Proficient in Georgia doesnt really mean proficient in the rest of the world. Thats one of the findings from a study released this week by the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit behavioral and social science research group.

Georgia considered 87 percent of eighth-graders to be proficient in math in 2011, according to the study. But, using international measures, only 24 percent of the states eighth-graders were proficient in math, the study found. No state had a larger gap.

AIR used data the state reported to the federal government under the No Child Left Behind education law.

The study found that Georgia, like other states, gave a falsely positive impression of student achievement. It seemed to be arguing in favor of the new set of national academic standards known as Common Core. Fifty states going in 50 different directions is not a strategy for national success in a globally competitive world, AIR vice president Gary Phillips said in a summary of the study. It may look good for federal reporting purposes, but it denies students the best opportunity to learn college-ready and career-ready skills.

Georgia has moved to Common Core and to a new standardized test called Georgia Milestones. The state is raising the threshold students must clear to meet the state standard on the new test.

State education officials argue the Common Core standards and the new test will be more rigorous and will do a better job of getting students ready for college and careers.

Common Core has been controversial in Georgia, as it has been in other states. Opponents argue the standards are lower than the ones they are replacing and that the state did not have enough input in creating them.

Officials in business, higher education and the military say the standards improve education by increasing the rigor of academic material and by harmonizing when students across the country are introduced to that material.

Continued here:
Study found state proficiency threshold too low

Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues have built the first smartphone app that automatically reveals students' mental health, academic performance and behavioral trends. In other words, your smartphone knows your state of mind -- even if you don't -- and how that affects you.

The StudentLife app, which compares students' happiness, stress, depression and loneliness to their academic performance, also may be used in the general population -- for example, to monitor mental health, trigger intervention and improve productivity in workplace employees.

"The StudentLife app is able to continuously make mental health assessment 24/7, opening the way for a new form of assessment," says computer science Professor Andrew Campbell, the study's senior author. "This is a very important and exciting breakthrough."

The researchers presented their findings on Wednesday at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. The paper has been nominated for best paper at UbiComp, the top conference mobile computing. They also released an anonymized version of the dataset in the hope that other social and behavioral scientists will use it in further studies.

The researchers built an Android app that monitored readings from smartphone sensors carried by 48 Dartmouth students during a 10-week term to assess their mental health (depression, loneliness, stress), academic performance (grades across all their classes, term GPA and cumulative GPA) and behavioral trends (how stress, sleep, visits to the gym, etc., change in response to college workload -- assignments, midterms, finals -- as the term progresses).

They used computational method and machine learning algorithms on the phone to assess sensor data and make higher level inferences (i.e., sleep, sociability, activity, etc.) The app that ran on students phones automatically measured the following behaviors 24/7 without any user interaction: sleep duration, the number and duration of conversations per day, physical activity (walking, sitting, running, standing), where they were located and how long they stayed there (i.e., dorm, class, party, gym), stress level, how good they felt about themselves, eating habits and more. The researchers used a number of well known pre- and post-mental health surveys and spring and cumulative GPAs for evaluation of mental health and academic performance, respectively.

The results show that passive and automatic sensor data from the Android phones significantly correlated with the students' mental health and their academic performance over the term.

Some specific findings: Students who sleep more or have more conversations are less likely to be depressed; students who are more physically active are less likely to feel lonely; students who are around other students are less likely to be depressed. Also, surprisingly, there was no correlation between students' academic performance and their class attendance; students who are more social (had more conversations) have a better GPA; students who have higher GPAs tend to be less physically active, have lower indoor mobility at night and are around more people.

The results open the door to the following breakthroughs for the first time:

"Under similar conditions, why do some individuals excel while others fail?" Campbell says. "What is the impact of stress, mood, workload, sociability, sleep and mental health on academic performance? Much of the stress and strain of student life remains hidden. In reality faculty, student deans, clinicians know little about their students in and outside of the classroom. Students might know about their own circumstances and patterns but know little about classmates. To shine a light on student life, we developed the first of a kind smartphone app and sensing system to automatically infer human behavior."

Continued here:
Smartphone app reveals users' mental health, performance, behavior

Psychologists say spanking and other forms of corporal punishment don't get children to change their behavior for the better. Science Photo Library/Corbis hide caption

Psychologists say spanking and other forms of corporal punishment don't get children to change their behavior for the better.

There's plenty of evidence that spanking, paddling or hitting children doesn't improve their behavior in the long run and actually makes it worse.

But the science never trumps emotion, according to Alan Kazdin, head of the Yale Parenting Center and author of The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.

After NFL star Adrian Peterson was indicted for child abuse after disciplining his 4-year-old son by hitting him with a switch, there's been a lot of conversation about how race and culture affect parents' approach to discipline. OK, what about the science? Behavioral psychologists say that people respond very predictably to others' words and actions, and parents can use that predictability to improve children's behavior without shouting or hitting.

We talked with Kazdin by phone about why parents use corporal punishment and what options they have for teaching good behavior. Here are highlights of that conversation.

Why do parents use physical discipline?

There are three reasons, Kazdin says. "The brain is hard-wired to pick up negative things in the environment; this is just how humans and mammals are." So parents naturally pay more attention to a child's bad behavior, rather than to all the good things they may be doing the rest of the day.

