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Magazine
In the July 6 SN: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, stone tool dates face scrutiny, ocean plastic goes deep, records of Inca taxation, erosion spurred plate tectonics and more.
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News
Easing test anxiety boosts low-income students’ biology grades
01/14/2019 - 15:00 Psychology, Science & SocietyAt a large Midwestern high school, almost 40 percent of low-income biology students were poised to fail the course. Instead, thanks to simple measures aimed at reducing test anxiety, that failure rate was halved.
Psychological interventions that improve grades could ultimately help keep more low-income students in the sciences, says Christopher Rozek, a psychologist at Stanford...
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Scicurious
Sometimes a failure to replicate a study isn’t a failure at all
12/16/2018 - 07:00 PsychologyAs anyone who has ever tried a diet knows, exerting willpower can be exhausting. After a whole day spent carefully avoiding the snack machine and attempting to take mindful joy in plain baked chicken and celery sticks, the siren call of cookies after dinner may be just too much to bear. This idea — that exercising self-control gets harder the more you have to do it — is called ego depletion,...
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Feature
Shahzeen Attari explores the psychology of saving the planet
Shahzeen Attari, 37Environmental decision makingIndiana University Bloomington09/26/2018 - 08:35 Psychology, ClimateWhen Shahzeen Attari was growing up in Dubai, her father ran a machine shop. Her mother, a gregarious people person, worked at a bank.
“My curiosity about how things work came from my father,” Attari says. “I learned to love getting to know people from my mother.”
That yin-yang background may help...
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News
Huge ‘word gap’ holding back low-income children may not exist after all
09/04/2018 - 05:30 Psychology, LanguageA scientific takedown of a famous finding known as the 30-million-word gap may upend popular notions of how kids learn vocabulary.
Research conducted more than 20 years ago concluded that by age 4, poor children hear an average of 30 million fewer words than their well-off peers. Since then, many researchers have accepted the reported word gap as a driver of later reading and writing...
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Science & the Public
‘Replication crisis’ spurs reforms in how science studies are done
08/27/2018 - 11:00 Psychology, Science & SocietyWhat started out a few years ago as a crisis of confidence in scientific results has evolved into an opportunity for improvement. Researchers and journal editors are exposing how studies get done and encouraging independent redos of published reports. And there’s nothing like the string of failed replications to spur improved scientific practice.
That’s the conclusion of a research team...
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News
Children may be especially vulnerable to peer pressure from robots
08/15/2018 - 14:00 Robotics, PsychologyPeer pressure can be tough for kids to resist, even if it comes from robots.
School-aged children tend to echo the incorrect but unanimous responses of a group of robots to a simple visual task, a new study finds. In contrast, adults who often go along with the errant judgments of human peers resist such social pressure applied by robots, researchers report August 15 in Science Robotics...