Focus on self-regulating skills in kindergarten may provide lasting academic effects

Some students showed improved achievement in first grade

2014-11-12

(Press-News.org) An educational approach in kindergarten focused on the development of executive functions--the ability to avoid distractions, focus attention, hold relevant details in working memory, and regulate impulsive behavior--in children improved academic learning in and beyond kindergarten, helping to overcome deficits in school readiness associated with poverty, according to a study published November 12, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Clancy Blair and C. Cybele Raver from New York University.

Based on the results, the authors suggest that executive function skills--the ability to avoid distractions, focus attention, hold relevant details in working memory, and regulate impulsive behavior-- should be a key focus of early childhood education.

A trial involving >750 children in 29 schools in Massachusetts compared the effects of a research-based curriculum program with typical kindergarten curricula on children's educational and executive functions outcomes. "Tools of the Mind" is a program that embeds executive functions practice into classroom routines, activities in literacy, math, and science aligned with the Common Core, and uses socio-dramatic play as a vehicle to build these functions.

When compared with peers, the authors found that children in Tools of the Mind were better at focusing attention in the face of distractions and had better working memory. These differences were even more pronounced in high poverty schools. Furthermore, these gains in achievement seem to carry into first grade, where these students achieved even higher results in reading and vocabulary.

The authors note that the analysis does not address program fidelity or components, but it may build on previous studies by neuroscientists that suggest a positive impact with improving these skills in preschool.

"Working memory and the ability to control attention, both important components of executive functions, enable children to focus and process information more efficiently. Our results suggest that a combined focus on executive functions and early academic learning provides the strongest foundation for early success in school," explained Clancy Blair, Principal Investigator of the study.

INFORMATION: Adapted by PLOS ONE from release provided by the author

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0112393

Citation: Blair C, Raver CC (2014) Closing the Achievement Gap through Modification of Neurocognitive and Neuroendocrine Function: Results from a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial of an Innovative Approach to the Education of Children in Kindergarten. PLoS ONE 9(11): e112393. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112393

Funding: Support for this research was provided by Institute of Education Sciences grant R305A100058. http://ies.ed.gov/. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Focusing on executive functions in kindergarten leads to lasting academic improvements

2014-11-12

An educational approach focused on the development of children's executive functions - the ability to avoid distractions, focus attention, hold relevant information in working memory, and regulate impulsive behavior - improved academic learning in and beyond kindergarten, according to a new study by researchers at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Because some effects were especially pronounced in high-poverty schools, the findings hold promise for closing the poverty-related achievement gap and suggest that an emphasis on executive ...

Amateur, professional astronomers alike thrilled by extreme storms on Uranus

2014-11-12

The normally bland face of Uranus has become increasingly stormy, with enormous cloud systems so bright that for the first time ever, amateur astronomers are able to see details in the planet's hazy blue-green atmosphere. "The weather on Uranus is incredibly active," said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and leader of the team that first noticed the activity when observing the planet with adaptive optics on the W. M. Keck II Telescope in Hawaii. "This type of activity would have been expected in 2007, when Uranus's ...

Semen directly impairs effectiveness of microbicides that target HIV

2014-11-12

In the fight against HIV, microbicides--chemical compounds that can be applied topically to the female genital tract to protect against sexually transmitted infections--have been touted as an effective alternative to condoms. However, while these compounds are successful at preventing transmission of the virus in a petri dish, clinical trials using microbicides have largely failed. A new study from the Gladstone Institutes and the University of Ulm now reveals that this discrepancy may be due to the primary mode of transportation of the virus during sexual transmission, ...

Virtual reality helps people to comfort and accept themselves

2014-11-12

VIDEO: The video illustrates the complete experiment. First the participant shown wearing the Oculus head-mounted display and the OptiTrack motion capture suit gives comfort to the crying virtual child. We see... Click here for more information. Self-compassion can be learned using avatars in an immersive virtual reality, finds new research led by UCL. This innovative approach reduced self-criticism and increased self-compassion and feelings of contentment in naturally self-critical ...

'Smart' drugs won't make smart people smarter

2014-11-12

It is claimed one in five students have taken the 'smart' drug Modafinil to boost their ability to study and improve their chances of exam success. But new research into the effects of Modafinil has shown that healthy students could find their performance impaired by the drug. The study carried out by Dr Ahmed Dahir Mohamed, in the School of Psychology at The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, and published today, Wednesday 12 November 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE, showed the drug had negative effects in healthy people. Dr Mohamed said: "We looked ...

Fighting crime through crowdsourcing

2014-11-12

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (Nov. 12, 2014) -- Crowdsourcing utilizes the input of a crowd of online users to collaboratively solve problems. To advance this emerging technology, researchers at the University of Miami are developing a computing model that uses crowdsourcing to combine and optimize human efforts and machine computing elements. The new model can be used to efficiently perform the complex tasks of face recognition--a method used in law enforcement. It's a new approach to using social networks as a formal part of the criminal investigation process, explained computer ...

Hope for those with social anxiety disorder: You may already be someone's best friend

2014-11-12

Making friends is often extremely difficult for people with social anxiety disorder and to make matters worse, people with this disorder tend to assume that the friendships they do have are not of the highest quality. The problem with this perception, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis, is that it's not necessarily true from the point of view of their friends. "People who are impaired by high social anxiety typically think they are coming across much worse than they really are," said study co-author Thomas Rodebaugh, PhD, associate professor ...

A piece of the quantum puzzle

2014-11-12

While the Martinis Lab at UC Santa Barbara has been focusing on quantum computation, former postdoctoral fellow Pedram Roushan and several colleagues have been exploring qubits (quantum bits) for quantum simulation on a smaller scale. Their research appears in the current edition of the journal Nature. "While we're waiting on quantum computers, there are specific problems from various fields ranging from chemistry to condensed matter that we can address systematically with superconducting qubits," said Roushan, who is now a quantum electronics engineer at Google. "These ...

Moving cameras talk to each other to identify, track pedestrians

2014-11-12

It's not uncommon to see cameras mounted on store ceilings, propped up in public places or placed inside subways, buses and even on the dashboards of cars. Cameras record our world down to the second. This can be a powerful surveillance tool on the roads and in buildings, but it's surprisingly hard to sift through vast amounts of visual data to find pertinent information - namely, making a split-second identification and understanding a person's actions and behaviors as recorded sequentially by cameras in a variety of locations. Now, University of Washington electrical ...

Primordial galaxy bursts with starry births

2014-11-12

ITHACA, N.Y. - Peering deep into time with one of the world's newest, most sophisticated telescopes, astronomers have found a galaxy - AzTEC-3 - that gives birth annually to 500 times the number of suns as the Milky Way galaxy, according to a new Cornell University-led study published Nov. 10 in the Astrophysical Journal. Lead author Dominik Riechers, Cornell assistant professor of astronomy, and an international team of researchers gazed back - with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile - over 12.5 billion years to find bustling galaxies creating ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Mysterious ‘Dark Dwarfs’ may be hiding at the heart of the Milky Way

Real-world data shows teclistamab can benefit many multiple myeloma patients who would have been ineligible for pivotal trial

Itani studying translation potential of secure & efficient software updates in industrial internet of things architectures

Elucidating the source process of the 2021 south sandwich islands tsunami earthquake

Zhu studying use of big data in verification of route choice models

[Press-News.org] Focus on self-regulating skills in kindergarten may provide lasting academic effects
Some students showed improved achievement in first grade