Second, there is increasing evidence that watching or engaging in aggressive behavior excites the reward centers in the brain, giving an incentive for aggression.

"And the third context is the Bible," Kazdin says. "Some religions view hitting the child, use of the rod, not just as all right but obligatory. You're not living up to your responsibility if you're not hitting your child.

Continue reading here:
How To Get Children To Behave Without Hitting Them

Update Alexithymia is not a condition that many outside the world of behavioral science are familiar with but its the focus of Indiana University School of Medicine Assistant Research Professor Dawn Neumanns work. She recently received an SBIR grant for her business EmotEd for a therapeutic intervention tool that functions as a video game, which shes developing with Indiana University School of Medicine, Indiana University School of Informatics, and Indiana software design and developer business, DeveloperTown.

She offered an explanation of her work in a phone interview with MedCity News.

The intervention will focus on helping brain injured adults in rehabilitation hospitals identify and understand when they are angry, upset, have anxiety or are depressed and eventually learn to perceive those emotions in others as well. Alexithymia, is present in about 10 percent of the typical population, and in 30 percent to 60 percent of patients with brain injury, Neumann said.

Just so were clear, this isnt World of Warcraft. Its a video game, but it focuses on scenarios as a teaching tool.

Neumann offers a couple of the scenarios the video game may embrace, though she emphasizes it is early days in the development phase. For example, you have a dentist appointment in the morning. You set the alarm the night before and wake up immediately the next day, only to realize the clock is one hour behind. Patients are given cues in a series of steps designed to trigger a response on how they feel. They are rewarded with points for these responses the more specific they can be, the more points they get. They also get additional points for things like empathy and demonstrating emotional intelligence. The long-term goal is to build an emotional foundation.

Another scenario could involve making dinner for your boyfriend/girlfriend and theyre one hour late. The person may say some mean things to their significant other but they may not even realize theyre angry or upset. The game is all about getting to a point where the patient knows what they are feeling and why. Even more importantly, they may come to understand how the other person may be feeling.

So why video games? Neumann points out that its more effective than role-playing in person because it offers more opportunities to freeze and replay the action and discuss it without throwing the participants off or requiring them to recall something that happened several minutes ago. EmotEds customers will include rehab centers and neuropsychologists.

The virtual environments Neumanns program envisions will create a platform for training patients. The emotion builder will also allow patients to dig deeper so they can process what they are feeling and give them tools and strategies to be better aware of them.

One of the biggest problems Neumann currently sees with this group of patients is that as soon as insurers decide members have reached the end of their recovery, the reimbursement for therapy ends. So theres no way to ensure that patients keep re-enforcing the progress they have made. Neumann said she has seen people that have lost the skills they built in recovery. The longterm vision is for the interactive scenario video game to be accessible online. So the skills learned in rehab can be reinforced. As a result, there is a movement to classify brain injury as a chronic condition, since it affects many stages and capacities of living.

Long-term, Neumann hopes to build app modules onto the program to focus on different scenarios, particularly for improving patients grasp of empathy.

Here is the original post:
EmotEds therapeutic intervention tool will use video games to help patients relearn emotions

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

18-Sep-2014

Contact: John Cramer John.Cramer@Dartmouth.edu 603-646-9130 Dartmouth College @dartmouth

Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues have built the first smartphone app that automatically reveals students' mental health, academic performance and behavioral trends. In other words, your smartphone knows your state of mind -- even if you don't -- and how that affects you.

The StudentLife app, which compares students' happiness, stress, depression and loneliness to their academic performance, also may be used in the general population for example, to monitor mental health, trigger intervention and improve productivity in workplace employees.

"The StudentLife app is able to continuously make mental health assessment 24/7, opening the way for a new form of assessment," says computer science Professor Andrew Campbell, the study's senior author. "This is a very important and exciting breakthrough."

The researchers presented their findings on Wednesday at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. The paper has been nominated for best paper at UbiComp, the top conference mobile computing. A PDF of the paper and a summary of the findings are available on request. They also released an anonymized version of the dataset in the hope that other social and behavioral scientists will use it in further studies.

The researchers built an Android app that monitored readings from smartphone sensors carried by 48 Dartmouth students during a 10-week term to assess their mental health (depression, loneliness, stress), academic performance (grades across all their classes, term GPA and cumulative GPA) and behavioral trends (how stress, sleep, visits to the gym, etc., change in response to college workload -- assignments, midterms, finals -- as the term progresses).

They used computational method and machine learning algorithms on the phone to assess sensor data and make higher level inferences (i.e., sleep, sociability, activity, etc.) The app that ran on students phones automatically measured the following behaviors 24/7 without any user interaction: sleep duration, the number and duration of conversations per day, physical activity (walking, sitting, running, standing), where they were located and how long they stayed there (i.e., dorm, class, party, gym), stress level, how good they felt about themselves, eating habits and more. The researchers used a number of well known pre- and post-mental health surveys and spring and cumulative GPAs for evaluation of mental health and academic performance, respectively.

The results show that passive and automatic sensor data from the Android phones significantly correlated with the students' mental health and their academic performance over the term.

Read more from the original source:
New Dartmouth smartphone app reveals users' mental health, performance, behavior