News by Subject Social & Behavior

A study from the University of York found that children from families of higher socioeconomic status had better language abilities at nursery school age and that these verbal skills boosted their later academic performance throughout school.

Expressive language sampling yielded five language-related outcome measures that may be useful for treatment studies in intellectual disabilities, especially fragile X syndrome. The measures were generally valid and reliable across the range of ages, IQs and autism symptom severity of participants. According to the study, led by UC Davis researchers and funded by NIH, the measures are also functional in supporting treatments that can improve language, providing far reaching benefits for individuals with intellectual disabilities.

US school districts may be flagged as over-identifying students of color as having disabilities when other factors, such as achievement gaps, may explain these disparities, according to new Penn State research.

Even before uttering their first words, babies master the grammar basics of their mother tongue. Thus eight-month-old French infants can distinguish function words, or functors -- e.g. articles (the), personal pronouns (she), or prepositions (on) -- from content words -- e.g. nouns (rainbow), verbs (to drive), or adjectives (green), according to researchers from the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (CNRS/Université de Paris).

Role models are important for aspiring scientists, but new research suggests that scientists who are known for their hard work -- like Thomas Edison -- are more motivating than scientists who are viewed as naturally brilliant, like Albert Einstein.

People who rate themselves as highly knowledgeable about a new infectious disease threat could also be more likely to believe they don't know enough, a new study suggests. In the case of this study, the infectious disease threat was the Zika virus. But the authors of the new study, published recently in the journal Risk Analysis, say the results could apply to the recent novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, has awarded £426,000 to the University of Surrey to undertake a ground-breaking investigation into interlingual live subtitling via respeaking.

A new study from the University of Washington shows that switching from passive teaching techniques, such as lectures, to inquiry-based 'active learning' methods in undergraduate STEM courses has a disproportionate benefit for underrepresented students, a term encompassing low-income students and Latinx, African-American, Native-American, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students. The achievement gap between overrepresented and underrepresented students narrowed on exam scores by 33% and course passing rates by 45%.