Counting on Fingers Really Helps Kids Improve Their Math Skills–By 40% New Study Shows

By Yan Krukau via Public Domain on PexelsSome teachers consider finger counting a signal that youngsters are struggling with math, while others associate its use as advanced numerical knowledge.Now, new research is the first to show that children’s performance in arithmetic can show a “huge” improvement through the teaching of a finger-counting method.Swiss and French teams explored whether finger counting can help primary-school-aged children to solve math problems. They said adults rarely use their fingers to calculate a small sum, because such behavior could be attributed to cognitive impairments or “pathological difficulties” in math.But young children under age 8 who use their fingers to solve such problems may be seen as intelligent, probably because they have already reached a level that allows them to understand that a quantity can be represented by different means.The research aimed to determine whether children who don’t count on their fingers can be trained to do so, and whether such training would result in enhanced arithmetic performance.The study, published in the journal Child Development, focused on 328 five- and six-year-old children at kindergarten, mainly living in France, and tested their abilities to solve simple addition problems.The kindergarteners were recruited through their teachers, who voluntarily took...

Read More........→September 23, 2024

Dads show gender biases, in both brain responses and behaviors, toward toddlers

“Our study provides one of the richest datasets for fathers now available,” says Emory neuroscientist Jennifer Mascaro. (Stock image)By Carol Clark: A toddler’s gender influences the brain responses as well as the behavior of fathers — from how attentive they are to their child, to the types of language that they use and the play that they engage in, a new study by Emory University finds.The journal Behavioral Neuroscience published the study, the first to combine brain scans of fathers with behavioral data collected as fathers interacted with their children in a real-world setting.One of the more striking behavioral differences was the level of attention given a child.“When a child cried out or asked for Dad, fathers of daughters responded to that more than did fathers of sons,” says Jennifer Mascaro, who led the research as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Emory anthropologist James Rilling, senior author of the study. “We should be aware of how unconscious notions of gender can play into the way we treat even very young children.”Mascaro is now an assistant professor in Family and Preventive Medicine at the Emory School of Medicine.In addition to being more attentive, fathers of daughters sang more often to their child and were more likely to use words associated with sad emotions, such as “cry,” “tears” and “lonely.” Fathers...

Read More........→July 16, 2024

No activity for hours during childhood may cause heart damage in later life: Study

London, (IANS): No activity for hours during childhood could be setting the stage for heart attacks and strokes later in life, a new study said on Wednesday.According to the study presented at the European Society of Cardiology, sedentary time accumulated from childhood to young adulthood was associated with heart damage -- even in those with normal weight and blood pressure."All those hours of screen time in young people add up to a heavier heart, which we know from studies in adults raises the likelihood of heart attack and stroke," said study author Andrew Agbaje of the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland."Children and teenagers need to move more to protect their long-term health," he added.To investigate, researchers let children wear a smartwatch with an activity tracker for seven days at 11 years of age.This was repeated at 15 years of age and again at 24 years of age.The weight of the heart’s left ventricle was assessed by echocardiography, a type of ultrasound scan, at 17 and 24 years of age and reported in grams relative to height (g/m2.7).The researchers analysed the association between sedentary time between 11 and 24 years of age and heart measurements between 17 and 24 years of age after adjusting for factors that could influence the relationship, including age, sex, blood pressure, body fat, smoking, physical...

Read More........→July 09, 2024

Hey dad, your health affects your baby’s well-being too

A father’s health prior to conception is just as important as the mother’s and has a serious impact on their child’s health. christyscherrer/flickr David Gardner, The University of Melbourne; Natalie Binder, The University of Melbourne, and Natalie Hannan, The University of Melbourne As a society, we put a significant emphasis on women’s healthF both immediately prior to and during pregnancy – and rightly so. A woman needs to prepare her body for the arduous nine months of gestation ahead to give the growing baby the best possible start to life. A pregnant woman is likely to take supplements and maintain a healthy diet free of alcohol and cigarettes while protecting herself from unnecessary environmental toxin exposure. In comparison, men’s health prior to conception is relatively insignificant right? Wrong! Enter father Our research shows that male diet prior to conception – particularly a fast-food-based diet – can be significantly detrimental to pregnancy success. Using an animal model of diet-induced obesity, we compared pregnancy outcomes when fathers were either normal weight or obese. We found that rates of pregnancy were significantly lower when the father was obese because embryos generated with sperm from obese males weren’t very good and failed to implant into the mother’s uterus. When obese fathers were able...

