Talking to Boys the Way We Talk to Girls

At a Father’s Day breakfast, my 5-year-old son and his classmates sang a song about fathers, crooning about “my dad who’s big and strong” and “fixes things with his hammer” and, above all else, “is really cool.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with most of these qualities in and of themselves. But when these lyrics are passed down as the defining soundtrack to masculine identity, we limit children’s understanding not just of what it means to be a father but of what it means to be a man — and a boy, as well.

When fathers appear in children’s picture books, they’re angling for laughs, taking their sons on adventures or modeling physical strength or stoic independence. There is the rare exception in children’s books where a father baldly demonstrates — without symbolic gestures — his love for his son (a few are “Guess How Much I Love You” and “Oh, Oh, Baby Boy!”). Just as women’s studies classes have long examined the ways that gendered language undermines women and girls, a growing body of research shows that stereotypical messages are similarly damaging to boys.

A 2014 study in Pediatrics found that mothers interacted vocally more often with their infant daughters than they did their infant sons. In a different study, a team of British researchers found that Spanish mothers were more likely to use emotional words and emotional topics when speaking with their 4-year-old daughters than with their 4-year-old sons. Interestingly, the same study revealed that daughters were more likely than sons to speak about their emotions with their fathers when talking about past experiences. And during these reminiscing conversations, fathers used more emotion-laden words with their 4-year-old daughters than with their 4-year-old sons.

What’s more, a 2017 study led by Emory University researchers discovered, among other things, that fathers also sing and smile more to their daughters, and they use language that is more “analytical” and that acknowledges their sadness far more than they do with their sons. The words they use with sons are more focused on achievement — such as “win” and “proud.” Researchers believe that these discrepancies in fathers’ language may contribute to “the consistent findings that girls outperform boys in school achievement outcomes.”

Two children in every class start school with an unexplained language disorder

Language is a fundamental human accomplishment. It is the foundation for literacy, underpins academic and social success, and is important for developing and maintaining relationships with others.

So it is no surprise that children who struggle to acquire their native language are at a distinct disadvantage when they start school. Our research, recently published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, found that two five-year-old children in every Year 1 classroom of 30 had a currently unexplained language disorder. An additional 2.34% had a language disorder that occurred as part of another developmental condition, such as autism or Down syndrome.

Children with language disorders have problems with speaking and listening. They tend to have limited vocabularies, leave endings off words and use very simple grammar in their sentences. They have difficulties telling coherent stories and don’t understand complex instructions. This causes many problems in the classroom.

So for example, children with language disorders will struggle to understand questions such as “which of these items will float? Why do you think so?” Even if they understand and know the answer, they may not be able to use words to explain “the ball will float because it is filled with air and is lighter than the penny.” A child with language disorder may just point and guess, or articulate a couple of key words such as “the penny sinked”.

Our study involved more than 7,000 children and 190 schools in Surrey, south of London, in order to find out how many children in England start school with a language disorder – what is known as a prevalence estimate. This may sound straightforward to work out, but it isn’t. As language is multi-faceted, we measured vocabulary, grammar and narrative skills both when the children were speaking and listening. This is the combination of tests that has informed current diagnostic criteria for language disorder.

Not just an ordinary pair of gloves

Two University of Washington undergraduates have won a $10,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for gloves that can translate sign language into text or speech.

The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize is a nationwide search for the most inventive undergraduate and graduate students. This year, UW sophomores Navid Azodi and Thomas Pryor — who are studying business administration and aeronautics and astronautics engineering, respectively — won the “Use It” undergraduate category that recognizes technology-based inventions to improve consumer devices.

Their invention, “SignAloud,” is a pair of gloves that can recognize hand gestures that correspond to words and phrases in American Sign Language. Each glove contains sensors that record hand position and movement and send data wirelessly via Bluetooth to a central computer. The computer looks at the gesture data through various sequential statistical regressions, similar to a neural network. If the data match a gesture, then the associated word or phrase is spoken through a speaker.

They honed their prototype in the UW CoMotion MakerSpace — a campus space that offers communal tools and equipment and opportunities for students to tinker, create and innovate. For Azodi and Pryor, that meant finding a way to translate American Sign Language into a verbal form instantaneously and in an ergonomic fashion.

