Close interrelation of motor development and cognitive development and of the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex

Motor development and cognitive development may be fundamentally interrelated. Contrary to popular notions that motor development begins and ends early, whereas cognitive development begins and ends later, both motor and cognitive development display equally protracted developmental timetables. When cognitive development is perturbed, as in a neurodevelopmental disorder, motor development is often adversely affected. While it has long been known that the striatum functions as part of a circuit with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, it is suggested here that the same is true for the cerebellum and that the cerebellum may be important for cognitive as well as motor functions. Like prefrontal cortex, the cerebellum reaches maturity late. Many cognitive tasks that require prefrontal cortex also require the cerebellum. To make these points, evidence is summarized of the close co-activation of the neocerebellum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in functional neuroimaging, of similarities in the cognitive sequelae of damage to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the neocerebellum, of motor deficits in "cognitive" developmental disorders, and of abnormalities in the cerebellum and in prefrontal cortex in the same developmental disorders.     

Individual differences in mathematical competence modulate brain responses to arithmetic errors: An fMRI study

Data from both neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have implicated the left inferior parietal cortex in calculation. Comparatively less attention has been paid to the neural responses associated with the commission of calculation errors and how the processing of arithmetic errors is modulated by individual differences in mathematical competence. Do more competent individuals exhibit a different brain response to errors than less mathematically able individuals? These outstanding questions were addressed in the present functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study through an investigation of which brain regions respond more to erroneously versus correctly solved arithmetic problems while a group of 24 adult participants with varying levels of mathematical competence solved problems of all four arithmetic operations. Despite high levels of accuracy, a robust main effect of accuracy (incorrect vs. correct) was observed in both medial and lateral regions of the prefrontal cortex. These regions have frequently been associated with both the detection of errors and the deployment of cognitive control following an error. Furthermore, mathematical competence was found to modulate the activation of an area in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Specifically, individuals with relatively higher mathematical competence (n = 12) were found to activate this region more for incorrectly solved trials than their less mathematically competent peers (n = 12). Taken together, these findings suggest that the commission of arithmetic errors modulates responses of prefrontal regions and, moreover, that activation of the right lateral prefrontal cortex during arithmetic errors is affected by individual differences in mathematical competence. In view of the evidence associating the lateral prefrontal cortex with the implementation of cognitive control, we suggest that individuals with relatively high mathematical competence may exhibit greater awareness of calculation mistakes and implement greater control following the commission of errors.     

Mental Health Help-Seeking and Young People: A Review

In the United Kingdom, the issue of health and social care of young people is now a major concern for the government. Thus, a recent government green paper has insisted on the provision of early and appropriate interventions for young peoples' mental health difficulties and that their views must be incorporated into the design of mental health services. More recently, the NHS Health Advisory Service has recommended that schools and teachers should assume some responsibility in the identification of pupils who may have mental health difficulties. Unfortunately, there is scant information in the United Kingdom on young peoples' pathways into services. We know very little about their help-seeking strategies and service use, barriers or facilitators to care, satisfaction with services and service preferences. In addition, we have limited knowledge of how young people conceptualize mental health or how they perceive mental health professionals. In brief, the needs and help-seeking behaviours of young people in psychological distress are poorly understood and often mediated through older people such as parents and teachers. In this paper, we examine these issues and discuss the implications of such gaps in the evidence base for our understanding of adolescent help-seeking and our ability to provide appropriate well-targeted services.     

How spatial abilities enhance,and are enhanced by,dental education

In two studies with a total of 324 participants, dentistry students were assessed on psychometric measures of spatial ability, reasoning ability, and on new measures of the ability to infer the appearance of a cross-section of a three-dimensional (3-D) object. We examined how these abilities and skills predict success in dental education programs, and whether dental education enhances an individual's spatial competence. The cross-section tests were correlated with spatial ability measures, even after controlling for reasoning ability, suggesting that they rely specifically on the ability to store and transform spatial representations. Sex differences in these measures indicated a male advantage, as is often found on measures of spatial ability. Spatial ability was somewhat predictive of performance in restorative dentistry practical laboratory classes, but not of learning anatomy in general. Comparisons of the performance of students early and late in their dental education indicated that dentistry students develop spatial mental models of the 3-D structure of teeth, which improves their ability to mentally maintain and manipulate representations of these specific structures, but there is no evidence that dental education improves spatial transformation abilities more generally.     

The impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. child care market: Evidence from stay-at-home orders

Stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) were implemented in most U.S. states to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This paper quantifies the impact of these containment policies on a measure of the supply of child care. The supply of such services may be particularly vulnerable to a SAHO-type policy shock, given that many providers are liquidity-constrained. Using plausibly exogenous variation from the staggered adoption of SAHOs across states, we find that online job postings for early care and education teachers declined by 16% after enactment. This effect is driven exclusively by private-sector services. Indeed, hiring by public programs like Head Start and pre-kindergarten has not been influenced by SAHOs. We also find that ECE job postings increased dramatically after SAHOs were lifted, although the number of such postings remains 4% lower than that during the pre-pandemic period. There is little evidence that child care search behavior among households was altered by SAHOs. Because forced supply-side changes appear to be at play, our results suggest that households may not be well-equipped to insure against the rapid transition to the production of child care. We discuss the implications of these results for child development and parental employment decisions.     

Neurocognitive function and joint attention ability in young children with autism spectrum disorder versus developmental delay

Studies have shown that young children with autism are not impaired on prefrontal tasks relative to what would be expected for their mental age, raising questions about the executive dysfunction hypothesis of autism. These studies did not include ventromedial prefrontal tasks, however. The present study examined whether young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are impaired on ventromedial prefrontal tasks, and whether performance on such tasks is correlated with a core autism symptom, joint attention ability. Seventy-two 3- to 4-year-old children with ASD, 34 3- to 4-year-old developmentally delayed children, and 39 12- to 46-month-old typically developing children, matched on mental age, were administered ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal tasks and joint attention tasks. Children with ASD performed similarly to comparison groups on all executive function tasks, indicating that at this early age, there is no autism-specific pattern of executive dysfunction. Ventromedial, but not dorsolateral, prefrontal task performance was strongly correlated with joint attention ability, however. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is hypothesized to play a role in the development of joint attention and possibly some aspects of the autistic syndrome.     

The Severity of State Truancy Policies and Chronic Absenteeism

ABSTRACT

Since the Common School era, states have maintained truancy laws to ensure that students attend school. However, we know little about the severity of these laws and their relationship to student outcomes, particularly absenteeism. In this study, we survey state education statutes to document the severity of truancy policies. We estimate the relationship between these truancy policies and rates of chronic absenteeism via multilevel models using data on all U.S. public schools from the Office of Civil Rights. We find that most students live in states where they may be referred to legal authorities for levels of absenteeism below federal standards. We find little evidence that states with truancy policies have lower chronic absenteeism after adjusting for demographic and other characteristics. However, while non-White high-school students are overrepresented among chronic absences overall, they have rates of chronic absenteeism comparable to their White peers in states with less severe truancy policies.     

Barriers to the Success of Affirmative Consent Initiatives: An Application of the Social Ecological Model

ABSTRACT

In response to evidence that one in five college women are sexually assaulted, institutions of higher education have started adopting affirmative consent policies. Affirmative consent must be voluntarily and explicitly communicated—verbally or nonverbally. A recently published article highlighted barriers to the success of affirmative consent initiatives at the intrapersonal level. To extend this discussion, we identified barriers at each level of the Social Ecological Model. In our commentary, we discuss social determinants that are particularly relevant for campus sexual assault. There are elements in young people's micro-, meso-, exo-, and macrosystems that hinder their adoption of affirmative consent practices. We focus on gender as an aspect of the macrosystem that is a formidable barrier to the success of affirmative consent initiatives, influencing each of the other levels. Finally, we discuss how sexuality education might begin to address the social determinants of sexual assault.     