Read More........→July 08, 2024

Avoiding long exposure to severe temperatures vital to save kids' developing brain: Experts

New Delhi, As exposure to extreme temperatures during early developmental stages can significantly impact neurodevelopment, specifically the integrity of white matter, experts on Sunday suggested that proper insulation, avoiding prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures, and educating parents and caregivers on recognising signs of heat and cold stress are essential measures to protect the developing brain of children.According to Sreenivas U.M., Consultant -- Neurology, MGM Hospital Chennai, heat exposure can lead to hyperthermia, disrupting normal cellular processes and causing neuronal injury, particularly in the developing brain, which has a high metabolic rate and is susceptible to heat-induced oxidative stress."Exposure to extreme temperatures during early developmental stages can significantly impact neurodevelopment, specifically the integrity of white matter. In the critical early years of life, the brain undergoes rapid growth, making it vulnerable to environmental stressors like extreme heat or cold, which can impair cognitive functions by damaging myelin," Sreenivas U.M. told IANS.As per experts, young children are especially at risk due to their underdeveloped thermoregulatory mechanisms, which can lead to white matter injury."Temperature extremes can disrupt myelination, trigger inflammatory responses damaging myelin,...

Read More........→July 02, 2024

Dogs Placed in Elementary Schools Making a Big Difference in Academics and Mental Health for Michigan Students

Priority PupsTo help reduce anxiety—and open the way for learning—several elementary schools in Michigan have enrolled service dogs as full-time happiness ambassadors—and it is paw-sitively working.Students are “already seeing a big difference in their academics,” according to a news report from WXMI-TV 17.Priority Health, a Michigan health insurance provider, launched Priority Pups in September when goldendoodles were placed in two of the state’s school districts, “with more to come”.“I love you, Meeka,” said Shelby, a student at North Godwin Elementary School who was snuggled up with the pup, which serves in a different classroom every day.Research shows the presence of a trained dog lowers children’s stress, fosters a positive attitude toward learning, and smooths interactions between classmates.A 2023 report from Mental Health America found that many youth in Michigan with clinical depression did not receive any mental health treatment.Shelby’s mom, Laurie Uhl, described the difference Meeka is making in her daughter’s life.“Shelby was diagnosed with a genetic disorder called Fragile X Syndrome, along with autism and ADHD. Here at school, she really struggles with a range of emotions.“She gets angry and will cry or scream uncontrollably.”But since Meeka the goldendoodle arrived at school, there is a guaranteed way to bring calm...

Read More........→May 21, 2024

Curious Kids: What happens when you flush a toilet on a plane?

AirP72/Shutterstock Doug Drury, CQUniversity AustraliaWhat happens when you flush a toilet on a plane? –Lily, aged 6, Harcourt Lily this is a great question! It doesn’t work like your toilet at home, which uses gravity to remove waste from our toilets into the sewer system. An aeroplane toilet uses a vacuum system along with a blue chemical that cleans and removes odours every time you flush. A smelly tank The waste and blue cleaning fluid ends up in a storage tank under the floor, in the very back of the cargo hold of the aeroplane. With so many people on the plane using the toilets, you can imagine how big the storage tank is! The system is designed very much like the vacuum cleaners we use around the house to remove dirt and dust from our floors. This dirt and dust ends up in a container that we empty into a garbage bin. Similarly, the aeroplane’s toilets need the vacuum pressure system to move all the waste from the toilet into the plumbing pipe that connects the toilet to the storage tank, and finally into the tank. There is a valve on the storage tank that opens when a toilet is flushed and closes when the toilet is not in use – to prevent odours from leaving the tank. This helps to keep the smell down from so many people using the toilet during a flight. The blue chemical helps to keep the smell down as well. Where...

Read More........→May 08, 2024

Curious Kids: what came first, the chicken or the egg?

