Category: Educational Psychology

People with multiple sclerosis (MS) may find it harder to learn, remember or process information on warmer days of the year, according to new research that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 63rd Annual Meeting in Honolulu April 9 to April 16, 2011.

"Studies have linked warmer weather to increased disease activity and lesions in people with MS, but this is the first research to show a possible link between warm weather and cognition, or thinking skills, in people with the disease," said study author Victoria Leavitt, PhD, with the Kessler Foundation in West Orange, New Jersey.

For the study, 40 people with MS and 40 people without MS were given tests that measured learning, memory and the speed at which they processed information. Those people with MS also underwent brain scans. The daily temperature on the days the tests were taken was also recorded.

The study found that people with MS scored 70 percent better on thinking tests during cooler days compared to warmer days of the year. There was no link between thinking test scores and temperature for those without MS.

"With more research, this information might help guide people with MS in life decisions and their doctors with clinical treatment. Scientists may also consider the effect of warmer weather on cognition when conducting clinical trials," said Leavitt.

Children as young as 5 years old can learn how to use a computer mouse, new research suggests.

While age is an important component in determining how well a child controls a mouse, the study also found that how frequently a child practices may be even more important.

"Learning how to use a computer has become as important as writing and reading in the classroom," says Alison Lane, an assistant professor of occupational therapy at Ohio State University.

"Since the frequency of computer mouse use is as important as age, it might be beneficial to introduce children to the computer at a young age so that they can slowly develop skills over years of practice," explained Lane.

Lane conducted the study with Jenny Ziviani of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Their results appear in a recent issue of the journal Computers & Education.

The study examined the computer-mouse skills of 221 Australian children between the ages of 5 and 10 years.

"We wanted to examine the influence of previous experience on children's mouse competence," Lane said.

The tests used to measure the children's mouse control consisted of subtests assessing point and click, dragging, and pursuit tracking movements with the mouse.

One of the subtests, called Chipmunk Fun, required the children to click on as many chipmunk faces as they could within a 20-second time period. The children performed this test six different times, and each time the size of the targets and where the targets were located on the screen would change.

"The way children approached the game seemed to depend on their age," said Lane. "The older children were more interested in the goal of the game, which was speed, whereas the younger children focused on the nature of finding the target and clicking the chipmunk's face as opposed to clicking as many as possible," she said.

While the children's approach to the game was age-dependent, and the speed and accuracy with which they played the game was also strongly dependent on their age, Lane and her colleagues discovered that the frequency of computer mouse use was also vital to determining their skill level.

Other research has found that younger children require more practice to achieve the same mouse movement capabilities as older children. One group observed that children within the range of six to eight years old required more than twice the amount of practice as did ten-year-old children.

There is debate about the best age to introduce a computer to children, and the amount of practice time they should have, Lane explained.

Lane and colleagues found that the largest increases in the children's computer-mouse accuracy and speed was observed between ages 6 and 7 and between ages 8 and 9. Between the ages of 9 and 10, performance appeared to plateau.

Past research has found that children's reaction times tend to increase around age 6 or 7, and that they start to develop enhanced spatial accuracy and speed around age 8.

"The improvements in speed and accuracy at these ages are most likely due to the children's motor skill development," said Lane.

While older children were faster and more accurate, they were not as smooth with their mouse motions as younger children. This finding came as a surprise to Lane and her colleagues because they expected that smoothness would improve along with speed and accuracy.

Their research found that smoothness continued to decrease as the children grew older. Lane suggests that this may be due to the competitive nature of the older children, who were willing to sacrifice fluidity for speed.

While there were no significant differences between girls and boys in terms of speed and accuracy with the mouse, results showed that girls were slightly more skilled at showing smooth mouse control than were the boys in the study.

Overall, Lane said the results suggested that children had to practice at least once a week or more with a mouse to show the best gains in terms of accuracy, speed and minimization of errors.

"We need more study to determine the optimal duration and content of practice sessions for children at different development stages," she said. "But practice definitely helps with speed and accuracy."