Relations between physiological and cognitive regulatory systems: infant sleep regulation and subsequent executive functioning

The aim of this report was to investigate the prospective links between infant sleep regulation and subsequent executive functioning (EF). The authors assessed sleep regulation through a parent sleep diary when children were 12 and 18 months old (N = 60). Child EF was assessed at 18 and 26 months of age. Higher proportions of total sleep occurring at night time, at both 12 and 18 months, were related to better performance on executive tasks, especially those involving a strong impulse control component. Most relations held above family socioeconomic status, prior mental development and concurrent verbal ability. These findings add to previous results with school-age children in suggesting that sleep favors the development of higher order cognitive functions requiring prefrontal cortex involvement.     

Understanding Starts in the Mesocosm: Conceptual metaphor as a framework for external representations in science teaching

In recent years, researchers have become aware of the experiential grounding of scientific thought. Accordingly, research has shown that metaphorical mappings between experience-based source domains and abstract target domains are omnipresent in everyday and scientific language. The theory of conceptual metaphor explains these findings based on the assumption that understanding is embodied. Embodied understanding arises from recurrent bodily and social experience with our environment. As our perception is adapted to a medium-scale dimension, our embodied conceptions originate from this mesocosmic scale. With respect to this epistemological principle, we distinguish between micro-, meso- and macrocosmic phenomena. We use these insights to analyse how external representations of phenomena in the micro- and macrocosm can foster learning when they (a) address the students’ learning demand by affording a mesocosmic experience or (b) assist reflection on embodied conceptions by representing their image schematic structure. We base our considerations on empirical evidence from teaching experiments on phenomena from the microcosm (microbial growth and signal conduction in neurons) and the macrocosm (greenhouse effect and carbon cycle). We discuss how the theory of conceptual metaphor can inform the development of external representations.     

The Role of Domains in the Conceptualization of Talent

In this article we present research concerning important aspects of domain-specific giftedness. Specifically, we address the evidence regarding the relationship between specific abilities and achievement. Empirical evidence suggests that specific abilities have been used widely and validly for identification of exceptional talent in performance domains, and mathematical and spatial reasoning ability have demonstrated predictive validity for achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains. We note that domains of talent have unique trajectories and discuss four critical aspects of domain-specific giftedness. These include the developmental nature of giftedness (giftedness moves from potential to competency to expertise and possibly to eminence over time); the temporal nature of giftedness (that domains vary in their starting, peak, and ending points); the contextual aspect of giftedness (societal value of some domains over others, changing of domains and emergence of new domains, and the environmental influences in fostering domain-specific achievement); and the relative nature of giftedness (childhood giftedness is advancement relative to age peers, and adult giftedness is exceptional achievement relative to other domain experts). Finally, we present some implications of a domain perspective on giftedness for educational practice.     

Measuring development of environmental awareness and moral reasoning: A case-study of a civil engineering course

ABSTRACT

Environmental awareness and ethical moral reasoning are important aspects of the engineering profession. Yet, engineering programmes have been struggling to teach these topics and measure the effectiveness of these educational interventions. In this study, we tested the effectiveness of two independent measures of environmental awareness and moral reasoning. We conducted pre-and post-test in two groups (experimental and control). Our sample was 84 students in the control group and 152 students in the experimental group. Data were collected with a survey. Results suggest the instruments were effective in measuring changes in scores, although they presented some limitations. Based on our results, we discuss implications for education practice and policy.     

Compulsory schooling,education, depression and memory: New evidence from SHARELIFE

In this paper we provide new evidence on the causal effect of education on adult depression and cognition. We use SHARE data and schooling reforms in several European countries as instruments for educational attainment. We find that an extra year of education has a large and significant protective effect on mental health; the probability of suffering depression decreases by 6.5 percentage points. We find a large and significant protective effect on cognition as measured by word recall. We also explore whether heterogeneity and selection play a part in the large discrepancy between OLS and IV (LATE) estimates of the effect of education on depression and cognition. Using the data available in SHARELIFE on early life conditions of the respondents such as the individuals’ socioeconomic status, health, and performance at school, we identify subgroups particularly affected by the reforms and with high marginal health returns to education.     

