Cultivating young children’s interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics has become a leading educational priority, as experts predict that many future jobs will require substantial math and technology skills.

Early education in STEM topics, as they’re known, is critical for boosting later success in school and attracting students to occupations in those fields. But little has been done to optimize STEM curriculum for preschoolers or help children seek out and enjoy STEM tasks.

Now, a new study by 91̽�� researchers shows that adding a basic social cue — making children feel like they’re part of a group — increased preschoolers’ engagement in STEM.

“At 4 and 5 years of age, social groups start to matter more to children and begin to influence who they are and what they’re interested in,” said lead author , a research scientist at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

“If we can get children interested in STEM when they’re young, it has the potential to carry through their education and increase the number of students pursuing STEM careers,” she said.

The journal Developmental Psychology published the research Sept. 5.

“We are capitalizing on kids’ interest in social groups to help boost their motivation in STEM learning,” said co-author , I-LABS co-director and the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair at UW.

“It’s a wonderful example of how basic science discoveries, in this case about the social nature of learning, can have practical applications and help children,” Meltzoff said.

An even mix of 141 boys and girls about 4-and-a-half years old participated in the study. Each worked on two STEM activities:

• A math task that involved matching cards showing a number (e.g., “6”) with a card depicting numbers of objects (e.g., six bluebirds)
• A spatial task that involved a 12-piece puzzle

Before each activity, an experimenter told the child whether they were doing the task as part of a group (e.g., “You are in the green group, and your green group does the number game”) or as an individual.

Each child did one game in the group condition and the other game in the individual condition. The group condition was in name only — all the children were tested separately and worked alone, and there was no competition between groups. But the study was designed to have many strong visual cues to remind children that they were working as part of their group (e.g., wearing the group’s color t-shirt, seeing the group’s color flag on the table).

For each activity, the researchers measured how well the children did, how long they persisted on it, and how they felt about each of the tasks. After completing both tasks — and experiencing both the individual and the group conditions — children were also asked to choose which one they liked more.

On all measures, the children did better when they felt they were part of a group rather than doing the task on their own.

“When told that they were part of a group, the children persisted longer, did better, enjoyed the task more, thought they were better at it, and chose that task over a task they did as an individual,” Master said.

The effect was strongest on the children (90 percent of those tested) who liked being part of their group.

Although social groups can be a positive motivator for children, Master cautioned that care needs to be taken so children don’t feel excluded from a group.

To avoid these potential pitfalls, Master suggested several strategies for adapting the study’s findings for use in classrooms:

• Make classroom-wide groups (e.g., “Our class goal is to learn math”) so that all children feel included
• Use social language, such as “time for us to do our math problems” to emphasize that the activity is shared
• Set goals that emphasize the process of the academic activity (“we do math”) instead of children’s ability for that activity (“this group is really good at math, but that group is not”)

, a 91̽��associate professor of psychology, is also a co-author of the study. Grants from the National Science Foundation and the Bezos Family Foundation funded the research.

For more information or a copy of the study, contact Master at almaster@uw.edu.

A by researchers at the 91̽�� shows that the final grades that college students received in a second-language class were predicted by a combination of genetic and brain factors.

Genetic variations of the COMT gene and a measure of the strength of the brain’s communications network — known as “white matter”— jointly accounted for 46 percent of the reason for why some students performed better than others in the language class.

“We are interested in understanding why individuals learn differently, including those who perform well and those who perform poorly,” said lead author , a research scientist at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS).

“Our study shows for the first time that variations of the COMT gene are related to changes in the brain’s white matter that are the result of learning,” Mamiya said.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the this week.

“We all know that human learning is highly complex and that a lot of factors play a role,” said co-author , co-director of I-LABS. “Second-language learning as an adult is difficult, and we thought studying how people learn something difficult would be a good way to tease out the interactions between genes and brains in learning.”

The research team recruited first-year college students — 20-years-old on average — who had just arrived in the U.S. from China. The 79 volunteers in the study had passed the university’s minimum English requirement, and 44 of them immediately entered a three-week immersion class intended to help international students improve their English skills.

