(Press-News.org)
A video game featuring a mystical character named Rumble has helped Griffith University researchers investigate how school kids fared following lockdown disruption.
Dr Jacqueline Allen from Griffith’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice headed up the team looking at self-reported wellbeing in a sample of primary school-aged children in Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia.
The team used an innovative video game called Rumble’s Quest, developed wholly within Griffith University, which measures the four key facets of wellbeing, as well as three executive functions by allowing children to respond to questions and stimuli in a very natural way.
While it appears to be a simple, fun game, it is in fact a sophisticated and reliable assessment tool specifically tailored to the primary school-age group.
Player’s characters are transported to a mystical land, where they meet friendly villagers and join the curious creature Rumble on a quest to save the village.
Along the way, they respond to a range of questions about social and emotional wellbeing, giving insight into how well they get along with their peers, how things are going at home and how comfortable and engaged they feel at school.
The study was originally just focused on children’s overall wellbeing, however the advent of COVID presented a new assessment window, with one cohort having played the game twice before any disruption, and another playing once before and once after the lockdowns.
Dr Allen said the results showed there was a drop in feelings of family support in the lockdown-affected group, with students suggesting things weren’t quite as good at home post-COVID as they had been before.
“We did find the change was more pronounced for girls, which could just come down to the fact that some girls tend to be a little better at picking up on stressful family dynamics than boys,” she said.
“We know families were stressed trying to do home schooling and deal with work closing down and maybe losing jobs, so the kids were likely picking up on a degree of family stress happening at the time.”
Perhaps surprisingly, boys tended to fare better than girls upon their return to the school environment.
“We looked at reports of a supportive family environment, such as feeling safe at home, getting along with parents; emotional wellbeing, which includes feelings of worry and anxiety; and behavioural wellbeing, including problematic behaviours like aggression, acting out and getting in trouble at school,” Dr Allen said.
“Boys seemed to have derived some positive benefit from a break from the school environment, particularly if they’d been having problems with peers or their teachers.
“The thing to remember with the gender difference is that overall, girls do tend to fare better than boys in terms of wellbeing, so when we say boys improved a bit, girls are still doing better.”
Sadly, children who had lower family support scores in the first sitting scored even lower following the lockdown, suggesting the experience exacerbated pre-existing problems for those families.
Dr Allen emphasised the results certainly weren’t a bad news story.
“There were lots of ways in which wellbeing really didn't change all that much and I think that's testament to how hard schools and families worked to support children during the pandemic,” she said.
“They moved mountains to keep kids engaged and I think that's showing up in our data and that's amazing.
“The key takeaway here is, to support children, we need to support families.”
The paper, titled ‘Child well-being before and after the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns in three Australian states’ has been published in the Australian Journal of Social Issues.
END
Consumption of a traditional Mediterranean-type diet – rich in foods such as seafood, fruit, and nuts – is associated with a reduced risk of dementia, reports a study published in BMC Medicine. Individuals with a higher adherence to a Mediterranean diet had up to 23% lower risk for dementia compared with those who had lower adherence to a Mediterranean diet.
Diet may be an important modifiable risk factor for dementia that could be targeted for disease prevention and risk reduction but previous studies exploring the impact of a Mediterranean diet have typically been limited to small sample ...
Great apes spinning behaviours could provide clues about the role of altered states for the origins of the human mind.
Online videos observed great apes spin themselves to deliberately make themselves dizzy.
Researchers say these new findings suggest that the behaviour could be used to understand when humans evolved the desire to seek altered mental states and actively manipulate their mood and perception of reality.
Great apes deliberately spin themselves in order make themselves dizzy, academics at the University ...
Eating a traditional Mediterranean-type diet – rich in foods such as seafood, fruit, and nuts – may help reduce the risk of dementia by almost a quarter, a new study has revealed.
Experts at Newcastle University found that individuals who ate a Mediterranean-like diet had up to 23% lower risk for dementia than those who did not.
This research, published today in BMC Medicine, is one of the biggest studies of its kind as previous studies have typically been limited to small sample sizes and low numbers ...
AUGUSTA, Ga. (March 14, 2023) – The vascular smooth muscle cells that normally give blood vessel walls strength and flexibility proliferate and become destructive in pulmonary hypertension, a typically rapidly progressing condition that makes it hard to get blood inside our lungs and oxygen to our bodies.
Now scientists have found that inhibiting a gene essential to making DNA so the cells can take on this uncharacteristic growth, can significantly reduce the destructive cell proliferation and disease progression, they report in the European Heart Journal.
The findings point toward a ...
Endometriosis is a painful, complex condition affecting about 1 in 10 women of reproductive age, but it is poorly understood. A new clinical review published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.220637 provides an overview of the causes, diagnosis and management of endometriosis based on the latest evidence, to help clinicians and patients.
The review is timely, as March is Endometriosis Awareness Month.
Endometriosis, defined as the presence of endometrial-like tissue outside the uterus, is one of the most common gynecologic conditions. It is estimated to affect approximately 1 million women ...
A new analysis by researchers at UCLA and UC Riverside shows that even in Blue state California, political attacks on public schools are pervasive and growing, hindering learning and the role schools play in a diverse democracy. Political division and community-level conflict is negatively impacting student interactions, and many California students are experiencing hostility and intolerance in school. Troublingly, the research finds high levels of hostile comments toward LGBTQ students, and racist remarks targeting Latino, and in particular, African American ...
El Camino Health is the first health system in the world to adopt FloPatch, an innovative new technology that monitors blood flow in real time. Developed by Flosonics Medical, FloPatch is the world’s first wireless, wearable Doppler ultra-sound system that helps clinicians better manage intravenous (IV) fluid therapy earlier in the sepsis care pathway.
“Timing is crucial when caring for patients with sepsis. Our nurses have seen firsthand how effective FloPatch is in monitoring the effectiveness of treatment in deteriorating patients, especially those with sepsis and low blood pressure,” said Cheryl Reinking, chief nursing officer at El Camino Health. “We ...
Scientists reveal a potential new approach to treating liver cancer
Results in cell and mouse studies may have implications for the development of a new class of anticancer drugs
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have uncovered a potential new approach against liver cancer that could lead to the development of a new class of anticancer drugs. In a series of experiments in cells and mice, researchers found that an enzyme produced in liver cancer ...
FINDINGS
A new study published in Science Immunology points to a promising therapeutic approach for future cancer treatments based on natural killer cells (NK), which are immune cells that bind to tumor cells and destroy them.
City of Hope scientists created a knockout mouse model for a protein called XBP1s to explore the molecule’s effect on NK cells and its role in fighting cancer. Earlier studies showed that XBPIs strengthened the survival of NK cells, but precisely how was unclear.
The team identified a previously unknown mechanism in which interleukin-15 (IL-15) — a protein naturally ...
With a high-speed camera and the luck of being in the right place at the right time, physicist Marcelo Saba, a researcher at Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE), and PhD candidate Diego Rhamon obtained a unique image of lightning strikes showing details of the connections to nearby buildings.
The image is so special that it appeared on the cover of the 28 December 2022 issue of Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) – one of the most important scientific journals in the field –, which featured an article with Saba as first author. ...