 It's a frustrating problem for many of today's parents: Little Jacob or Isabella is utterly indifferent to schoolwork during the day but then happily spends all evening engrossed in the latest video game.

The solution isn't to banish the games, says one Florida State University researcher. A far better approach, advises Valerie J. Shute, is to make the learning experience more enjoyable by creating video games into which educational content and assessment tools have been surreptitiously added — and to incorporate such games into school curricula.

To Jacob and Isabella, such games would remain a pleasant diversion — but to Mom and Dad, they would provide reassurance that their child is acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to excel in an increasingly competitive world.

"The concept is known as 'stealth assessment,'" said Shute, a professor of instructional systems at Florida State. "Essentially what we try to do is disguise educational content in such a way that kids aren't even aware that they're being assessed while they're engrossed in gameplay."

To accomplish that, Shute employs video games that have been specially designed to give educators a means of reviewing how students solve complex tasks while immersed in virtual (computer-generated) worlds. How students react to new challenges and put evidence together — without the pressure of having to remember a large body of information and then take a paper-and-pencil exam — can reveal a great deal about creative problem-solving skills and other important "21st-century competencies" that traditional testing cannot.

"Everybody likes to play," Shute said. "And so much could be done to support learning using games."

Stealth-assessment technologies also have several other advantages over more conventional teaching and testing methods.

"Based on a student's responses to various situations that come up during the course of playing a video game, the game itself can be programmed to assess where that student might be especially strong or weak in core competencies," Shute said. "The game can then adapt its content so that the student is exposed to more or less information in that area. And it continues to assess the student's progress to determine how well he or she is learning the embedded concepts and skills.

"So in theory, not only can these stealth-assessment games measure a student's current level of knowledge in a given area, they can also determine areas where that student needs to improve and then help him or her to make those improvements, using feedback, maybe easier problems, and so on," Shute said. "In that sense, it can be a fantastic learning tool as well as an assessment tool."

Still other important features of such games, adds Shute:

• They can be used to assess a student's knowledge on a specific topic both at the beginning and at the end of the game, thus providing numerical data that illustrate how much the student has learned.
• They can be easily customized to meet the educational strengths and weaknesses of individual students. In this manner, each student can learn at his or her own speed and be appropriately challenged.

In a related area involving computerized learning, Shute and two colleagues have received a U.S. patent for a "method and system for designing adaptive, diagnostic assessments."

"Essentially, the patent is for a computer algorithm that we developed," she said. "The algorithm applies 'weights' to a student's responses to specific tasks within a game, then uses those weights to measure proficiency levels. With that information, the game knows whether to assign additional tasks to the student in a particular area or move on to another area."

Shute was the lead researcher on the adaptive-algorithm project. Her fellow researchers were Russell G. Almond, now an associate professor in FSU's Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems, and research scientist Eric G. Hansen. All three worked at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., when the patent application was filed in 2006.

"Stealth assessment within engaging learning and gaming environments might be one of the key tools we can use to improve the way we teach our children and the way they learn," she said.

 Year-end test scores of Massachusetts middle school students whose teachers used ASSISTments, a Web-based tutoring platform developed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), as a central part of their mathematics instruction were significantly better than those of students whose teachers did not use the platform, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Educational Computing Research.

Conducted by Neil T. Heffernan, PhD, of WPI, and Kenneth R. Koedinger, PhD, and Elizabeth A. McLaughlin, both of Carnegie Mellon University, the study examined data collected from 1,240 seventh grade students in four schools in an urban Massachusetts school district.

The study compared students' seventh-grade year-end test scores to their comparable scores at the end of sixth grade. Students at three schools where ASSISTments was used were shown to significantly outperform their peers at the fourth school, where it was not used. The improvement in test scores was pronounced for all students in the schools where ASSISTments was used, and especially so for special education students whose learning needs are less likely to be met in regular class instruction.