Shutterstock/Edited by The Conversation Ellen K. Mather, Flinders UniversityWhat came first, the chicken or the egg? — Grace, age 12, Melbourne Hi Grace! Thanks for this great question. It’s an age-old dilemma that has left many people scratching their heads. From an evolutionary perspective, both answers could be considered true! It all depends on how you interpret the question. The case for the egg When the first vertebrates – that is, the first animals with backbones – came out of the sea to live on land, they faced a challenge. Their eggs, similar to those of modern fish, were covered only in a thin layer called a membrane. The eggs would quickly dry up and die when exposed to air. Some animals such as amphibians (the group that includes frogs and axolotls) solved this problem by simply laying their eggs in water – but this limited how far inland they could travel. It was the early reptiles that evolved a key solution to this problem: an egg with a protective outer shell. The first egg shells would have been soft and leathery like the eggs of a snake or a sea turtle. Hard-shelled eggs, such as those of birds, likely appeared much later. Some of the oldest known hard-shelled eggs appear in the fossil record during the Early Jurassic period, roughly 195 million years ago. Dinosaurs laid these eggs, although reptiles...

Read More........→April 29, 2024

Children Do Much Better in Math When Music is Added to the Lesson: New Study

Photos by Crissy Jarvis (left) and Ben MullinsA new study explored the causal role that music engagement has on student achievement in mathematics—and they found a significant benefit. Researchers believe that music can make math more enjoyable, keep students engaged, and help ease their fear or anxiety about topics like fractions. The addition of music may even motivate kids to appreciate math and want to learn more. A typical technique for integrating music into math lessons for young children involves clapping to songs with different rhythms learning numbers, and equating fractions to musical notes. The new meta-analysis published in the journal Educational Studies analyzed 55 studies from around the world, involving almost 78,000 students, from kindergarten to university age. Three types of musical interventions were included: typical music lessons in which children sing, listen to, and learn about composing music; learning how to play instruments alone or as part of a band; and music-math integrated interventions, where music was integrated into math lessons. Students took math tests before and after taking part in the intervention, and the change in their scores was compared with those who didn’t take part in any intervention. The use of music—whether in separate lessons or as part of math classes—caused a greater improvement...

Read More........→April 16, 2024

Why Should You Breastfeed Your Baby?

(Photo courtesy of Flushing Hospital Medical Center)Flushing Hospital Medical Center’s New Beginnings unit provides the women and their families with the ultimate birthing experience. Each month, we cover a new topic exploring an important aspect of health and well-being for expectant mothers. This month, we’ll cover the health benefits of exclusive breastfeeding for both mothers and their babies. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, exclusive breastfeeding involves only feeding breast milk to your baby and no other foods or liquids. It is the best source of nutrition for your infant’s first six months of life. Some of the benefits to babies and mothers include: Providing all necessary nutrients for the baby’s healthy physical development, including vitamin D, iron, and zincPreventing infections and serious health conditions, both during infancy and later in lifeReducing a mother’s risk of conditions such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressureBreastfeeding may become less frequent as your baby starts eating solid foods around six to 12 months of age. For guidance on how you should breastfeed your baby, talk to a lactation consultant or your baby’s doctor or nurse.Flushing Hospital’s New Beginnings unit offers spacious, modern delivery suites and advanced postpartum care, providing you with a safe...

Read More........→August 23, 2023

Mothers with depression take longer to respond to their child

Credit: University of MissouriNewswise — COLUMBIA, Mo. – A recent study at the University of Missouri found mothers who are struggling with depression tend to take longer to respond to their child during back-and-forth dialogue. The findings provide the basis for further research to determine if the slower response time has any long-term impacts on the children’s language development, vocabulary or academic outcomes.Nicholas Smith, an assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions, and his team listened to audio recordings of more than 100 families who were involved in the Early Head Start program, a federal child development program for children whose family’s income is at or below the federal poverty line. Some of the moms involved were struggling with depression, and Smith’s team documented how much time passed in between responses for a mother and her child during back-and-forth dialogue.“We found that the time gap in between responses, in general, gets shorter between mother and child as the child ages, and we also found the mom’s timing tended to predict the child’s timing and vice versa,” Smith said. “Mothers and children are in sync. Children who were slower to respond to their mom often had moms who were slower to respond to the child, and children who were faster to respond to their mom had moms who were faster...