Scientific Literacy: The Role of Goal-Directed Reading and Evaluation in Understanding Scientific Information

In this article, we examine the mental processes and representations that are required of laypersons when learning about science issues from texts. We begin by defining scientific literacy as the ability to understand and critically evaluate scientific content in order to achieve one's goals. We then present 3 challenges of learning from science texts: the intrinsic complexity of science phenomena, the need to coordinate multiple documents of various types, and the rhetorical structure of the texts themselves. Because scientific information focuses on models, theories, explanations, and evidence, we focus on how explanatory and argumentative texts are processed. Then we examine 2 components of executive control in reading—goal-directed guidance and evaluation of content—that readers can acquire and adopt to deal with these challenges. Finally, we discuss 3 implications that these theories and empirical findings have for interventions intended to improve laypersons’ understanding of scientific information.     

Concreteness fading in learning secondary school physics concepts

Concreteness fading has been proposed as a general instructional approach to support learning of abstract mathematics and science concepts. Accordingly, organizing external knowledge representations in a three-step concrete-to-idealized sequence should be more beneficial than the reverse, concreteness introduction, sequence. So far, evidence for the benefits of concreteness fading come mainly from studies investigating learning of basic mathematics concepts. Studies on learning natural science concepts are scarce and have not implemented the full three-step-sequence. In an experimental classroom study (N = 70), we compared concreteness fading and concreteness introduction in high school science education about electromagnetic induction using a detailed assessment. Furthermore, we explored whether these sequences differentially affect the use of the different representations during instruction. Both sequences were equally effective and there were no differences in using the representations. We discuss why our results question the proposed advantages of concreteness fading and highlight conceptual differences and learning goals across domains.     

When does a nation-level analysis make sense? ESD and educational governance in Brazil,South Africa,and the USA

International policy analysis tends to simplify the nation state, portraying countries as coherent units that can be described by one statistic or placed into one category. As scholars from Brazil, South Africa, and the USA, we find the nation-centric research perspective particularly challenging. In each of our home countries, the effective influence of the national government on education is quite limited, particularly in fringe and emerging areas of education such as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Climate Change Education (CCE). This essay explores how nation-level comparisons are and are not useful for international research on ESD and CCE. We consider several layers of decentralized governance, but ultimately come to the conclusion that ESD governance in our respective countries is polycentric rather than decentralized. We discuss the implications of this idea for cross-national policy research on ESD and CCE.     

The concept of public goods,the state,and higher education finance: a view from the BRICs

Because higher education serves both public and private interests, the way it is conceived and financed is contested politically, appearing in different forms in different societies. What is public and private in education is a political–social construct, subject to various political forces, primarily interpreted through the prism of the state. Mediated through the state, this construct can change over time as the economic and social context of higher education changes. In this paper, we analyze through the state’s financing of higher education how it changes as a public/private good and the forces that impinge on states to influence such changes. To illustrate our arguments, we discuss trends in higher education financing in the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China. We show that in addition to increased privatization of higher education financing, BRIC states are increasingly differentiating the financing of elite and non-elite institutions.     

Homeless Children and Youth at Risk: The Educational Impact of Displacement

We know that homelessness creates conditions of risk for homeless children and youth (e.g., malnutrition, missing parental support, affiliation with deviant peers, disconnect from schooling, and so forth). Researchers also document that these states of risk have devastating physical, emotional, social, and educational impacts on young people. In this article, we explore the final issue—how displacement affects the educational well-being of homeless children and youth. We begin our review with a variable—mobility—that has a good deal of explanatory power for the educational impacts examined. We conclude with the consequences of homelessness that follow displaced children and youth into adulthood. In between we discuss an assortment of outcome factors: placement in special education, attendance, academic success, and graduation.     

数学学科教育眼动研究的应用与启示

国内外的相关研究表明,眼动研究可以通过对数学问题解决过程中的眼动轨迹进行记录以及对注视时间、注视次数等眼动指标的分析,进而了解数学问题解决过程中,大脑的内部加工机制。数学学科能力主要体现为数学问题的解决能力,通过数学学科教育中的眼动研究文献分析发现,眼动研究有助于探寻数学问题解决过程中注意分配及加工策略选择过程。在数学学科教育中针对这些认知加工的特点进行策略教学旨在:培养高效的注意能力、提取关键的表征信息、激发多知识体系的想象力,更好地提高学科教育的有效性。