The new study is the latest to show the effectiveness of ASSISTments in improving student performance. A 2009 study published in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education showed that fifth-graders in a rural school district who completed their daily homework using ASSISTments learned two-thirds more than students who used traditional paper and pencil methods.

ASSISTments (the name blends tutoring "assistance" with student "assessments") helps students learn by presenting them with problems and then offering carefully structured assistance. The software records how students use the system and meticulously tracks their progress. The system has been developed at WPI over the past decade with more than $9 million in support from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and other federal and state agencies.

At WPI, the ASSISTments platform is the heart of a research and school collaborative that currently includes 35 school districts across the United States that use the system for instruction and assessment and help improve it by adding content. ASSISTments lets teachers add content in any domain. WPI has received funding to create middle school math and science libraries, but teachers elsewhere have used the platform to develop content for such diverse topics such as English and French vocabulary and training teachers to recognize common misconceptions.

"ASSISTments is a powerful tool for understanding how well students are learning day to day," said Heffernan, professor of computer science and co-director of the university's Learning Sciences and Technologies Program." This, essentially, is the kind of formative assessment data that saves teachers' time and makes their teaching more effective because they know who needs help as it's needed and who can move forward and remain engaged and challenged.

"Teachers determine what instruction or remediation is needed to raise student achievement, which will also lead to improved scores on year-end tests," adds Heffernan, who leads the ASSISTments research team. "This is exactly the kind of data-driven instruction advocated by U.S. Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan, who cited ASSISTments in the 2010 National Education Technology Plan."

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Journal Reference:

1. Neil T. Heffernan, Elizabeth A. McLaughlin, Kenneth R. Koedinger. A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of an On-line Formative Assessment and Tutoring System. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 2010; 43 (4): 489 DOI: 10.2190/EC.43.4.d

A troublesome trend is occurring at colleges and universities around the country: fewer students are graduating with degrees in natural resource related degree programs. As a result, the number of qualified professionals to manage fish and wildlife programs is dwindling. What is even more troubling is that nationally, the percentage of students enrolling in the major has increased.

For reasons unknown, students have been leaving the natural resource degree path after enrollment to pursue other degrees. Finding cause for the steady decline in student interest was the focus of a Michigan State University study, published in the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education.

After interviewing students that had been enrolled in a fish and wildlife degree program, but had left to pursue another major at Michigan State, researchers identified seven categories for student departure. All the interviews were conducted in the same manner, using the same questions.

Engagement and employment were two themes identified by researchers. Previous research indicates students dislike lecture-based learning classes and prefer a more active learning environment. However, fish and wildlife students felt they had little to no access hands on experiences or field work. At the same time, many of the students believed that finding a job after graduation would be difficult, unless they received a masters or Ph.D.

Academic rigor and awareness of the major were also included in the seven categories. Students who left admitted they were not expecting face paced, advanced math and science pre-requisite courses, nor did they understand the relevancy of such courses. Even students that were academically competitive in high school found these courses to be a challenging task. Many students had not even heard of the major until visiting campus or while enrolling in classes. Others simply equated it to be being like a biologist on television, walking through nature and easily finding animals to study.

Although programmatic quality and experience as well as motivation ranked high on importance with students that left the major, almost none of the students being interviewed had any negative comments about the actual fish and wildlife courses. In fact, many were impressed with the close relationships formed with the professor and the students due to the majors smaller class sizes. While some students cited a past connection with the wilderness or experience in outdoor recreation as motivation for picking the major, leaving the major had not changed their views of the natural world.

"Understanding what motivates students to pursue natural resources careers has far reaching implications for both university programs and management and any attempt to address these issues is a step in the right direction regarding student retention. However, failure to address these issues will likely perpetuate the dwindling enrollments of natural resources programs," says Bjørn Wolter, one of the authors of the study.

Wolter hopes the study will motivate schools across the country to develop strategies aimed at increasing enrollment in natural resource related majors.

