups in an unbiased way -controlled: control how much of the IV they get (ex: control how much coffee they get to drink) -still looking for correlations in this kind of study but because it is an RCT we can interpret this correlation more strongly because to the best of our knowledge the only difference between the groups is how much of the IV they got (how much coffee they drank) -downsides with RCT: difficult to randomly assign children to families, ethical issues, and some parents may either not want to be told how to parent or may be unable to comply -allow us to figure out what causes what by assigning one group to receive treatment and another group to retrieve some other treatment

Does learning a second language make us smarter?

-some studies claim this because when we learn two languages we are forced to constantly be switching back and forth from one language to the other and this constant switching they claim involved a type of cognitive control that is central to human intelligence and our abilit to plan, think flexibily about problems, and to stop old undesirable habits and replace them with new behaviors (these abilities are called executive function) -bilingual kids perform better on tests like these-> but critics of this because say most studies are correlational and not experimental -absolutely no evidence that if there is a correlation it must be because bilingualism causes better executive function to answer this really need large-scale experimental studies where massive groups of kids are randomly assigned to either learn a second language or learn only one -not ready to make claim that bilingualism causes better executive function -many of these studies include small groups of kids which makes it so it doesn't reflect the general population -much more likely to find positive results with smaller samples -since scientists know that null results don't get published they don't submit them to journals as much-> stick failures into file drawer -scientists tend to find no bilingual advantage bt these don't get stuied as much -evidence for this came from conference presentations-> positive findings got accepted while negative findings did not as much (70% vs 30%)

phonemes

-speech sounds -kids are way better at detecting thse than adults -kids born with ability to detect all speech sounds -different languages have different speech sounds -innate ability to hear phonemes -then learn which ones are important to your language and lose the ability to hear phonemes not in your language

syntax

-structure of their language -learning the order of words -can see how early immigrants moved to US by how easily they detect problems in syntax -> oerformance perfect among Chinese immigrants who came before age 7 and got significantly worse for later ages -> ones who arrived around puberty or later never mastered english the same way -this data has been taken for evidence for biological sensitive period for learning language -can learn new words our whole life but hard to learn grammar of a new language as an adult or its sound patterns

Blank Slate

-tabula rosa -idea from Aristotle that children are born with a blank slate (not knowing anything) and then everything we learn and know is through experience in the world -proposes that everything is learned -behaviorists are huge advocates of this idea (John B. Watson that he could make any baby achieve virtually any outcome depending on their environmental experiences)

Misunderstanding of nature-nurture debate is also sociological

-tempting to align the nature-nurture debate with our moral values and politics -might think it would be bad if genetic differences totally explain differences in traits like aggressivity or intelligence since this might suggest some people are doomed to be violent or slow learners

unshared environment

-the environment that the child doesn't share with their siblings, all the experiences that are totally unique to them -captures things that happens outside the home, outside the realm of control of parents -behaviors of child's friends, teachers, emdia

shared environment

-the environment that the child shares with siblings when raised together (in the home) -captures things within a caregivers control -bedtime, diet, discipline

Alison Gopnik

-the gardener and the carpenter -most of life's important lessons come from exploration and play -parents should take on a role that's more like a gardener, providing the basis for the child to grow safely and explore rather than that of a carpenter who tries to shape the child with a particular outcome in mind -parents should create a safe, protected, rich space in which children can explore new possibilities -carpenter= you have some raw material to shape that material into an adult (not what you should be doing) -gardener= create a flexible ecosystem -carpenter idea is like idea of behaviorists -creativity, ability to solve problems without supervision, and to take on new challenges -importance of play, children learn through play -> if want someone to be able to do something new, to be able to respond to changing circumstances and deal with a different world -children are smart -good at looking by observing you, imitating the things that you do -let children learn on their own vs. trying to teach them

behavior genetics

-tries to figure out how biology, shared environment, and unshared environment contribute to differences between people -to do this studies are designed to hold constant environment, so that we see the effects of genetic differences, or to hold constant genetics so that we can see the effect of environmental variation -looks at twins-> identical and fraternal who were not separated at birth, twins who grew up in different environment with different parents (separated at birth), fraternal twins separated at birth -looks at all these groups at once and with a little bit of math figures out the precise effects that variation in genetics, shared environment, and unshared environment have on variation among individual people -main goal= look at the extent to which genes influence behavioral traits, that is variation in behavioral traits -do so by looking at twins and adoptees -basic goal is to pull apart how differences between people can be explained by differences in their genes and differences in their environment -> doesn't tell us which genes matter or which other specific environmental factors matter

can look at twins vs. siblings

-twins share same prenatal environment -this can tell us whether stressful events or substances experienced during pregnancy may be related to a later autism diagnosis

Variable enforcement schedule vs. continuous reinforcement

-variable= slot machines in vegas-> reward behavior at random times -continuous= encourage a behavior by rewarding it every time it occurs, to be consistent-> kids may then learn behavior to be only worthwhile if it's rewarded -most experts recommend setting up rewards that you view as good in and of themselves, like rewarding reading with special alone time for kids

Learning

-when a child's mind or brain changes, and when these changes reflect changes in the environment in a particular way

adoption

-when children are adopted they are raised by caregivers that they are biologically unrelated to -based on this we might reason that if these kids end up behaving like their adoptive parents, then these similarities must be due to nurture and not nature

role of genetics in ability to read

-when kids are raised by highly educated parents, genetics plays a very small role in predicting reading ability -whereas for kids raised by parents with little education, genetics plays a much stronger role in predicting which kids will become strong readers and which won't -if you do not have a strong genetic predisposition to read this can be compensated for by lots of rich environmental support (lots of exposure to reading and books) -if you don't have rich environmental support than strong predisposition to read may make up for this -in equaitable societies where solid public edu is available to most kids then genetics plays a strong role in predicting individual differences (like in study in UK)-> heritability of reading and numeracy is high in UK bc most kids receive quality training so there's not much variability in enviro meaning that most remaining differences between kids have to be explained by genetics -different kids have different predispositions to read and learn about numbers but these differences are swamped by effective equitable edu -children's exposure to reading and math matters quite a bit

