I often write about research studies from various field and how they can be applied to the classroom. I write individual posts about ones that I think are especially significant, and will continue to do so. However, so many studies are published that it’s hard to keep up. So I’ve started writing a “round-up” of some of them each week or every other week as a regular feature:
Bilingual Immigrants Report Better Health Than Speakers of One Language is the headline on a report about a Stanford study. Here’s an excerpt:
Healthy individuals who immigrate to the U.S. often see their health decline over time. A recent study from Stanford University suggests that immigrants who learn English while maintaining their native language might be protected against this puzzling phenomenon.
Ariela Schachter, a Ph.D. student in sociology, examined the correlation between English and native-language proficiency and Asian and Latino immigrants’ self-reported health status. The results, published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, showed that people who are proficient at both English and their native language report better health than do speakers of just one language.
I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning The Advantages To Being Bilingual.
Stress Changes How People Make Decisions is from The Association for Psychological Research. Here’s an excerpt:
Feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk and reward…. under stress, people pay more attention to the upside of a possible outcome.
This means when people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they’re considering and less to the downsides. So someone who’s deciding whether to take a new job and is feeling stressed by the decision might weigh the increase in salary more heavily than the worse commute.
The increased focus on the positive also helps explain why stress plays a role in addictions, and people under stress have a harder time controlling their urges. “The compulsion to get that reward comes stronger and they’re less able to resist it,” Mather says. So a person who’s under stress might think only about the good feelings they’ll get from a drug, while the downsides shrink into the distance.
It’s a remind– for me, at least — that when a student is having self-control issues, there may be more than meets the eye. I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Learning About Teens & Stress.
Study Shows a Sliding Scale of Sleep Needed for Academic Achievement is from Education Week. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Helping Teens Learn About The Importance Of Sleep.
Thinking Outside The Box, With Our Bodies And Our Brains is from NPR and reports on an intriguing study. Basically, some students sat in a big box and others sat outside of it. Both were given tests to measure their creativity. The students sitting on the outside were judged to have developed solutions on the test that were twenty percent more creative than those sitting inside. The NPR writer comments:
As an educator, I enjoy playing with these ideas. Aren’t walled classrooms boxes too? Would my students’ creativity flare to new heights if we met under open skies?