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Journal Reference:

1. P. 10 – 18 Bjørn H. K. Wolter, Kelly F. Millenbah, Robert A. Montgomery, and James W. Schneider. Factors Affecting Persistence of Undergraduate Students in a Fisheries and Wildlife Program: Leavers. Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education, January 2011 DOI: 10.4195/jnrlse.2010.0025u

Researchers at the NYU Child Study Center demonstrated that a brief program for families of Pre-Kindergarten students attending schools in disadvantaged urban communities improved children's behavior at school. The study, called "Promoting effective parenting practices and preventing child behavior problems in school among ethnically diverse families from underserved, urban communities," was published in the February 2011 issue of Child Development.

Dr. Laurie Miller Brotman and her colleagues spent several years developing ParentCorps, a program for families of young children as they transition to school. ParentCorps includes a series of 13 group sessions for parents and children held at the school during early evening hours, facilitated by trained school staff and mental health professionals. The program is unique by reaching parents through public schools in underserved communities to help them learn a set of parenting strategies. For example, parents can learn ways to establish routines and rules for the family, reinforce positive behavior and provide effective consequences for misbehavior. ParentCorps helps each parent to select from a portfolio of scientifically-proven strategies that will work for them based on their own family goals, values and culture. By bringing families and early childhood educators together to support and learn from each other, the ParentCorps program helps young children succeed.

"Rich or poor, urban or rural, every parent wants their child to succeed " said Laurie Miller Brotman, PhD, the Corzine Family Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU Child Study Center. "There are hundreds of studies that show that parenting under stress can lead to negative outcomes for children. Parents who are struggling to make ends meet, parents who experience depression, parents who are raising children on their own — all need extra support in their important role as parent."

Using a rigorous experimental design, where some schools were assigned to receive ParentCorps and some receive school services as usual, the study examined the impact of ParentCorps among 171 children enrolled in Pre-Kindergarten across eight public elementary schools in a large NYC school district, representing an ethnically diverse population.

Despite multiple demands and stressors, parents made the time to come to the 13-session family series to share with and learn from other parents. "We saw great enthusiasm for and commitment to a program that helps young children do well in school, and this was true for parents and teachers from all different backgrounds," said Dr. Esther Calzada, one of the study co-authors.

In schools that offered ParentCorps, parents had improved knowledge of evidence-based parenting strategies, reported using more effective discipline strategies and were observed in the home to be more responsive to their children during play interactions. Most importantly, by the end of the Pre-Kindergarten year, relative to control schools, children in schools with ParentCorps, were rated by their teachers to be better behaved in the classroom and to show more social and emotional competencies, foundational skills for learning.

Based on the very promising findings from this study, Brotman and her team are conducting a second study that examines the long-term benefits on classroom behavior and academic achievement in over 1000 children. "All families deserve to have access to resources and services that will help their children succeed," Brotman said.

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Journal Reference:

1. Laurie Miller Brotman, Esther Calzada, Keng-Yen Huang, Sharon Kingston, Spring Dawson-McClure, Dimitra Kamboukos, Amanda Rosenfelt, Amihai Schwab, Eva Petkova. Promoting Effective Parenting Practices and Preventing Child Behavior Problems in School Among Ethnically Diverse Families From Underserved, Urban Communities. Child Development, 2011; 82 (1): 258 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01554.x

For every $1 invested in a Chicago early childhood education program, nearly $11 is projected to return to society over the children's lifetimes — equivalent to an 18 percent annual return on program investment, according to a study led by University of Minnesota professor of child development Arthur Reynolds in the College of Education and Human Development.

For the analysis, Reynolds and other researchers evaluated the effectiveness of the Chicago Public Schools' federally funded Child Parent Centers (CPCs) established in 1967. Their work represents the first long-term economic analysis of an existing, large-scale early education program. Researchers surveyed study participants and their parents, and analyzed education, employment, public aid, criminal justice, substance use and child welfare records for the participants through to age 26.

