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Consistent with studies showing that gender stereotypes can worsen math performance in females, a year-long study involving 17 first- and second-grade teachers and their 52 boy and 65 girl students has found that boys' math performance was not related to their (female) teacher's math anxiety while girls' math achievement was. Early elementary school teachers in the United States are almost exclusively female. Math achievement was unrelated to teacher math anxiety in both boys and girls at the beginning of the school year.

A study of 80 pairs of middle-income Canadian mothers and their year-old babies has revealed that children of mothers who answered their children's requests for help quickly and accurately; talked about their children's preferences, thoughts, and memories during play; and encouraged successful strategies to help solve difficult problems, performed better at a year and a half and 2 years on tasks that call for executive skills, compared to children whose mothers didn't use these techniques.

A study involving 125 women has found the first, direct human evidence that fetuses exposed to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol may have trouble paying attention or solving problems at 17 months. But more hopefully, the association only occurred among children showing insecure attachment to their mothers, independent of socioeconomic factors. The findings suggest that a stressful prenatal environment may be effectively counteracted by good parental care. The children will be followed up when they turn 6.

A study involving 132 8- and 9-year-old children, some of whom had been adopted into U.S. homes after spending at least a year and three-quarters in institutions in Asia, Latin America, Russia and Eastern Europe, and Africa, while others were adopted by the time they were 8 months old into U.S. homes from foster care in Asia and Latin America, having spent no or very little time in institutional care, has found that those adopted early from foster care didn't differ from children who were raised in their birth families in the United States.

Data from North Carolina's mandated End-of-Grade tests (2000-2005), which includes student reports on how frequently they use a home computer for schoolwork, watch TV or read for pleasure, reveals that students in grades five through eight (c.10-13), particularly those from disadvantaged families, tended to have lower reading and math scores after they got a home computer. The researchers suggest that the greater negative effect in disadvantaged households may reflect less parental monitoring.

A study following 1,323 children in Grades 3 to 5 and 210 college students has found that children who exceeded two hours per day of screen time (TV and video games) were 1.5 to two times more likely to be considered above average in attention problems by their teachers compared to children who met the guideline. A similar association between screen media time and attention problems (self-reported) was found for the college students. A study earlier this year found U.S.

Analysis of 30 years of SAT and ACT tests administered to the top 5% of U.S. 7th graders has found that the ratio of 7th graders scoring 700 or above on the SAT-math has dropped from about 13 boys to 1 girl to about 4 boys to 1 girl. The ratio dropped dramatically between 1981 and 1995, and has remained relatively stable since then. The top scores on scientific reasoning, a relatively new section of the ACT that was not included in the original study, show a similar ratio of boys to girls.

A study using data on reported homicides in Chicago 1994-2002 and two independent surveys of children and families in Chicago, has revealed that African-American children who were assessed directly after a local homicide occurred scored substantially lower on vocabulary and reading assessments than their peers from the same neighborhood who were assessed at different times. The impact of the homicide faded both with time and distance from the child's home.

A study involving 629 12th-grade students from three Los Angeles-area high schools has revealed that, across both genders and all ethnicities, adolescents with more in-school friends, compared with out-of-school friends, had higher grade point averages. It’s assumed that this is due to the fact that in-school friends are more likely to support school-related activities, including studying.

Seventh graders given 20 mg zinc, five days per week, for 10 to 12 weeks showed improvement in cognitive performance, responding more quickly and accurately on memory tasks and with more sustained attention, than classmates who received no additional zinc. Those who received only 10mg a day did not improve their performance. Previous studies have linked zinc nutrition to motor, cognitive and psychosocial function in very young children and adults, but this is the first study of its effect in adolescents.

A guinea pig study has found that newborn guinea pigs subjected to moderate vitamin C deficiency had 30% fewer hippocampal neurons and markedly worse spatial memory than guinea pigs given a normal diet. For several reasons the neonatal brain is thought to be particularly vulnerable to even a slight lowering of the vitamin C level. Vitamin C deficiency is very common in some parts of the world, and even in wealthy nations occurs in an estimated 5-10% of the adult population.

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