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Who knew? Taking your kids to a museum will help them get better grades than making them study for hours. So says a new study that proclaims that spending quality time with your kids will do them a lot better in school than forcing them to hit the books over and over. Research indicates adolescents are more likely to want to pursue further study if their parents take them to museums rather than homework clubs, according to newswise.com. Researchers found that adolescents who take part in cultural activities with their mother and father were more likely to aspire to continue their studies post-16 than those who didn’t. This is compared to even those who attended homework clubs or participated in extra-curricular activities. Why?  Filial dynamics such as emotional closeness to parents and "cultural capital" were better predictors than more school-driven parent-child interactions, researchers found. In the study, factors relating to family emotional ...

Does your daughter expect a D on the algebra test?  No matter the amount of studying, she will probably get it. Not because she's dumb.  Because somehow kids' expectations of how they will do in a class actually affect the outcome, according to a new study. Research has shown that what a student expects to learn and how they expect to do in a class actually has an impact on their learning, professor Angela King has found. For example, she says at newswise.com, a student might take a divisional class and assume they will get an A because it’s viewed as their “easy” class. “They are already calculating their GPA based on that A and will do whatever it takes to get that A, while a student who takes a class perceived as more difficult, like an organic chemistry course, just wants to pass the class.” And sometimes that means they settle for a C, she added, when a little more effort or an alternative study method could help them improve their learning, and their grade...

My husband (who went to BU) is determined that our son go to Harvard.  I, a Syracuse University ("party school") graduate isn't so concerned.  Hey, at least I went to Newhouse for journalism. In any event, a new study has found that where you go to college may not matter all that much, in the end.  That's because, according to newswise.com, is it the institutions themselves that succeed in getting students through to degree completion, or is degree completion merely a result of the quality of the students entering the institutions? It's long been thought that students should attend the most academically selective college possible, since, among other reasons, highly selective institutions graduate students at higher rates.  But now experts aren't so sure. New research has shown that attending a more selective college, as measured by average SAT score, does not make much of a difference for a student’s chance of graduating with a bachelor’s degree, ...

So are we getting less creative ?  But there's some good news too. According to newswise.com, "Research in recent years has suggested that young Americans might be less creative now than in decades past, even while their intelligence — as measured by IQ tests — continues to rise." Thankfully, a new study out of the University of Washington Information School and Harvard University puts an end to that kind of thinking. Or creating. The study of students over 20 years found that, while some aspects of creativity — such as the ones used in visual arts, not surprisingly — are gently rising over the years, other aspects, "such as the nuances of creative writing, could be declining," newswise.com reports. As someone who's written (but not published, though come close, over eight novels), that makes me very sad. The question researchers asked was, "How have the style, content and form of adolescents' art-making and creative writing changed over t...

Oh no, say it isn't so!  But a new survey has found that Subway is every bit as unhealthy as McDonald's. In a study of young people from 12 to 21, a little over 1,000 calories were consumed by each participant at the golden arches, while at Subway, it was 955,  according to a story at takepart.com.  The Institute of Medicine (IOM) advises that students eat no more than 850 calories at lunch (and for people like me, on a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet, even that sounds decadent!). Now, I was also under the impression that Subway was healthier.  There you could get a turkey sandwich (okay, rolled turkey), tomato and lettuce on a bun, hold the mayo, maybe a slice of swiss cheese, and that just had to be healthier than a Big Mac, no? But the sodium content is higher at Subway (that's probably how they get away with making the food taste good), and the Subway sandwiches, one of the chain's most popular offerings, still had 200 more calories than a similar McDonald's mea...