(Press-News.org) The cognitive effects of poverty can be mitigated during middle school with a targeted intervention, according to researchers at the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas.
In a paper published today in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers for the first time examine the efficacy of cognitive training in a large and diverse group of 7th and 8th grade public middle school students as compared to typically developing students who received no specific training.
"Previous research has shown that growing up in poverty can shape the wiring and even physical dimensions of a young child's brain, with negative effects on language, learning and attention," said Dr. Jacquelyn Gamino, director of the Center for BrainHealth's Adolescent Reasoning Initiative and assistant research professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. "What this work shows is that there is hope for students in poverty to catch up with their peers not living in poverty."
The research team studied 913 middle school students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds, accounting for any diagnosed medical or learning differences. Five hundred and fifty six students received the cognitive intervention and 357 served as a comparison group. The protocol included pre- and post-training assessments, in which all adolescents were asked to read several texts and then craft a high-level summary, drawing upon inferences to transform ideas into novel, generalized statements, and recall important facts. For the 556 students who received the Center for BrainHealth-developed cognitive training called SMART (Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Training), they completed 10 45-minute sessions over a one-month period. The SMART program was provided by research clinicians and consists of hierarchical cognitive processes that are explained and practiced through group interactive exercises and pen and paper activities using student instructional manuals.
"Much focus has been put on early childhood learning and brain development - and for good reason," said Dr. Gamino. "However, extensive frontal lobe development and pruning occurs during adolescence making middle school a prime opportunity to impact cognitive brain health."
"Existing studies show that a large percentage of students in middle school are not developing inferential thinking entering high school," explained Dr. Gamino. "The cognitive gains demonstrated after short-term, intensive training in this research suggest that middle school is an appropriate and beneficial time to teach students strategies to enhance understanding and the ability to infer global meanings from information beyond the explicit facts."
Cognitive tests indicate that students living in poverty showed as much as a 25% increase in gist reasoning, or the ability to derive abstracted meaning from information presented, after training, comparable to the gains made by their peers living above the poverty line. Additionally, the SMART-trained group, regardless of socioeconomic status, showed significant generalized gains and as much as an 18% improvement in increased memory for facts, even though this skill was not specifically targeted in training.
"The ability to use inference to abstract meaning from incoming information as trained in the SMART program is a skill crucial to future life success and applies to both academic and informal learning activities such as reading a school assignment, listening and taking notes from a lecture, watching a movie or television program, or having a conversation with a friend," Dr. Gamino continued.
Findings revealed gender differences among the students studied as well. Seventh and eighth grade girls showed significant improvement after receiving the SMART program, as did 8th grade boys, regardless of socioeconomic level. After training, 7th grade boys showed improvement in fact retention but not gist reasoning.
INFORMATION:
The Center for BrainHealth's Adolescent Reasoning Initiative has provided training to more than 300 teachers and 30,000 teens across the country. The research team is planning to expand their study to determine if cognitive training closes the academic achievement gap by conducting longitudinal research and comparing standardized test scores.
The research was funded by the State of Texas, The AT&T Foundation, The Meadows Foundation and The Pickens Foundation.
Rules don't reduce death, morbidity or adverse effects
Surgeon who best knows patient should continue with critical care
Restrictions may hurt patient safety
CHICAGO --- Controversial restrictions on hospital residents' duty hours imposed in 2011 did not improve surgery patients' outcomes, reports a large new Northwestern Medicine study of U.S. hospitals, one of the first national evaluations of the results of the restrictions.
The restrictions also did not result in any differences in surgical residents' performance on exams.
"Our study suggests that these ...
An examination of the effect of resident duty hour reforms in 2011 finds no significant change in mortality or readmission rates for hospitalized patients, according to a study in the December 10 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education.
In 2011, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented new duty hour reforms for all ACGME-accredited residency programs. The revisions maintain the weekly limit of 80 hours set forth by the 2003 duty hour reforms but reduced the work hour limit from 30 consecutive hours to 16 hours for firstyear ...
An examination of the effect of resident duty hour reforms in 2011 finds no significant change in outcomes for general surgery patients, according to a study in the December 10 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education.
Ravi Rajaram, M.D., of the American College of Surgeons, Chicago, and colleagues conducted a study to determine if the 2011 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) duty hour reform was associated with a change in general surgery patient outcomes or in resident examination performance.
The study examined general surgery patient ...
Among primary care physicians, the spending patterns in the regions in which their residency program was located were associated with expenditures for subsequent care they provided as practicing physicians, with those trained in lower-spending regions continuing to practice in a less costly manner, even when they moved to higher-spending regions, and vice versa, according to a study in the December 10 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education.
Regional and system-level variations in Medicare spending and overall intensity of medical services delivered to patients ...
An analysis of the non-English-language skills of U.S. medical residency applicants finds that although they are linguistically diverse, most of their languages do not match the languages spoken by the U.S. population with limited English proficiency, according to a study in the December 10 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education.
More than 25 million U.S. residents have limited English proficiency, an 80 percent increase from 1990 to 2010. Limited English proficiency (LEP) may impede participation in the Englishlanguage-dominant health care system. Little ...
There has been a doubling during the last decade in the number of U.S. medical schools that have student-run free clinics, with more than half of medical students involved with these clinics, according to a study in the December 10 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education.
Sunny Smith, M.D., of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues conducted a study to assess whether there has been growth of student-run free clinics (SRFCs) in medical schools and describe the characteristics of these clinics. The first national study of SRFCs conducted in 2005 ...
In a sample of U.S. emergency departments, compared to attending physicians alone, supervised visits (involving both resident and attending physicians) were associated with a greater likelihood of hospital admission and use of advanced imaging and with longer emergency department stays, according to a study in the December 10 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education.
A common assumption is that care at academic medical centers costs more than care at nonteaching hospitals in part because of a higher frequency of testing and other resource use in teaching settings. ...
PHILADELPHIA - In the first year after the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) reduced the number of continuous hours that residents can work, there was no change in the rate of death or readmission among hospitalized Medicare patients, according to a new study published in JAMA. The study was led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
"There has been a lot of speculation about the effect of the 2011 ACGME duty hour reforms on patient outcomes, so we looked ...
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Clinical recommendations discouraging the use of CYP2D6 gene testing to guide tamoxifen therapy in breast cancer patients are based on studies with flawed methodology and should be reconsidered, according to the results of a Mayo Clinic study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
For years, controversy has surrounded the CYP2D6 gene test for breast cancer. Women with certain inherited genetic deficiencies in the CYP2D6 gene metabolize tamoxifen less efficiently, and thus have lower levels of tamoxifen's active cancer-fighting metabolite ...
Yeast cells can sometimes reverse the protein misfolding and clumping associated with diseases such as Alzheimer's, according to new research from the University of Arizona.
The new finding contradicts the idea that once prion proteins have changed into the shape that aggregates, the change is irreversible.
"It's believed that when these aggregates arise that cells cannot get rid of them," said Tricia Serio, UA professor and head of the department of molecular and cellular biology. "We've shown that's not the case. Cells can clear themselves of these aggregates."
Prions ...