Over the course of the three-week language class and up to eight days after the class ended, the researchers performed brain scans of all the students, including a control group who had also just arrived from China but did not get into the class.

The researchers used an MRI technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which gives clues about the structure of the brain’s connections. Better structure helps signals transfer across the brain, which may lead to better learning.

The brain scans suggest that within a day of the immersive English training, white matter had already begun to change. Foreign language exposure increased the connectivity of the brain’s language circuitry in enrolled students compared with students who were not enrolled in the language class. The increase went up over the course of the three-week training, and then reversed after the training ended.

“Being able to document these associations between brain structure and environmental stimulation in young adult human brains is really exciting,” Mamiya said. “It is one of the highlights in this paper.”

Since different forms of the COMT gene can have different effects on brain structure, the researchers suspected that the students’ COMT genotype would be related to how much white matter changed from the language class.

Sure enough, using DNA samples taken from the students at the beginning of the language program, the researchers found that two specific forms of the COMT gene (Methionine/Valine or Valine/Valine) were linked to greater increases in brain connectivity in students who took the language class. Students with a third COMT genotype (Methionine/Methionine) did not show any white matter change in response to the language experience.

The combination of the COMT genotype and the white matter measure was so powerful on language learning that it accounted for 46 percent of total variance in the students’ final scores.

“Humans’ abilities in learning any particular skill vary tremendously, and we want to know why,” Kuhl said. “Knowing why answers a basic science question about how the environment, our genes, and our brains really work, but could also lead to interventions that improve learning.”

Other co-authors of the study are Todd Richards of the 91̽��Department of Radiology, and Bradley Coe and Evan Eichler of the 91̽��Department of Genome Sciences. The National Science Foundation’s 91̽��Life Center and the Ready Mind Project at I-LABS funded the study.

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For more information, contact Mamiya at 206-685-0361 or pcmamiya@uw.edu 0176 or Kuhl at pkkuhl@uw.edu or 206-685-1921.

Some adults learn a second language better than others, and their secret may involve the rhythms of activity in their brains.

New findings by scientists at the 91̽�� demonstrate that a five-minute measurement of resting-state brain activity predicted how quickly adults learned a second language.

The , published in the June-July issue of the journal Brain and Language, is the first to use patterns of resting-state brain rhythms to predict subsequent language learning rate.

“We’ve found that a characteristic of a person’s brain at rest predicted 60 percent of the variability in their ability to learn a second language in adulthood,” said lead author , a faculty researcher at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and a 91̽��associate professor of psychology.

At the beginning of the experiment, volunteers — 19 adults aged 18 to 31 years with no previous experience learning French — sat with their eyes closed for five minutes while wearing a commercially available EEG (electroencephalogram) headset. The headset measured naturally occurring patterns of brain activity.

The participants came to the lab twice a week for eight weeks for 30-minute French lessons delivered through an immersive, virtual reality computer program. The U.S. Office of Naval Research — who funded the current study — also funded the development of the language training program.

The program, called Operational Language and Cultural Training System (OLCTS), aims to get military personnel functionally proficient in a foreign language with 20 hours of training. The self-paced program guides users through a series of scenes and stories. A voice-recognition component enables users to check their pronunciation.

Watch a video demonstration of the language software:

To ensure participants were paying attention, the researchers used periodic quizzes that required a minimum score before proceeding to the next lesson. The quizzes also served as a measure for how quickly each participant moved through the curriculum.

At the end of the eight-week language program, participants completed a proficiency test covering however many lessons they had finished. The fastest person learned twice as quickly but just as well as the slower learners.

The recordings from the EEG headsets revealed that patterns of brain activity related to language processes were linked the most strongly to the participants’ rate of learning.

So, should people who don’t have this biological predisposition not even try to learn a new language? Prat says no, for two reasons.

“First, our results show that 60 percent of the variability in second language learning was related to this brain pattern — that leaves plenty of opportunity for important variables like motivation to influence learning,” Prat said.

Second, Prat said it’s possible to change resting-state brain activity using neurofeedback training — something that she’s studying now in her lab. Neurofeedback is a sort of brain training regimen, through which individuals can strengthen the brain activity patterns linked to better cognitive abilities.