Read More........→February 20, 2023

Kids develop self-esteem even before age five

New York: Children may develop a sense of self-esteem even before they begin kindergarten, reveals an interesting research. "We found that by as young as five years of age, self-esteem is established strongly enough to be measured using sensitive techniques," said lead study author Dario Cvencek, research scientist at University of Washington. The study conducted in January 2016 used a newly developed test to assess implicit self-esteem in more than 200 children up to five-year-old. "Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves," study co-author Andrew Meltzoff from University of Washington noted. Until now, no measurement tool has been able to detect self-esteem in preschool-aged children as the existing self-esteem tests require the cognitive or verbal talk. Researchers created a Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT), to measure how strongly children feel positively about themselves. To make the task appropriate for preschoolers, a mix of 234 boys and girls of five-year-old from the Seattle area, replaced words related to the self ("me," "not me") with objects. They used small unfamiliar flags, and where told about "yours" and "not yours". Using buttons on a computer, children responded to a series of "me" and "not me" flags, using words and pressing...

Read More........→November 17, 2015

Shhh! Your baby learning in sleep too

© Flickr.com/ robscomputer/cc-by-2.0 London: While infants sleep, they are reprocessing what they have learnt during the day, a study has found. Working with researchers from the University of Tubingen, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany discovered that babies of the age from nine to 16 months remember the names of objects better if they had a short nap. And only after sleeping can they transfer the learnt names to similar new objects. The infant brain thus forms general categories during sleep, converting experience into knowledge. The results show that sleep significantly affects memory organisation even in the infant brain - and at a time when memory is growing on a massive scale. "The waking infant brain quickly forgets newly-learnt names, but during sleep, words are more durably linked to objects and imprinted," said Angela Friederici, director at Max Planck Institute. The researchers also showed that the formation of categories is closely related to a typical rhythmic activity of the sleeping brain called "sleep spindles". Infants with high "sleep spindle" activity are particularly good at generalising their experiences and developing new knowledge while sleeping. In order to study the impact of sleep on infant memory, the team invited parents to...

Read More........→August 12, 2015

Chinese toddler first in the world to have 3D printed skull

Beijing: A three-year-old girl in China has become the first person in the world to have her skull reconstructed with the help of 3D printing technology, after a 17-hour-long ground-breaking surgery. The girl was suffering from a medical condition called hydrocephalus, which causes a buildup of excess cerebrospinal fluid in the brain. The condition left her with a head weighing about 20 kg, while she herself weighs only 32 kg. Doctors said she is recovering steadily after the 3D-printed titanium alloy skull was implanted, becoming the first person to have her cranium successfully reconstructed by by 3D printers. Han Han underwent the 17-hour surgery on Wednesday at the Second People's Hospital of central China's Hunan Province and is under observation, said neurosurgeon Kuang Weiping, who is in charge of her treatment. Han was admitted to the hospital two months ago. Since September last year, she has become bedridden as her head grew four times the normal size, taking up more than half of her total weight, Xinhua news agency reported. Due to the heavy weight, parts of her brain suffered serious infections and she lost sight because her optic nerve was affected. Kuang said they believed her skull was likely to rupture as infected parts became thinner and only the "brain-shrinking" operation could save her life. During the process,...

Read More........→July 18, 2015

The first baby born from a womb transplant

Doctors in Sweden have announced the first baby born to a mother with a womb transplant. This pioneering operation offers hope to thousands of couples who are unable to conceive children. In 2013, researchers at the University of Gothenburg completed a series of nine womb transplants on women in Sweden. Among the patients was an unnamed 36-year-old with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH), a rare condition that prevents the uterus from developing. Her ovaries were intact, however, so she could ovulate. This female became the recipient of a uterus donation from her 61-year-old family friend, the latter having gone through the menopause around seven years earlier. Drugs were needed to suppress the immune system, which otherwise would have resulted in the organ being rejected. Alongside this, IVF was used to produce 11 embryos, frozen and stored for later use. In January 2014, a year after the transplant, doctors successfully implanted one of these embryos into the patient, transferring it to her new womb. There were concerns over how well a transplanted uterus would Credit: The Lancet cope with the strains of pregnancy, during which it swells greatly in size. The procedure had been attempted by scientists in the past – but in each case, it led to either a miscarriage or organ failure caused by disease. On this occasion,...

