Scott Broom reports for Washington Post TV that a team of high school students from Frederick County, Maryland has been selected as national finalists for the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeen grant for their invention to help people without access to running water transport water more efficiently.
In an article for Bloomberg Business about how poverty can impact brain development in children, John Tozzi highlights research by Prof. John Gabrieli examining how family income can affect academic achievement. "It’s only in the last few years that there’s been any systematic research asking about the biological side of the story," explains Gabrieli.
MIT will be collaborating with the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation to examine teacher and school leadership education, reports Jacqueline Thomsen for Inside Higher Ed. “The research will be part of a new institute at MIT, called the MIT PK-12 Initiative, which will provide support to STEM teachers in all levels of K-12 education."
NPR reporter Claudio Sanchez reports on the new collaboration between MIT and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation aimed at helping teachers use new technologies in the classroom. Sanchez explains that MIT researchers will focus on conducting studies to “guide the new curriculum and develop technologies focused on digital learning.”
Students from MIT and Harvard are biking across the country, stopping in rural communities along the way in an effort to get kids excited about science, the AP reports. "We can't teach them programming in a day, but we can get them excited about programming," says MIT freshman Drew Bent.
Alison Gopnik of The Wall Street Journal writes that new research by Professor John Gabrieli indicates that poverty can have a negative impact on brain development in children. The researchers found that “low-income children had developed thinner cortices than the high-income children.”
Ami Albernaz reports for The Boston Globe on a new study co-authored by Prof. John Gabrieli that finds that income disparity affects brain development in children. “The findings add a biological perspective on what it means to come from a lower socioeconomic background,” says Gabrieli.
Research by Prof. John Gabrieli demonstrates that poverty can have a negative impact on the adolescent brain, writes Brooks Hays for UPI. “When researchers at MIT scanned the brains of some 54 students, they found high-income students (in comparison with lower-income peers) have thicker cortex tissue in areas of the brain linked with visual perception and knowledge acquisition,” Hays writes.
A team of MIT researchers has found that the brain’s cortical thickness differs between low-income and high-income teenagers, reports Lyndsey Layton for The Washington Post. “The thing that really stands out is how powerful the economic influences are on something as fundamental as brain structure,” said Prof. John Gabrieli.