“We’re looking at properties of brain function that are related to being ready to learn well. Our goal is to use this research in combination with technologies such as neurofeedback training to help everyone perform at their best,” she said.

Ultimately, neurofeedback training could help people who want to learn a second language but lack the desirable brain patterns. They’d do brain training exercises first, and then do the language program.

“By studying individual differences in the brain, we’re figuring out key constraints on learning and information processing, in hopes of developing ways to improve language learning, and eventually, learning more generally,” Prat said.

Co-authors of the study are Brianna Yamasaki, Reina Kluender and Andrea Stocco — all at UW.

Rock your baby in sync with music and you may wonder how the experience affects her and her developing brain.

A new by scientists at the 91̽��’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) shows that a series of play sessions with music improved 9-month-old babies’ brain processing of both music and new speech sounds.

“Our study is the first in young babies to suggest that experiencing a rhythmic pattern in music can also improve the ability to detect and make predictions about rhythmic patterns in speech,” said lead author , a postdoctoral researcher at I-LABS.

“This means that early, engaging musical experiences can have a more global effect on cognitive skills,” Zhao said.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the study this week.

“Infants experience a complex world in which sounds, lights and sensations vary constantly,” said co-author , co-director of I-LABS. “The baby’s job is to recognize the patterns of activity and predict what’s going to happen next. Pattern perception is an important cognitive skill, and improving that ability early may have long-lasting effects on learning.”

Like music, language has strong rhythmic patterns. The timing of syllables helps listeners define one speech sound from another and understand what someone is saying. And it’s the ability to identify differences in speech sounds that helps babies to learn to speak.

The I-LABS researchers designed a randomized-controlled experiment to see if teaching babies a musical rhythm would help the babies with speech rhythms.

Over the course of a month, 39 babies attended 12 15-minute play sessions in the lab with their parents. In groups of about two or three, the babies sat with their parents, who guided them through the activities.

In the 20 babies assigned to the music group, recordings of children’s music played while an experimenter led the babies and their parents through tapping out the beats in time with the music.

All the songs were in triple meter — like in a waltz — which the researchers chose for being relatively difficult for babies to learn.

The 19 babies in the control group attended play sessions that did not involve music. Instead, they played with toy cars, blocks and other objects that required coordinated movements without music.

“In both the music and control groups, we gave babies experiences that were social, required their active involvement and included body movements — these are all characteristics that we know help people learn,” Zhao said. “The key difference between the play groups was whether the babies were moving to learn a musical rhythm.”

Within a week after the play sessions ended, the families came back to the lab so the babies’ brain responses could be measured. The researchers used (MEG) to see the precise location and timing of brain activity.

While sitting in the brain scanner, the babies listened to a series of music and speech sounds, each played out in a rhythm that was occasionally disrupted. The babies’ brains would show a particular response to indicate they could detect the disruption.

The researchers focused their analyses on two brain regions, the auditory cortex and the prefrontal cortex, which is important for cognitive skills such as controlling attention and detecting patterns.

Babies in the music group had stronger brain responses to the disruption in both music and speech rhythm in both the auditory and the prefrontal cortex, compared with babies in the control group.

This suggests that participation in the play sessions with music improved the infants’ ability to detect patterns in sounds.

“Schools across our nation are decreasing music experiences for our children, saying they are too expensive,” Kuhl said. “This research reminds us that the effects of engaging in music go beyond music itself. Music experience has the potential to boost broader cognitive skills that enhance children’s abilities to detect, expect and react quickly to patterns in the world, which is highly relevant in today’s complex world.”

Funders of the research were the National Science Foundation 91̽��LIFE Center, the Ready Mind Project at I-LABS, and the Washington State Life Sciences Discovery Fund.

Many brain studies show that bilingual adults have more activity in areas associated with executive function, a set of mental abilities that includes problem-solving, shifting attention and other desirable cognitive traits.

Now new findings reveal that this bilingualism-related difference in brain activity is evident as early as 11 months of age, just as babies are on the verge of producing their first words.

“Our results suggest that before they even start talking, babies raised in bilingual households are getting practice at tasks related to executive function,” said , lead author and a research scientist at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences () at the 91̽��.

