The Week in Ed Science Links: Interesting, Useful, Odd

I read sciencedaily every day (I'm afraid) and there's often interesting stuff there that seems related to education in some way, however strange. So I though I'd save the ones that seemed possibly relevant to education, and put them up once a week. Enjoy (or avoid) as you please! [Please excuse the different formatting.]

Medication For ADHD May Help Students Succeed At School

n an 18-year-study on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Mayo Clinic researchers found that treatment with prescription stimulants is associated with improved long-term academic success of children with ADHD. The Mayo Clinic results are the first population-based data to show stimulant drug therapy helps improve long-term school outcomes.

Eye Movement Can Affect Problem-solving, Cognition

Directing the eye movements of test subjects allowed researchers to affect the participants' ability to solve a problem, demonstrating that eye movement is not just a function of cognition but can actually affect our cognitive processes

You Can Teach An Old Dog New Tricks -- With The Right Diet

Nutritional supplements have successfully been used to improve the memory, ability to learn and cognitive function of old dogs -- and might be able to do the same thing with humans. These supplements (acetyl-l-carnitine and alpha lipoic acid) are continuing to be studied in work with humans, and scientists believe they may provide a new approach to the neurodegeneration and cognitive decline common with aging.

Insight Into The Struggles Of Children With Language Impairments

For the first time, a new study has looked into how language impairments affect a child's ability to understand and retell a script-based story. For this study, the examiner read a script-based story (about two children who go to a restaurant with their mother) to 44 eight-year-old children with and without language impairments. The children with language impairments faired very poorly when trying to recall story details.

Teaching Adolescents About Condoms

Teaching adolescents to use condoms when abstinence fails is a reasonable strategy for preventing HIV, according to a new article. This finding might appear common sense, but the best way to teach HIV prevention to young people has in fact has been controversial. The "abstinence-only" approach, favored in recent years by US government-sponsored programs, reflects the notion that teaching adolescents anything about safer sex (including condom use) might encourage risky activity. However, recent studies have found that abstinence-only programs have failed to reduce HIV risk.

Teen Girls Report Abusive Boyfriends Try To Get Them Pregnant

Seven years ago, Elizabeth Miller was a volunteer physician in a community-based clinic in Boston, Mass., which offered confidential services to teens. She is still haunted by the memory of a 15-year old girl who asked her for a pregnancy test. It was negative, but two weeks later the girl was treated for a severe head injury in a nearby emergency room. The girl's boyfriend had pushed her down a flight of stairs.

The Science Of Collective Decision-making

Why do some juries take weeks to reach a verdict, while others take just hours? How do judges pick the perfect beauty queen from a sea of very similar candidates? We have all wondered exactly why we did not win a certain award. Now, new psychological research explains how groups come to a collective decision.

How The Brain Handles Surprise, Good And Bad

Whether it's a mugger or a friend who jumps out of the bushes, you're still surprised. But your response -- to flee or to hug -- must be very different. Now, researchers have begun to distinguish the circuitry in the brain's emotion center that processes surprise from the circuitry that processes the aversive or reward "valence" of a stimulus.

New Understanding Of Basic Units Of Memory

A molecular "recycling plant" permits nerve cells in the brain to carry out two seemingly contradictory functions -- changeable enough to record new experiences, yet permanent enough to maintain these memories over time.