"Our findings provide strong evidence that sustained high-quality early childhood programs can contribute to well-being for individuals and society," said Reynolds, director of the Chicago Longitudinal Study and co-director of the Human Capital Research Collaborative at the University of Minnesota. "The large-scale CPC program has one of the highest economic returns of any social program for young people. As public institutions are being pressed to cut costs, our findings suggest that increasing access to high-quality programs starting in preschool and continuing into the early grades is an efficient use of public resources."

The CPC program in the project provided services for low-income families beginning at age three in 20 school sites. Kindergarten and school-age services are provided up to age nine (third grade). Funded by Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, CPC is the second oldest (after Head Start) federally funded preschool program. The analysis appears in the January/February issue of Child Development, the journal of the Society for Research in Child Development. Co-authoring researchers included Judy Temple, Barry White and Suh-Ruu Ou at the University of Minnesota and Dylan Robertson from the Chicago Public Schools.

Reynolds and his colleagues did the cost-benefit analysis of the CPC using information collected on about 900 children enrolled in the 20 centers starting when they were three and first enrolled in a preschool program. The study continued until the children were nine and taking part in a school-age program that featured smaller classes, teacher aides, and instructional and family support. Follow-up interviews were done in early adulthood and information was collected from many sources until age 26. These children were compared to a group of about 500 comparable children who didn't take part in the CPC but participated in the usual educational interventions for disadvantaged youths in Chicago schools.

The CPC resulted in significantly higher rates of attendance at 4-year colleges and employment in higher-skilled jobs and significantly lower rates of felony arrests and symptoms of depression in young adulthood.

The program's economic benefits in 2007 dollars exceeded costs, including increased earnings and tax revenues, averted costs related to crime and savings for child welfare, special education and grade retention. The preschool part showed the strongest economic benefits providing a total return to society of $10.83 per dollar invested — equivalent to an 18 percent annual return on program investment. Gains varied by child, program and family group.

When the researchers included the benefits from reductions in smoking, total returns rose to more than $12 per dollar invested. The school-age program yielded a return of about $4 per dollar invested (annual rate of return of 10 percent) and the combined preschool and school-age program (preschool to third grade) yielded returns of $8.24 per dollar invested (annual rate of return of 18 percent), based on average net benefits per child of $38,000 above and beyond less extensive intervention.

Children at higher levels of risk experienced the highest economic benefits, including males ($17.88 per dollar invested; a 22% annual return), children who had taken part in preschool for a year ($13.58 per dollar invested; a 21% annual return) and children from higher-risk families, including those whose parents had not graduated from high school ($15.88 per dollar invested; a 20% annual return).

The researchers identified five key principles of the CPC that they say led to its effectiveness, including providing services that are of sufficient length or duration, are high in intensity and enrichment, feature small class sizes and teacher-student ratios, are comprehensive in scope and are implemented by well-trained and well-compensated staff. A further unique feature of the research is that the origin of the economic returns can be empirically traced through a chain of early educational advantages to cumulate in long-term effects.

The findings from this analysis can be useful to policymakers and school superintendents across the nation as they make funding decisions. A lot of states are thinking of scaling back on early childhood investments, but this analysis suggests the opposite, Reynolds said.

"Access to effective programs like CPC should be increased," Reynolds said. "In scarce times, policymakers should divest in programs that aren't working and reserve the scarce resources for the most effective."

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Journal Reference:

1. Arthur J. Reynolds, Judy A. Temple, Barry A. B. White, Suh-Ruu Ou, Dylan L. Robertson. Age 26 Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Child-Parent Center Early Education Program. Child Development, 2011; 82 (1): 379 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01563.x

Decades of research have demonstrated the importance of the resources in children's homes and the benefits of high-quality interactions with parents in supporting healthy development. High-quality child care plays a similar, albeit less powerful, role. Children who come from more difficult home environments and have lower-quality child care have more social and emotional problems, but high-quality child care may help make up for their home environments.

Those are the findings of a new study by researchers at the University of Denver, Georgetown University, American University, Harvard University, and Auburn University. The research is published in the January/February issue of the journal, Child Development.

Researchers used information from a large-scale longitudinal study carried out under the auspices of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development followed children from birth through the middle-school years.