“This suggests that bilingualism shapes not only language development, but also cognitive development more generally,” she said.

The study also gives evidence that the brains of babies from bilingual families remain more open to learning new language sounds, compared with babies from monolingual families.

The study was  April 4 in Developmental Science and will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal.

“Monolingual babies show a narrowing in their perception of sounds at about 11 months of age — they no longer discriminate foreign-language sounds they successfully discriminated at 6 months of age,” said co-author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of I-LABS.

“But babies raised listening to two languages seem to stay ‘open’ to the sounds of novel languages longer than their monolingual peers, which is a good and highly adaptive thing for their brains to do,” Kuhl said.

The researchers used magnetoencephalography (), which measures magnetic changes given off by active nerve cells. Unlike other brain-imaging methods, MEG can precisely pinpoint both the timing and location of activity in the brain.

The study is the first to use MEG to do whole-brain analyses comparing activation patterns in response to speech sounds in babies raised in monolingual and bilingual households.

In the experiment, 16 11-month-old babies — eight from English-only households and eight from Spanish-English households, and an even mix of demographic factors such as the family’s socioeconomic status — sat in a highchair beneath the helmet-like MEG scanner.

The babies listened to an 18-minute stream of speech sounds, such as “da’s” and “ta’s.” The stream included sounds specific to English or Spanish, and sounds shared by the two languages. (See a of the experimental set-up).

The researchers compared monolingual and bilingual babies’ brain responses to the language sounds. The most obvious difference they saw was in two brain regions associated with executive function, the prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex. In these regions, the Spanish-English bilingual babies had stronger brain responses to speech sounds, compared with English-only babies.

The findings align with brain studies in bilingual and monolingual adults, Ferjan Ramírez said. The boost bilingualism gives to executive function areas in the brain could arise from bilinguals needing to switch back and forth between languages, allowing them to routinely practice and improve executive function skills.

Other brain evidence from the study should be a relief for parents wondering if their bilingual baby is learning enough language:

• Bilingual babies displayed neural sensitivity to both English and Spanish sounds, meaning that they were learning both languages.
• Bilingual babies had the same sensitivity to English sounds as the monolingual babies, which suggests that they were learning English at the same rate as the monolingual babies.

“The 11-month-old baby brain is learning whatever language or languages are present in the environment and is equally capable of learning two languages as it is of learning one language,” Ferjan Ramírez said.

“Our results underscore the notion that not only are very young children capable of learning multiple languages, but that early childhood is the optimum time for them to begin,” she said.

Other co-authors of the study are Rey Ramírez, Maggie Clarke and Samu Taulu — all researchers at UW’s I-LABS. The National Science Foundation 91̽��LIFE Center funded the research.

Adults often form fast opinions about each other’s personalities, especially when it comes to negative traits. If we see someone argue with another driver over a parking space, for instance, we may assume that person tends to be confrontational.

Two new research studies with hundreds of 15-month-old infants demonstrate that babies form similar generalizations about others and make attempts to appease adults they consider prone to anger.

The research, by scientists at the 91̽��’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (), reveal for the first time that 15-month-old babies generalize an adult’s angry behavior even if the social context has changed.

“Our research suggests that babies will do whatever they can to avoid being the target of anger,” said lead author , an I-LABS faculty scientist. “At this young of an age, they have already worked out a way to stay safe. It’s a smart, adaptive response.”

In , published in the March issue of Developmental Psychology, Repacholi and co-authors wanted to see how exposing babies to an unfamiliar adult’s anger toward another adult would affect the babies’ behavior in a new situation. Do the babies assume that the initial negative encounters would happen again?

“Our research shows that babies are carefully paying attention to the emotional reactions of adults,” said co-author , co-director of I-LABS.

“Babies make snap judgments as to whether an adult is anger-prone. They pigeonhole adults more quickly than we thought,” added Meltzoff, who holds the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair at UW.

The experiment went like this: The babies, 270 15-months-old that included a mix of boys and girls, sat on their parents’ laps across the table from a researcher called the “Experimenter.”

