November 6, 2012,
Volume 59, No. 11
Building Road Maps to Close the Achievement Gap
If big-city school systems had a clear picture of the risks that put their African-American students in danger of falling behind academically, and of the protective factors that are helping some of those students overcome such dangers and succeed, educators and policy makers could build locally targeted solutions for addressing the achievement gap.
Researchers at Penn’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) have found a way to create just such a road map by mining the kinds of data that schools and social service agencies already collect routinely. Their findings were reported in the October 2012 issue of the Journal of School Psychology.
In the study they describe in “Academic Achievement of African-American Boys: A City-wide, Community-based Investigation of Risk and Resilience,” Penn GSE Professor John Fantuzzo and his co-authors used an integrated data system they helped develop to match thousands of third-grade boys from across Philadelphia, both black and white, with records stored by the schools and other agencies that had previously not shared data systematically, if at all.
Third-grade boys were chosen because third grade is the first time that children take state-mandated achievement tests. The data, which had been collected over the boys’ lifetimes and even extended back before their births to the time of their mothers’ pregnancies, allowed the researchers to use sophisticated analytic techniques to find the correlation between academic performance and various risks and protective factors over time.
The researchers found that the black-white achievement gap was accompanied by a “risk gap” of the same magnitude. African-American boys in Philadelphia were considerably more likely than their white counterparts to experience risks such as poverty, maltreatment, homelessness or lead exposure; to have a low birth weight; to have a mother with a low level of education; or to have a mother who received inadequate prenatal care. All of these risks were correlated with poor academic performance, and Dr. Fantuzzo calls them “what’s behind being behind.”
The researchers also studied the link between academic performance and the boys’ school attendance and behavioral records. They found that African-American boys who showed higher levels of engagement through strong attendance records and frequent participation in classroom tasks did better academically than their peers who were less engaged.
The findings suggest that to close the achievement gap, schools and social service agencies must work together to reduce the risks to which African-American boys in their communities are exposed. But educators must also work with boys and their families, building home-school collaborations to help these boys stay engaged with learning. And this must happen early in the children’s academic careers, the researchers say; many African-American boys show increasing signs of disengagement beginning in the youngest grades.
Dr. Fantuzzo’s co-authors are Research Associate Whitney LeBoeuf of Penn GSE, Dr. Heather Rouse of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Dr. Chin-Chih Chen of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Education.
Biomarkers in Blood May Detect Alzheimer's Disease
Efforts to develop a blood test for Alzheimer’s disease are progressing, as a new study co-authored by experts from the Perelman School of Medicine has found a group of biomarkers that hold up in statistical analyses in three independent groups of patients. The study, a unique collaborative effort between researchers at Penn, Emory School of Medicine and Washington University as well as the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), was recently published online in Neurology.
Previous efforts have focused on spinal fluid biomarkers and radiologic tests like MRIs and PET scans. These newer tests can detect various levels of proteins implicated in the Alzheimer’s disease process, such as amyloid-beta and tau proteins.
In this study, researchers found that the levels or amounts of four different biomarkers detected in blood plasma were different in people with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s, when compared to healthy controls. These protein biomarkers included: apolipoprotein E, B-type natriuretic peptide, C-reactive protein and pancreatic polypeptide.
Future research will seek to validate this large multi-center study to determine how informative these biomarkers may be in research settings and clinical practice, develop standard protocols for their use in research and clinical settings, and ensure that a blood test for Alzheimer’s based on these new findings delivers accurate results consistently.
The study’s lead author, Dr. William Hu, assistant professor of neurology at Emory University, began this research when he was a fellow at Penn. The research team from Penn included Drs. Leslie M. Shaw, Steven E. Arnold, Murray Grossman, the late Christopher M. Clark (Almanac January 24, 2012), Vivianna M. Van Deerlin, Leo McCluskey, Lauren Elman, Jason Karlawish, Alice Chen-Plotkin, Howard I. Hurtig, Andrew Siderowf, Virginia M.-Y. Lee and John Q. Trojanowski.