This research looked at the double jeopardy of children at ages 2, 3, and 4-1/2 who come from more difficult home environments and have lower-quality child care. Difficult family environments were characterized by fewer resources, fewer learning opportunities, and less sensitivity and acceptance of the child as rated by trained observers in the home. Lower-quality child care was characterized by fewer observed learning opportunities, caregivers who used negative or neutral facial expressions and tone of voice, as well as insensitive responses, as rated by trained observers in the care environment. The study also assessed the child's age, gender, race, and ethnicity; the family's resources in the child's first 6 months of life and at each assessment age; the age the child started child care; and how many hours per week the child spent in nonmaternal care.

The study found that children in difficult home and child care environments had more social-emotional problems–such as being anxious or fearful; behaving disruptively or aggressively; or being less helpful, friendly, and open to peers–than children who attended lower-quality care but were raised in more advantaged and supportive homes.

It also found that when children who grow up in homes that lack important influences are enrolled in high-quality child care, the child care may compensate for the children's challenging home environments. The researchers posit that experiencing high-quality child care may offer children models of positive ways to express themselves and interact with the world, and provide a safe emotional space to grow and learn. In so doing, children may be protected from developing anxious, fearful, aggressive, or unfriendly behaviors.

"This pattern of findings is consistent with existing evidence that the quality of child care that young children experience may matter more for those from more disadvantaged home environments," according to Sarah Enos Watamura, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Denver, who directed the investigation.

"The study also confirms the importance of integrating early intervention strategies and policies across home and child care environments."

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Journal Reference:

1. Sarah Enos Watamura, Deborah A. Phillips, Taryn W. Morrissey, Kathleen McCartney, Kristen Bub. Double Jeopardy: Poorer Social-Emotional Outcomes for Children in the NICHD SECCYD Experiencing Home and Child-Care Environments That Confer Risk. Child Development, 2011; 82 (1): 48 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01540.x

— When a laboratory rat learns how to reach for and grab a food pellet — a pretty complex and unnatural act for a rodent — the acquired knowledge significantly alters the structure of the specific brain cells involved, which sprout a whopping 22 percent more dendritic spines connecting them to other motor neurons.

The finding, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Mark H. Tuszynski, MD, PhD, professor of neurosciences and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, underscores the brain's remarkable ability to physically change as it learns (not just in rats, but presumably in humans too), but also reveals that the effect is surprisingly restricted to the network of neurons actually involved in the learning.

"I think it's fair to say that in the past it was generally believed that a whole cortical region would change when learning occurred in that region, that a large group of neurons would show a fairly modest change in overall structure," said Tuszynski, who is also director of the Center for Neural Repair at the UC San Diego and a neurologist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Health System.

"Our findings show that this is not the case. Instead, a very small number of neurons specifically activated by learning show an expansion of structure that's both surprisingly extensive — there's a dramatic increase in the size and complexity of the affected neurons — and yet highly restricted to a small subset of cells. And all of this structural plasticity is occurring in the context of normal learning, which highlights just how changeable the adult brain is as a part of its normal biology."

Tuszynski said the new work improves science's basic understanding of how the brain learns. "This tells us that learning may be mediated by relatively few cells, but that these few cells exhibit a substantial or extensive change in structure." Notably, the impacted cells in the rat study were not clustered together, but widely distributed over the motor cortex of the rat brain, suggesting that learned behaviors create expansive networks of distant cells.

Whether these new connections and changes are permanent is the subject of continuing research. For a rat, reaching for and grasping food is a learned behavior that takes time and repetition to master, not unlike a person learning to ride a bike or play the piano. If the behavior isn't regularly practiced, it becomes rusty, though it may be later resumed and remembered.

"This seems to be a 'hard-wired' form of memory," said Tuszynski. "We were curious whether we could find evidence of hard-wiring as part of learning in animal brains. We designed this study and our original hypothesis seems to be confirmed.

