Boarding Schools for Girls

A new study from the University of Georgia found that gender and age differences matter when teenagers size up their peers.

Dr. Daniel Pine and his colleagues used magnetic resonance technology to watch the brain activities of 34 healthy young people ages nine to 17 years old. The participants rated their interest in communicating with teenagers based on how their faces appeared on computer screens. Then they were asked to appraise the same faces two weeks later.

Older females in the study showed more brain activity than younger ones did in the parts of the brain that process social emotion. Older males' reactions were not that much different than those of younger males.

This study appears in the journal Child Development.

Labels: research, brain-chemistry

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Intense remedial instruction can permanently "rewire" the brains of dyslexic students and others with poor reading skills, helping them to become better readers, according to a new study from Carnegie Mellon University.

Professors Marcel Just, Ann Meyler, and Tim Killer studied 25 fifth-graders who had undergone an hour a day of intensive reading instruction over a 100-day period. The scientists used magnetic resonance imagery (MRIs) to demonstrate that the children showed increases in activity in cortical regions of the brain associated with reading. Many of the students' brains activated at near-normal levels after the round of remedial instruction.

The research team expressed hope that remedial education may help students in subjects besides reading.

"We are at the beginning of a new era of neuro-education," said Dr. Just, director of the Carnegie Mellon Center for Cognitive Brain Imagery.

This study appears in the journal Neuropsychologia.

Labels: school, reading, brain-chemistry

Posted By: Aspen Education Group 0 Comments