The baby saw the Experimenter demonstrating how to play with a series of toys. In each trial, a second researcher, the “Emoter,” reacted in either a neutral way (“That’s entertaining.”) or negative way by saying “That’s aggravating!” in a stern voice when the Experimenter performed her action on the toy. The Emoter’s reaction was the same for each toy.

Then the baby had a chance to play with the same toy.

The researchers measured how readily the babies imitated the Experimenter’s actions. Babies who witnessed the angry outburst were less likely to play with the toy or to duplicate the adult’s actions than babies who saw a neutral reaction from the Emoter. (Watch a from demonstrating the experiment.)

Next, the Experimenter showed the baby how to play with a new toy. This time, however, the previously angry Emoter now appeared to be neutral.

“We wanted to see if babies would treat the anger they had seen before as a one-off event or whether they see it as being part of the person’s character,” Repacholi said.

When given the chance to play with the new toy, the babies who knew the Emoter’s angry history avoided playing with the toy, compared with the babies who were in the neutral group.

“It’s as if the baby doesn’t trust that the Emoter is now calm,” Repacholi said. “Once babies have detected that someone’s prone to anger, it’s hard to dismiss. They’re taking a better-safe-than-sorry approach, where they’re not going to take a risk even though the situation has apparently changed.”

A second new study by Repacholi, Meltzoff and team suggests that babies are capable of coming up with appeasement gestures in situations involving anger-prone adults. The and will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Infancy.

Using a similar experimental setup, another group of babies — 72 15-month-olds, with an even number of boys and girls — first observed either the “angry” or “neutral” Emoter’s reaction to toys used by the Experimenter.

Then, the twist: the Experimenter brought out new toys designed to be highly desirable to the infants, such as a toy with a small ball that lit up when rotated.

Sitting on their parents’ laps, the babies got to play with the appealing toy briefly before the Emoter — who had a neutral facial expression and wasn’t showing any anger at this point — asked for a turn.

What did the babies do? Those who had previously seen the Emoter be angry readily relinquished the toys. That is, 69 percent of babies in the “anger” group gave up the toys compared to 46 percent of babies in the “neutral” group.

“I was so surprised to see the infants give the toys away — it was like they were appeasing or compromising with the adult,” Repacholi said. “They didn’t want to risk making the previously angry adult mad again. They didn’t act this way with the other adult who had not shown anger.”

Together the studies illustrate how babies:

• make quick judgments about people’s emotional qualities
• can have negative emotions dominate their perceptions of a person’s character, and
• tend to assume a person with a history of anger will become angry again even if the situation has changed.

“Our studies show that babies are very tuned into other people’s anger,” Repacholi said. “For parents, it’s important to be mindful of how powerful that emotion is for babies.”

Added Meltzoff, “The babies are ‘emotion detectives.’ They watch and listen to our emotions, remember how we acted in the past, and use this to predict how we will act in the future. How long these first impressions last is an important question.”

The Developmental Psychology paper was funded by the 91̽��Royalty Research Fund and the Ready Mind Project Fund, and co-authored by Tamara Spiewak Toub and Ashley Ruba. The Infancy paper was co-authored by Theresa Hennings and Ashley Ruba.

By age 5 children have a sense of self-esteem comparable in strength to that of adults, according to a new study by 91̽�� researchers.

Because self-esteem tends to remain relatively stable across one’s lifespan, the study suggests that this important personality trait is already in place before children begin kindergarten.

“Our work provides the earliest glimpse to date of how preschoolers sense their selves,” said lead author , a research scientist at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS).

“We found that as young as 5 years of age self-esteem is established strongly enough to be measured,” said Cvencek, “and we can measure it using sensitive techniques.”

The , published in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, used a newly developed test to assess implicit self-esteem in more than 200 5-year-old children — the youngest age yet to be measured.

“Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves. Our findings suggest that self-esteem, feeling good or bad about yourself, is fundamental,” said co-author, , co-director of I-LABS. “It is a social mindset children bring to school with them, not something they develop in school.”

Meltzoff continued: “What aspects of parent-child interaction promote and nurture preschool self-esteem? That’s the essential question. We hope we can find out by studying even younger children.”

