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Damn. Looks like my husband was right again.  A new study has found that getting kids to bed at the same time every night (read: early) is a very good thing. Researchers found that a good night’s sleep is linked to better performance in math and languages – subjects that are powerful predictors of later learning and academic success, according to newswise.com.  In findings published recently in the journal Sleep Medicine , the researchers reported that “sleep efficiency” is associated with higher academic performance in those key subjects. Sleep efficiency is a gauge of sleep quality that compares the amount of actual sleep time with the total time spent in bed. While other studies have pointed to links between sleep and general academic performance, these   scientists examined the impact of sleep quality on report-card grades in specific subjects. The upshot: with greater sleep efficiency, the children did better in math and languages – but don't ...

It almost caused me to drop out (just kidding!) but a new study has found that schools that emphasize math and science see more of their populations drop out . According to newswise.com, as U.S. high schools beef up math and science requirements for graduation, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that more rigorous academics drive some students to drop out. “There’s been a movement to make education in the United States compare more favorably to education in the rest of the world, and part of that has involved increasing math and science graduation requirements,” explained first author Andrew D. Plunk, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine. “There was an expectation that this was going to be good for students, but the evidence from our analyses suggests that many students ended up dropping out when school was made harder for them,” he added. Hmm...  Wonder where Com...

Is your kid in the school choir?  Does he play the saxophone?  How about the drums, like my son (who is driving me crazy with all his pounding on walls and coffee cans and the floor and just about anything that makes a sound when you hit it). Well, be grateful, not annoyed.  A new study has found that even the smallest bit of musical training in early childhood provides a boost to the brain as an adult. According to medicalnewstoday.com, "Researchers discovered that, despite not having played an instrument in nearly 40 years, (the) participants who completed 4-14 years of music training early in life had the fastest response to (a) speech sound (approximately a millisecond faster than those without music training)."  The faster the response, the better the brain activity The story relates this to neural timing, and states that "neural timing is the first to go in aging adults."  Experts define neural ability as the physical basis for thoughts, feelings a...

I've always hated math .  I'm probably the only person you'll ever know who got 380 on her math SAT (and that's with 200 points for spelling your name right!). But Glen Whitney's trying to put an end to that.  According to Molly Petrilla at smartplanet.com, in 2006, when the mathematician and hedge fund algorithm manager, learned the tiny Goudreau Museum of Math in Art and Science in Hyde Park, N.Y., had closed for good, he began thinking about ways to replace it. A few years later, Whitney had raised $23 million" to build a brand-new, 20,000-square-foot museum devoted to his favorite subject," Petrilla writes. The only museum of its kind in North America, the Museum of Mathematics opened in Manhattan on Dec. 12, 2012.  That's 12-12-12, you guys. Eight months later, MoMath — a nickname Whitney embraces — has attracted more visitors than he ever imagined. “There was a projection that we’d have 60,000 visitors in the first year,” he tells Petrilla...

For the longest time, I thought my son was a prodigy. Then I began reading about kids who wrote and passed around newsletters on how truly un-nutritious their cafeteria food really was -- in fourth grade!  And won spelling bees by correctly spelling kneidel (a Hebrew word for matzoh balls but who knew?).  And invented a test for breast cancer (she was in high school, but still). And my son began getting B's. Christie McNicholson reports at smartplanet.com that there's actually a child who spoke his first word at three months (mine's first was "squirrel"  -- go figure!), learned the entire alphabet by eight months, went to college at nine, developed a new form of mathematics and by age 13 had written a research paper accepted by a math journal. Now that's a prodigy.  Apparently there's just one trait shared by all prodigies .  Guess what it is?  Sounds a little too crazy to be true but it's a good working memory, not IQ.  And it's actually one...