Education

A Different Kind of Math Tutor: Research on how people think results in cognitive tutor programs that help kids do better in math.

Believing You Can Get Smarter Makes You Smarter: Thinking about intelligence as changeable and malleable, rather than stable and fixed, results in greater academic achievement, especially for people whose groups bear the burden of negative stereotypes about their intelligence.

Early Intervention Can Improve Low-Income Children's Cognitive Skills and Academic Achievement: National Head Start program conceptualized while psychologists were beginning to study preventive intervention for young children living in poverty.

Family-Like Environment Better for Troubled Children and Teens: The Teaching-Family Model changes bad behavior through straight talk and loving relationships.

Have Your Children Had Their Anti-Smoking Shots?: Attitude inoculation dramatically reduces teenage smoking rates.

How to Build a Better Educational System: Jigsaw Classrooms: The jigsaw classroom technique can transform competitive classrooms in which many students are struggling into cooperative classrooms in which once-struggling students show dramatic academic and social improvements.

Increasing Student Success through Instruction for Self-Determination: An enormous amount of research shows the importance of self-determination (i.e., autonomy) for students in elementary school through college for enhancing learning and improving important post-school outcomes.

Intelligence and Achievement Testing: Is the Half Full Glass Getting Fuller? More research is needed to try to ensure that IQ and achievement tests are used to maximize learning opportunities for all students.

Marital Education Programs Help Keep Couples Together: In the United States, couples marrying for the first time have approximately a fifty percent chance of divorcing. Psychologists are helping couples' "I do" last a lifetime through development and application of scientifically tested relationship education programs.

Playing Make-Believe Prepares Kids for the Real World: "No playing until you've finished your homework!" We've all heard that before. New research suggests, though, that imaginative play actually increases children's academic success.

Putting the Power of Television to Good Use: "Do as I say, not as I do." Dr. Al Bandura's research suggests that "doing" is more powerful than "saying" when it comes to battling social ills like HIV transmission, illiteracy, and population growth.

School Bullying Is Nothing New, But Psychologists Identify New Ways to Prevent It: Systematic international research has shown school bullying to be a frequent and serious public health problem. But psychologists are using this research to develop bullying prevention programs that are being implemented in schools around the world.

Schoolyard Blues: Physical and verbal bullying can be serious problems in children's social lives, but psychologists are finding that other, more subtle forms of peer maltreatment can also wreak havoc on adjustment.

See Brain. See Brain Read: Psychological science can help more kids learn to read. Scientists are using new brain imaging technology to study what happens in the brain when children read.

Stereotype threat widens achievement gap: Reminders of stereotyped inferiority hurt test scores.

Think Again: Men and Women Share Cognitive Skills: Psychologists have gathered solid evidence that boys and girls or men and women differ in very few significant ways -- differences that would matter in school or at work -- in how, and how well, they think.

Undoing Dyslexia via Video Games: Psychologists and neuroscientists are using new techniques to identify the source of language and reading problems such as dyslexia in the brain and create neural processing exercises disguised as computer video games to significantly improve children's language learning and reading.