all Human Development and Psychology Department stories

Advances in genetics can help kids learn

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:34:19 -0400

Education was becoming a no-brainer, some people at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) complained.

Kurt Fischer and his colleagues looked at the revolution in brain scanning, genetics, and other biological technologies and decided that most teachers and students weren’t getting much benefit from them. Brain scans are now available to watch what’s going on when someone is learning — or not learning. Finding genes that are involved in leaning disabilities is a hot area. Why, they asked, aren’t the powers of such technologies helping teachers in classrooms?

Verbal beatings hurt as much as sexual abuse

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:37:29 -0400

Sticks and stones may break my bones,

But names will never hurt me. …

That often repeated children’s rhyme is wrong, according to Harvard University psychiatrists. Scolding, swearing, yelling, blaming, insulting, threatening, ridiculing, demeaning, and criticizing can be as harmful as physical abuse, sexual abuse outside the home, or witnessing physical abuse at home, notes a report in the April issue of the Harvard Mental Health Letter.

The accidental 'best friend'

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:17:35 -0400

Harvard researchers studying Siberian foxes have uncovered evidence that the ability to interpret human expressions and gestures that helped transform the wild wolf into humankind's cooperative "best friend" may have occurred by accident. The research casts doubt onto a previous theory that domestic dogs' ability to interpret human communication results from generations of selection for that specific trait by ancient breeders. Rather, the research indicates that the "social intelligence" shown by dogs may have been an unintended byproduct of wolves becoming domesticated and losing their fear and aggression toward humans. Previous research with both wild wolves and nonhuman primates such as chimpanzees shows the dog is superior at being able to interpret human gestures such as pointing to hidden food sources. But the Siberian research shows that foxes bred only for tameness are the equal of the domestic dog in the task.

Monsters, tooth fairies and germs!

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:34:43 -0400

Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Paul Harris argues that children as young as preschool age can discern whether or not they're hearing the truth, even in a domain for which they have no previous knowledge, by accurately judging the reliability of the person who's telling them. "Particularly among 4-year-olds, but also among 3-year-olds, they're selective," he says. "They come to trust somebody who seems to tell the truth, and to mistrust somebody who's not." In collaboration with two postdoctoral fellows, Melissa Koenig and Fabrice Clément, Harris created experiments in which a pair of speakers - people in one case, puppets in another - presented various claims to the 3- and 4-year-olds.

Researchers debate origin of language

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:26:25 -0400

Birds sing, chimps grunt, and whales whistle, but those sounds fall far short of expressing the richness of their experiences. Their lack of language goes to the question of why humans have it but no other animals do. That question in turn leads to two major theories of the origin of language. One is the idea that language arises from bird song, dolphin whistles, monkey hoots, and other precursors that extend back through hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The other theory maintains that language is a uniquely human adaptation, or series of adaptations, with no precursors among other species. Marc Hauser, a Harvard professor of psychology, and his colleagues have come up with a third idea.

Building difference, breaking it down

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:22:42 -0400

Mica Pollock, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, taught and did dissertation research in a California high school where she observed students "bending" racial categories. "What interested me was how young people were simultaneously throwing up for grabs the very idea that race existed and holding this idea of being 'mixed,' and reinforcing the idea that people could be classified into single lump-sum racial groups," she said in an interview. "Somebody would be a little bit Chinese, a little bit Samoan, a little bit white, a little bit Native American and then at another moment he would just be 'Samoan.' So bending meant simultaneously challenging these race categories and employing them." Why did students do this?

Imagination important for children's cognitive development

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:19:14 -0400

Paul Harris, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, says there are two very different ways to define imagination. "You can either see it as disappearing or waning during childhood, or you can see it the way I do, as persisting throughout life," Harris says. The message in his book, "The Work of the Imagination," is this: "Suppose we think of pretend play and fantasy as something that's quite characteristic of young children -- it makes them playful and endearing but doesn't really contribute to their later cognitive development and by adulthood it has in some sense disappeared. I tried to argue that this is wrong," Harris said.

Looking behind headlines on preschools

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:12:41 -0400

The National Institute for Child Health and Human Development Study of Child Care and Youth Development is the most comprehensive look at child care to date. The study made news in April 2001, when Harvard researcher Kathleen McCartney and her colleagues presented their findings. "We were presenting lots of data ... the media focused on the bad news aspect of one paper," says McCartney. That bad news was that 17 percent of children who were in child care for more than 30 hours per week were rated as often aggressive toward other children when they got to kindergarten. Before parents rush to pull their children from child care - not an economic reality for most families - McCartney highlights some subtleties of the research that the media may have missed.

Light illuminates better teaching strategies

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:05:30 -0400

"When students say something works, that's powerful," says Harvard Professor Richard Light, author of "Making the Most of College." Among his findings: • The widely held belief that colleges should admit talented students and then "get out of their way" is directly contrary to what students actually want; students report that some of their most meaningful college experiences involve those teachers and administrators who actively "get in their way" by offering advice, opportunities, and challenges.