You Have to Eat Except When You're Not Hungry
When compared to their normal-weight siblings, overweight and obese children ate 34 percent more calories from snack foods even after eating a meal, reports a Penn Nursing researcher in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. That can be enough calories, if sustained over time, to continue excess weight gain.
In a study of 47 same-sex sibling pairs, the research showed that, even after eating a meal they enjoyed until they were full, overweight and obese children were more prone to overeating when presented with desirable snack foods than their normal-weight siblings.
The study also showed that normal-weight siblings ate less of the meal when provided with a calorie-dense appetizer just before the meal. In comparison, overweight and obese siblings did not lessen the amount they ate at the meal enough to offset the additional calories from the appetizer.
“The overweight and obese siblings showed an impaired ability to adjust for calorie differences and consumed more snacks even when satiated,” said lead author Dr. Tanja Kral, an assistant professor at Penn Nursing. “These findings suggest some children are less responsive to their internal cues of hunger and fullness and will continue eating even when full.”
This inability may be inherited and exacerbated by an environment that offers large portions of desirable foods, said Dr. Kral, explaining that the full siblings in the study were more similar in their eating behaviors than the half-siblings, suggesting a genetic influence underlying these traits.
In the study, siblings ate a standardized dinner of pasta with tomato sauce, broccoli, unsweetened applesauce, and two percent milk once a week for three weeks. When presented with desirable post-meal snack foods, the overweight and obese siblings ate an average of 93 calories more than their normal-weight siblings. This additional calorie intake over time is considered enough to lead to excess weight gain.
“Future studies should test whether teaching children to focus on internal satiety cues and structuring the home food environment in a healthy way may prevent at-risk children from overeating,” Dr. Kral said.
Present Verb Tense Can Positively Affect Substance Abuse
The use of present versus the past tense in recalling an experience with binge drinking can positively influence behaviors, an important step in aiding the development of alcohol abuse messages.
That is the primary finding of a study by Dr. Dolores Albarracín, Martin Fishbein Chair of Communication at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, and colleagues Pilar Carrera, Dolores Muñoz, Amparo Caballero and Itziar Fernàndez. Their findings are reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 48, No. 5).
How an incident of binge drinking is recalled can have a positive impact on influencing future behavior. “It may be best to use the present tense when evoking images of non-drinking behaviors being promoted but the past tense for the drinking behaviors to prevent,” said Dr. Albarracín. She added that use of the present tense in scenarios like self-help groups, may be particularly beneficial in preventing abuse.
Dr. Albarracín and her colleagues conducted three studies where participants wrote about their experiences in binge drinking using either the present or past tense. Experiment number one revealed a stronger influence of past behaviors on drinking intentions when the test participants wrote about an episode of excessive drinking using the present tense. Correspondingly, there was a stronger influence of attitudes supporting excessive drinking when participants wrote about the episode in the past tense. Experiments two and three found that the present tense recollections had a more concrete interpretation and impact, while past tense recollections were more abstract.
Participants in the study were, on average, 22 years old and were primarily female (123 out of a total of 153). All were psychology students from the Autónoma University of Madrid, Spain (The school that Drs. Carrera, Muñoz, and Caballero are from; Dr. Fernândez is from the Universidad Nacional de Educatión a Distancia, also in Spain) and were randomly assigned to each study. Participants were asked to write about their personal experiences with binge drinking (defined as five drinks in a row for males, four drinks in a row for females) using either the past or present tense. The team also evaluated the degree of difficulty participants experienced in writing about situations in the past or present tense and found that this did not impact their recollections.
“Recalling a past instance of binge drinking can lead to intentions to repeat what one habitually does or what seems beneficial depending on what verb tense is used. Reliving the past of drinking excessively in the present tense (I am drinking) makes people use their past behavior as a guide for future intentions: Regardless of whether people drank a lot or abstained in the past, they intend to do the same in the future. Recalling the past in the past tense (I drank), however, leads to more abstract types of thought and thus forming intentions on the basis of how good or bad drinking seems,” explained Dr. Albarracín.