Until now no measurement tool has been able to detect self-esteem in preschool-aged children. This is because existing self-esteem tests require the cognitive or verbal sophistication to talk about a concept like “self” when asked probing questions by adult experimenters.

“Preschoolers can give verbal reports of what they’re good at as long as it is about a narrow, concrete skill, such as ‘I’m good at running’ or ‘I’m good with letters,’ but they have difficulties providing reliable verbal answers to questions about whether they are a good or bad person,” Cvencek said.

To try a different approach, Cvencek, Meltzoff and co-author created a self-esteem task for preschoolers. Called the Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT), it measures how strongly children feel positively about themselves.

Adult versions of the IAT, which was first developed by Greenwald, can reveal attitudes and beliefs that people don’t know they have, such as biases related to race, gender, age and other topics.

“Previously we understood that preschoolers knew about some of their specific good features. We now understand that, in addition, they have a global, overall knowledge of their goodness as a person,” said Greenwald.

The task for adults works by measuring how quickly people respond to words in different categories. For instance, the adult implicit self-esteem task measures associations between words like “self” and “pleasant” or “other” and “unpleasant.”

To make the task appropriate for preschoolers who can’t read, the researchers replaced words related to the self (“me,” “not me”) with objects. They used small unfamiliar flags, and the children were told which of the flags were “yours” and “not yours.”

The 5-year-olds in the experiment—which included an even mix of 234 boys and girls from the Seattle area—first learned to distinguish their set of flags (“me”) from another set of flags (“not me”).

Using buttons on a computer, they responded to a series of “me” and “not me” flags and to a series of “good” words from a loudspeaker (fun, happy, good, nice) and “bad” words (bad, mad, mean, yucky). Then, to measure self-esteem, the children had to combine the words and press the buttons to indicate whether the “good” words were associated more with the “me” flags or not.

The results showed that the 5-year-olds associated themselves more with “good” than with “bad,” and this was equally pronounced in both girls and boys.

The researchers also did two more implicit tests to probe different aspects of the self. A gender identity task assessed the children’s sense of whether they are a boy or a girl, and a gender attitude task measured the children’s preference for other children of their own gender, called a “gender in-group preference.”

Children who had high self-esteem and strong own-gender identity also showed stronger preferences for members of their own gender.

Taken together, the findings show that self-esteem is not only unexpectedly strong in children this young, but is also systematically related to other fundamental parts of children’s personality, such as in-group preferences and gender identity.

“Self-esteem appears to play a critical role in how children form various social identities. Our findings underscore the importance of the first five years as a foundation for life,” Cvencek said.

The researchers are following up with the children in the study to examine whether self-esteem measured in preschool can predict outcomes later in childhood, such as health and success in school. They are also interested in the malleability of children’s self-esteem and how it changes with experience.

Grants from the UW’s Ready Mind Project, and the Implicit Cognition Research Fund supported the research.

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For more information, contact Cvencek at 206-543-8029 or dario1@uw.edu, Greenwald at 206-543-7227 or agg@uw.edu, Meltzoff at 206-685-2045 or meltzoff@uw.edu. Image available of the apparatus used in the experiment.

The , published in the October issue of the journal Learning and Instruction, is the first to demonstrate a link between students’ subconscious math self-concepts and their actual math achievement scores.

The study also measured the strength of students’ stereotype that “math is for boys” and found that, for girls, the stronger this subconscious stereotype, the weaker the individual child’s math self-concept.

“Our results show that stereotypes are related to how children think of themselves as math learners, which, in turn, is related to how well they do on an actual math test,” said lead author , a research scientist at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS).

With co-author , co-director of I-LABS, Cvencek examined math-gender stereotypes, math self-concepts and math scores in 300 children (an even mix of boys and girls) in grades 1, 3, and 5 in Singapore.

The researchers chose Singapore, because it — and other Asian countries including Japan and China — is consistently ranked as one of the top nations in the world for math achievement among girls and boys.

The researchers focused on a high-achieving culture where there aren’t gender differences in math ability, so that they could see which psychological factors have a role in student performance.

