Friday, June 4, 2010

Education Research Report: having friends who attend the same school is key to good grades

Education Research Report: having friends who attend the same school is key to good grades

having friends who attend the same school is key to good grades

Ω

Enrichment classes, after-school activities, tutoring, not to mention the gentle prodding of parents — all may count in giving a child that extra academic edge. But parents still puzzle over what the right mix is to make their children excel in school.

It turns out that the missing ingredient could be the friends a child keeps, specifically their in-school friends, the ones who sweat the same tests and homework and complain about the same teachers, rather than those they may make outside of school.

UCLA professor of psychiatry and senior study author Andrew J. Fuligni and first author Melissa R. Witkow, a former graduate student of Fuligni's, report in the online edition of the Journal of Research on Adolescence that adolescents with more in-school friends than out-of-school friends had higher grade-point averages and — complementing this finding — that those with higher GPAs had more in-school friends.

How smarter school lunchrooms increase fruit sales

Ω

How many more apples can a school cafeteria sell if the fruit is displayed in an attractive basket and placed in a well-lit area?

That's the sort of question researchers from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab are exploring as part of their Smarter Lunchrooms Initiative—an effort to discover and share low-cost changes that can be made in lunchrooms to subtly guide smarter food choices.

Led by Professor Brian Wansink, the researchers observed a 58 percent increase in fresh fruit sales at one Upstate New York school simply by moving the fruit from a stainless steel tray and into a basket lit by an ordinary desk lamp.