"Whether this physically represents the formation of long-term memory is hard to say" Tuszynski said, explaining that the data are correlative. "The rats learn, and we know that the learning is mediated by the small set of cells we studied. We know that adjacent cells in the cortex, which are not required to learn the new task, do not show the structural change. So presumably the structural change is occurring only in the learning neurons, and the learning would likely not occur without the structural change."

He added that in order to determine whether the structural change is necessary for the learning to occur, scientists would need to block the expansion in spines and then observe a failure to learn. "Yet the inference is quite strong that structural change is necessary for the learning to occur."

Tuszynski said it remains to be seen how the brain changes in other types of learning, such as language-based knowledge or arithmetic-type learning.

"Types of memory that require much repetition for learning — and that don't fade away easily — likely use this modification of (dendritic) structure to accomplish the learning," he said. "Other forms of memory that are not so hard to establish — and which fade more rapidly — may not involve such extensive structural changes. These are concepts that will be pursued in future studies."

Co-authors of the study are Ling Wang, James M. Conner and Jessica Rickert, all in the Department of Neurosciences, UC San Diego.

The research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grant AG10435 and by the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation.

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Journal Reference:

1. L. Wang, J. M. Conner, J. Rickert, M. H. Tuszynski. Structural plasticity within highly specific neuronal populations identifies a unique parcellation of motor learning in the adult brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1014335108

Bilinguals find it easier to learn a third language, as they gain a better aptitude for languages, a new study from the University of Haifa reveals.

Prof. Salim Abu-Rabia and Ekaterina Sanitsky of the Department of Special Education, who conducted the study, set out to examine what benefits bilingualism might have in the process of learning a third language. They hypothesized that students who know two languages would have an easier time gaining command of a third language than would students who are fluent in only one language.

For this study, two groups of 6th grade students in Israel were chosen to represent a sample of students studying English as a foreign language. The first group comprised 40 students, immigrants from the FSU whose mother tongue is Russian and who speak fluent Hebrew as a second language. The second group comprised 42 native Hebrew-speaking students with no fluency in another language, besides the English being studied in school as a foreign language.

Each participant took part in two meetings: a group meeting and an individual meeting. At the group meeting, the participants were given tests that assessed reading strategy and familiarity with the orthography of each language — Hebrew, English and Russian for the Russian speakers, and were asked to fill out personal questionnaires. At the individual student meetings, the researchers gave the Hebrew-only speakers a test in Hebrew and English, and the same tests with Russian added were given to those who were Russian speakers.

After comparing and merging the results of these tests, the researchers were able to conclude that those students whose mother tongue was Russian demonstrated higher proficiency not only in the new language, English, but also in Hebrew. They found that the total average between the tests of the two groups was above 13% in the Russian-speakers' favor. Some of the specific tests showed particularly wide gaps in command of English, the Russian speakers achieving the higher scores: in writing skills, there was a 20% gap between the scores; in orthographic ability, the gap reached up to 22%; and in morphology it soared as high as 35%. In the intelligence test (the Raven Progressive Matrices test), the gap was over 7% on the side of the Russian speakers. According to the researchers, these results show that the more languages a person learns, the higher his or her intelligence will be.

This team of scholars also noted that the fact that the Russian speakers had better Hebrew skills than the Hebrew speakers themselves indicates that acquiring a mother tongue and preserving that language in a bilingual environment does not come at the expense of learning a second language — Hebrew in this case. In fact, the opposite is true: fluency and skills in one language assist in the language acquisition of a second language, and possessing skills in two languages can boost the learning process of a third language.

"Gaining command of a number of languages improves proficiency in native languages," Prof. Abu-Rabia explained. "This is because languages reinforce one another, and provide tools to strengthen phonologic, morphologic and syntactic skills. These skills provide the necessary basis for learning to read. Our study has also shown that applying language skills from one language to another is a critical cognitive function that makes it easier for an individual to go through the learning process successfully. Hence, it is clear that tri-lingual education would be most successful when started at a young age and when it is provided with highly structured and substantive practice," he concluded.