“We were fascinated to find that elementary-school children have subconscious thoughts about whether or not they are a math person,” Meltzoff said. “They have an implicit identity of ‘math is for me’ or ‘math is not for me’ at a surprisingly early age. This self-concept matters because it is correlated with actual behavior, such as math achievement.”

At the beginning of the children’s school year, the researchers led each child through an assortment of tasks measuring the students’ beliefs about math-gender stereotypes (“math is for boys”) and math-self concepts (“math is for me”).

A Child Implicit Association Test (IAT) examined the children’s subconscious beliefs. The IAT probes self-concepts, stereotypes and other attitudes that people may not know they have. of IAT reveal hidden beliefs about gender, race, religion and other topics.

The researchers also used self-reported tasks to measure the children’s explicit beliefs. These tasks involved the children looking at a series of drawings of boys and girls and then answering questions such as how much the characters in the drawings liked math.

Then, at the end of the school year, the students took a standardized math achievement test administered by their teachers.

Girls and boys performed well on the math test and had similar scores. But when the researchers factored in their math-gender stereotype and math self-concept beliefs, they discovered that the children’s implicit — but not explicit — beliefs affected math scores.

In both genders, students with stronger implicit math self-concepts did better on the math test. Stronger implicit math-gender stereotypes correlated with stronger math self-concepts for boys, but weaker math self-concepts for girls.

“We’ve found that there are implicit psychological factors, such as students’ beliefs about math, that can weaken students’ identification with math and also impair their math performance,” Cvencek said.

And since the factors are implicit and not detectable by self-report measures, this means they can affect student performance without students’ being aware of them.

Previously, Cvencek and Meltzoff found that children in the U.S. begin to express the cultural stereotype that “math is for boys, not for girls,” which may discourage girls from pursuing math.

The researchers plan to use the findings to design ways to identify implicit math self-concepts as they emerge early in elementary school and create interventions to change beliefs that could be detrimental to math performance.

“We have high hopes for the usefulness of our tests,” Cvencek said. “We think it could be useful for teachers and parents to know whether their young child identifies positively or negatively with math. If we can boost children’s math self-concepts early in development, this may also help boost their actual math achievement and interest in the discipline. We plan to test this.”

Manu Kapur from the National Institute of Education in Singapore is another co-author of the study.

The National Science Foundation, the Singaporean Ministry of Education and the 91̽��funded the research.

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For more information, contact Cvencek at 206-543-8029 or dario1@uw.edu and Meltzoff at 206-685-2045 or meltzoff@uw.edu.

Women lag behind men in the lucrative computer science and technology industries, and one of the possible contributors to this disparity is that they’re less likely to enroll in introductory computer science courses.

A new study of 270 high school students shows that three times as many girls were interested in enrolling in a computer science class if the classroom was redesigned to be less “geeky” and more inviting.

The results, by 91̽�� researchers, reveal a practical way for teachers to help narrow the gender gap in computer science by helping girls feel that they belong.

“Our findings show that classroom design matters — it can transmit stereotypes to high school students about who belongs and who doesn’t in computer science,” said lead author , a post-doctoral researcher at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS).

The Journal of Educational Psychology published online Aug. 17.

“This is the earliest age we’ve looked at to study stereotypes about computer science,” Master said. “It’s a key age group for recruitment into this field, because girls in their later adolescence are starting to focus on their career options and aspirations.”

Co-authors of the paper are Sapna Cheryan, a 91̽��associate professor of psychology, and , co-director of I-LABS. The National Science Foundation funded the research.

“Identity and a sense of belonging are important for adolescents,” Meltzoff said. “Our approach reveals a new way to draw girls into pipeline courses. It is intriguing that the learning environment plays such a significant role in engaging high school girls in computer science.”

In the study, high school boys and girls (aged 14 to 18 years) completed questions about:

• Their interest in enrolling in a computer science class
• Their sense of belonging in a computer science class
• How much they thought they personally “fit” the computer science stereotype

Then, the 91̽��team showed the students photos of two different computer science classrooms decorated with objects that represented either the “geeky” computer science stereotype, including computer parts and “Star Trek” posters, or a non-stereotypical classroom containing items such as art and nature pictures.