Real Nature/Nurture Question

-when we look around at other people, they vary, why? -what causes this variability? -in each person both genes and environment play a role in the development of a trait -ask whether differences between people are due to genetic differences between them or due to different experiences they've had-> this is the interesting nature and nurture distinction -to what degree are differences between people caused by genetic or environmental differences -allows answers that are not just the mushy bit of both-type answer -behavioral genetics allows us to say what amount of variability in people's behaviors are due to genetic differences, and what amount is due to environmental factors?

3 basic findings of behavior genetics

1. genes impact every behavior that researchers have studied 2. parents have much less of an impact on their children than anyone ever expected 3. effects of parenting appear to wear off as people age with more and more variability in their behaviors explained by genetics as they grow older

3 reasons why science is best source we have to answer parenting questions

1. we don't have much choice 2. we make choices because we think they matter 3. the truth will set us free -> parents don't have as big of a role in outcome of child as previously thought -> individual choices matter a lot less than previously thought

issues with behavior genetics approach

1.-heritability estimates can change over time as environment changes 2. behavior genetics focuses on traits and behaviors that are generally thought to be stable and that are especially likely to be mediated by genetic variability -behavior geneticists tend to study things that could plausibly have strong genetic components, so called stable-traits 3. families that adopt may not be representative of the general population and may be more homogenous than average (because there is likely to be less environmental variability, studies that focus on adopted kids may overestimate the role of genetics) 4. it doesn't tell us which genes matter, which parenting practices matter, or what environmental factors matter-> can tell us relative role that genetics, parents, and other environmental factors play but it can't tell us much about which specific experiences or parenting practices have which effects

What do ppl get wrong with nature vs. nurture

1.-make it an either/or question-> instead say how do differences in genes and enviro cause differences in behavior; what percentage of variability is due to environmental or genetic differences 2. say it's bad to show how genes or enviro causes behavior -science is descriptive not perscriptive-> tells consequences of choices, not what choices to make -fear of showing bc fear of how results will be used (wrong) -can tease apart morality from science

stages of kids learning numbers

First, they learn the word "one" and can give one object when asked for one but not for other numbers. Then, about six months later, they learn the word "two" and give two objects when asked for two but not for higher numbers. Then several months later, they learn three and then four. By around three and a half to four, kids seem to realize something pretty profound, that they can use their counting routine to always get the right answer. Up until this point, most kids don't even try to count when asked to give a number. Instead, they just eyeball the amount and grab it. Three and four-year-olds figure out that you can count the set and always get it right. Learning that counting can get you the right answer and understanding why is an important foundation to learning arithmetic in elementary school. -However, research has also shown that children's very first numbers, like one through four, aren't learned from counting practice at all but, instead, from how parents talk to their kids about numbers in conversation. Just hearing numbers like two, three, and four used to label different familiar quantities like the number of fingers we have can speed children's learning fairly dramatically, and later on practice organizing objects into rows, pointing and touching each object while counting and then using this counting routine to answer the question "How many?" are all really important developmental milestones that any parent can facilitate.

2 simple steps for promoting early numeracy

The first is to simply talk a lot about number, even when you're not sure your child really understands what you're talking about. The only way they'll learn is through hearing these words in their environment. Second, you can play counting games, like counting piles of fish or, better yet, boardgames like Snakes and Ladders, which teach the fundamentals of counting while still being fun.

How do twin studies test heritability

• If you have identical twin and turned out differently, that has got to be from environment, and then can infer causation because controlling genetic relatedness

differences b/w reading and speaking

Well, one difference between spoken language and writing is that written language is written and so it requires decoding visual symbols on a page. This is a really different skill than hearing a spoken language or even learning a sign language. Another difference is that written language often differs in style, structure and vocabulary from spoken language. -isn't just a matter of mapping spoken language onto a new set of symbols, it's also sometimes a question of learning a new dialect with new words and new structures.

Gold Standard for testing kids number knowledge

get yourself a small pile of eight to 10 countable objects, all of the same kind, like toy fish or something else that's small and easy to manipulate and count. Also, you'll need a small bowl or box. Finally, write down in random order the numbers one through six on separate lines of a piece of paper, and then repeat the sequence two more times so that each number is written down three times. Once you have these things set up, you'll be ready to ask the child about the numbers you've written down in order. For example, if the number one is the first number, you'd ask the child the following question: "Can you find one fish and put one fish into the bowl?" Then just let them put as many fish as they want into the bowl, and don't give them any feedback, help, or other cues that might influence what they spontaneously do. Then, once they're done, remove the objects from the bowl, return them to the child, and test the next number. At the end, you should have answers for all 18 trials. The next step is this. Add up how many times out of three they got each number correct. Then find the highest number for which the following two things are true. First, they gave the correct number two out of three times in response, so for number two, they gave a set of exactly two on at least two out of three trials, and second, they gave this number of objects, in our example two, at least two out of three times in response to the number two rather than a response to other requests, like three or four. -when young kids counting in number lines can't be sure they really understand the numbers

How to calculate heritability

• Shared environment • Unshared environment (Everything else)-> we never measure unshared environment in these studies-> just measure whether or not identical twin, non-identical twin, non-identical sibling, and if you live together (shared environment) • Heritability is variance in the phenotype accounted for by genetic factors • Run a regression analysis with person's scores on some kind of trait and whether or not they live together and whether or not they are genetically identical