Kindergarten children whose teachers rate them as being highly inattentive tend to earn less in their 30s than classmates who are rated highly “pro-social,” according to a recent paper in JAMA Psychiatry. In fact, inattention could prove to be a better predictor of future educational and occupational success than the famous “marshmallow test” designed to assess a…
If you want your preschooler to grow up with a healthy attitude toward artificial intelligence, here’s a tip: Don’t call that cute talking robot “he” or “she.” Call the robot “it.” Today’s small children, aka Generation Alpha, are the first to grow up with robots as peers. Those winsome talking devices spawned by a booming…
“Sharenting” – where parents share personal information about their children on social media – is the “weakest link” in risking online fraud and identity theft, warns Barclays. The bank says parents are compromising their children’s future financial security with so much online sharing. Source: ‘Sharenting’ puts young at risk of online fraud – BBC News…
Fans of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells them the secret to life, the universe and everything. The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute the answer, which famously comes out as 42….
What they’ve found is that an approach called active learning (also called active instruction) consistently produces the best results. This involves pushing students to work through problems and reason things out as an inherent part of the learning process. Even though the science on that is clear, most college professors have remained committed to approaching…
With an emphasis on test scores and “digital literacy,” there is a myth among many that the school library is irrelevant and even old-fashioned. Talk to students and you will find that they don’t feel this way. Children want access to books. They want to spend time in a library perusing titles and discussing what…
So many people, especially young people and teenagers, spend a significant period of time each day staring at a screen of some kind, whether that be a computer, smartphone, tablet, or the regular old TV. Now, a new study is warning parents that all that screen time may be behind a stunning rise in children…
The French military wants to figure out what its armed forces might face in the future. To help, it’s bringing on a group of people who are well-versed in imagining the future: science fiction writers. The UK’s Telegraph reports that France’s Defence Innovation Agency is hiring between four and five writers to form a “Red Team” that will come…
For some people, math can be a necessary headache. Yes, algorithms guide countless aspects of daily life. There are tips to calculate and hours to count. But unless someone’s a specialist, they’ll probably ignore complex math in any given situation if they can help it. But Yale assistant professor of mathematics Stefan Steinerberger wants to…
Human beings have an astonishing ability to learn, but our motivation to do so tends to decrease with age, particularly in adulthood. As children, we are naturally curious and free to explore the world around us. As adults, we are much more interested in preserving what we learned, to the point of resisting any information — and…