Read More........→October 21, 2014

Infants Learn More Than We Might Think

Credit: Concordia Does a baby know that a dog can jump a fence while a school bus can’t? Can a toddler grasp that a cat can avoid colliding with a wall, while a table being pushed into a wall can’t? A new study from Concordia shows that infants as young as 10-months old can tell the difference between the kinds of paths naturally taken by a walking animal, compared to a moving car or piece of furniture. That’s important information because the ability to categorize things as animate beings or inanimate objects is a fundamental cognitive ability that allows toddlers to better understand the world around them. The study, published in Infant Behavior & Development, looked at about 350 babies — who participated at 10, 12, 16 and 20 months — to find out when children clue in to the fact that animals and objects follow different motion paths. Since the study subjects could not express much in words, the researchers used a technique called the “visual habituation paradigm,” which measures how long one looks at a given object. “You can understand something about what babies know based on how long they look at something,” explains former doctoral student Rachel Baker, who collaborated on the study with fellow researcher Tamara Pettigrew and Diane Poulin-Dubois, a professor in Concordia’s Department of Psychology and member of...

Read More........→September 20, 2014

The "water nymph" of the Yucatan Peninsula

The find has been named Naia, Greek for "water nymph". "Pristine prehistoric skeleton of teenage girl found in underwater cave" : by Sheryl Ubelacker, May 16th, 2014, CTV News,  The pristine skeleton of a teenaged girl who lived about 13,000 years ago, discovered in a deep, water-filled underground cavern in the sprawling cave system in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, is providing archeologists with an unprecedented glimpse into the history of the early inhabitants of the Americas. Given the name Naia, Greek for "water nymph," the remains of the 15- or 16-year-old girl were found at the bottom of the boulder-strewn, underwater chamber dubbed Hoyo Negro -- "black hole" in Spanish -- along with the scattered bones of 26 large animal species, among them sabre-tooth tigers, giant ground sloths and cave bears. "Sealed off by water and darkness for over 8,000 years, it is a time capsule of the environment and human life in central America at the end of the Ice Age, when glaciers across the globe trapped massive amounts of water as ice and sea level was far lower than it is today," said American paleontologist Jim Chatters, head of an international research team investigating the site and its archeological treasures. Chatters, the first scientist to study the prehistoric skeleton known as Kennewick Man that was found in...

Read More........→May 18, 2014

Golden Eagle tries to snatch kid in Montreal

Golden Eagle is moving towards kids A child flees from what could have been a disaster, as he is clutched by a Golden Eagle, while sitting in a park in Montreal, Canada. You can observe as the eagle moves towards the baby, and the father is filming the whole event. As he perceives the bird start to veer down, and skull it for his people, he frights and jogs towards it. The infant is raised in the air for a few moments, but it emerges the eagle lets go soon after. Many are claiming this video is a fake, as the father's reaction seems to be too detached and a little late. After all, he stops to admire the bird instead of running to protect his family as he sees it approach them. If you didn't catch the sequence, it is played in small motion at the end of the clip. According to wikipedia The Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) is one of the best-known birds of prey in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the most widely distributed species of eagle. Like all eagles, it belongs to the family Accipitridae. Once widespread across the Holarctic, it has disappeared from many areas which are now more heavily populated by humans. Despite being extirpated from or uncommon in some its former range, the species is still fairly ubiquitous, being present in sizeable stretches of Eurasia, North Golden eagle  America,...

Read More........→May 04, 2014

Psychologists document the age our earliest memories fade

What's your earliest surviving memory? By Carol Clark: Although infants use their memories to learn new information, few adults can remember events in their lives that happened prior to the age of three. Psychologists at Emory University have now documented that age seven is when these earliest memories tend to fade into oblivion, a phenomenon known as “childhood amnesia.” The journal Memory published the research, which involved interviewing children about past events in their lives, starting at age three. Different subsets of the group of children were then tested for recall of these events at ages five, six, seven, eight and nine. “Our study is the first empirical demonstration of the onset of childhood amnesia,”says Emory psychologist Patricia Bauer, who led the study. “We actually recorded the memories of children, and then we followed them into the future to track when they forgot these memories.”  The study’s co-author is Marina Larkina, a manager of research projects for Emory’s Department of Psychology. The Bauer Memory Development Lab focuses on how episodic, or autobiographical memory, changes through childhood and early adulthood. “Knowing how autobiographical memory develops is critically important to understanding ourselves as psychic beings,” Bauer says. “Remembering yourself...

Read More........→March 19, 2014