Students had to say which classroom they preferred, and then answered questions about their interest in enrolling in a computer science course and their thoughts and feelings about computer science and stereotypes.

Girls (68 percent) were more likely than boys (48 percent) to prefer the non-stereotypical classroom. And girls were almost three times more likely to say they would be interested in enrolling in a computer science course if the classroom looked like the non-stereotypical one.

Boys didn’t prefer one classroom’s physical environment over the other, and how the classroom looked didn’t change boys’ level of interest in computer science.

“Stereotypes make girls feel like they don’t fit with computer science,” Master said. “That’s a barrier that isn’t there for boys. Girls have to worry about an extra level of belonging that boys don’t have to grapple with.”

Previously the 91̽��team reported that inaccurate negative cultural stereotypes about computer science from the field and that can increase girls’ interest.

The researchers say that changing computer science stereotypes to make more students feel welcome in high school classrooms would help recruit more girls to the field, which has one of the among STEM fields.

“Our new study suggests that if schools and teachers feel they can’t recruit girls into their computer science classes,” Master said, “they should make sure that the classrooms avoid stereotypes and communicate to students that everyone is welcome and belongs.”

New findings by researchers at the (I-LABS) at the 91̽�� demonstrate for the first time that an early social behavior called gaze shifting is linked to infants’ ability to learn new language sounds.

Babies about 10 months old who engaged in more gaze shifting during sessions with a foreign language tutor showed a boost in a brain response that indicates language learning, according to , which is published in the current issue of Developmental Neuropsychology.

“Our study provides evidence that infants’ social skills play a role in cracking the code of the new language,” said co-author , co-director of I-LABS.

“We found that the degree to which infants visually tracked the tutors and the toys they held was linked to brain measures of infant learning, showing that social behaviors give helpful information to babies in a complex natural language learning situation,” Kuhl said.

Gaze shifting, when a baby makes eye contact and then looks at the same object that the other person is looking at, is one of the earliest social skills that babies show.

“These moments of shared visual attention develop as babies interact with their parents, and they change the baby’s brain,” said co-author , research assistant professor at I-LABS.

In an , Brooks and others showed that infant gaze shifting serves as a building block for more sophisticated language and social skills as measured in preschool children.

“Since gaze shifting is linked to a larger vocabulary in preschoolers, we suspected that eye gaze might be important earlier when babies are first learning the sounds of a new language, and we wanted to use brain measures to test this,” Brooks said.

In the experiment, 9.5-month-old babies from English-speaking households attended foreign language tutoring sessions. Over four weeks, the 17 infants interacted with a tutor during 12 25-minute sessions. The tutors read books and talked and played with toys while speaking in Spanish.

At the beginning and end of the four-week period, researchers counted how often the infants shifted their eye gaze between the tutor and the toys the tutor showed the baby.

After the tutoring sessions ended, the researchers brought the babies back to the lab to see how much Spanish the babies had learned. This was measured by their brain responses to English and Spanish sounds. The babies listened to a series of language sounds while wearing an electroencephalography (EEG) cap to measure their brain activity.

The results showed that the more gaze shifting the babies participated in during their tutoring sessions, the greater their brain responses were to the Spanish language sounds.

“Our findings show that young babies’ social engagement contributes to their own language learning – they’re not just passive listeners of language,” Brooks said. “They’re paying attention, and showing parents they’re ready to learn when they’re looking back and forth. That’s when the most learning happens.”

The study builds on by Kuhl’s team, which found that babies from English-speaking households could learn Mandarin from live tutors, but not from video or audio recordings of Mandarin and from at I-LABS establishing the importance of infant eye gaze for language learning.

The researchers hope their findings help parents, caregivers and early childhood educators develop strategies for teaching young children.

“Babies learn best from people,” Brooks said. “During playtime your child is learning so much from you. Spending time with your child matters. Keeping them engaged — that’s what helps them learn language.”

Lead author of the paper is Barbara Conboy of the University of Redlands, who did the research as a postdoctoral fellow at I-LABS. , co-director of I-LABS, is also a co-author.

The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health funded the study.