“Many of the sign language translation devices already out there are not practical for everyday use. Some use video input, while others have sensors that cover the user’s entire arm or body,” said Pryor, an undergraduate researcher in the Composite Structures Laboratory in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics and software lead for the Husky Robotics Team.

“Our gloves are lightweight, compact and worn on the hands, but ergonomic enough to use as an everyday accessory, similar to hearing aids or contact lenses,” said Pryor.

The Musical Brain: Novel Study of Jazz Players Shows Common Brain Circuitry Processes Both Music and Language

Researchers scanned brains while musicians “traded fours"

The brains of jazz musicians engrossed in spontaneous, improvisational musical conversation showed robust activation of brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax, which are used to interpret the structure of phrases and sentences. But this musical conversation shut down brain areas linked to semantics - those that process the meaning of spoken language, according to results of a study by Johns Hopkins researchers.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of jazz musicians in the act of "trading fours," a process in which musicians participate in spontaneous back and forth instrumental exchanges, usually four bars in duration. The musicians introduce new melodies in response to each other's musical ideas, elaborating and modifying them over the course of a performance.

The results of the study suggest that the brain regions that process syntax aren't limited to spoken language, according to Charles Limb, M.D., an associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Rather, he says, the brain uses the syntactic areas to process communication in general, whether through language or through music.

Limb, who is himself a musician and holds a faculty appointment at the Peabody Conservatory, says the work sheds important new light on the complex relationship between music and language.

Kids whose time is less structured are better able to meet their own goals

Children who spend more time in less structured activities—from playing outside to reading books to visiting the zoo—are better able to set their own goals and take actions to meet those goals without prodding from adults, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The study, published online in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, also found that children who participate in more structured activities—including soccer practice, piano lessons and homework—had poorer “self-directed executive function,” a measure of the ability to set and reach goals independently. 

“Executive function is extremely important for children,” said CU-Boulder psychology and neuroscience Professor Yuko Munakata, senior author of the new study. “It helps them in all kinds of ways throughout their daily lives, from flexibly switching between different activities rather than getting stuck on one thing, to stopping themselves from yelling when angry, to delaying gratification. Executive function during childhood also predicts important outcomes, like academic performance, health, wealth and criminality, years and even decades later.”

The study is one of the first to try to scientifically grapple with the question of how an increase in scheduled, formal activities may affect the way children’s brains develop.

Munakata said a debate about parenting philosophy—with extremely rigid “tiger moms” on one side and more elastic “free-range” parents on the other—has played out in the media and on parenting blogs in recent years. But there is little scientific evidence to support claims on either side of the discussion.

What’s the optimum amount of homework to set a teenager?

Coaxing teenagers to sit down and do their homework is never an easy task. But is it actually worth their while to slave away for hours on end every evening? Not according to a new study of Spanish secondary school students which has concluded that the optimum amount of homework for children is around one hour a day.

Researchers at the University of Oviedo studied the maths and science homework and test results of 7,451 adolescents with an average age of around 13. They found a relationship between the amount of homework completed and children’s attainment. But the authors acknowledge they can’t say definitively that one hour of homework a night in total actually causes better test results.

Previous research in this area is both inconsistent and inconclusive. Some has shown the positive effects of homework and some its negative effects. In 2012, The Guardian reported on Department of Education research showing that two to three hours per day produced greater effects on achieving the highest results. In 2014, research at Stanford University found that too much homework can have a negative impact on children.

Homework can help to establish a routine and to develop independent learning skills that will be useful for professional life. Conversely, it could be argued that working at home in the evenings is the beginning of an unhealthy work-life balance and that there are academic drawbacks in studying instead of sleeping.

Not all children need to study the same

It’s unclear whether the children in the Spanish study achieve more as a result of doing the “optimum” amount of homework. Children of different abilities may take different amounts of time to complete their homework. If we subscribe to the idea that there is an “optimum” time, then we are effectively saying that children who work more quickly should complete more homework than children who work more slowly, which is arguably a disincentive for the fastest – and probably the most able – children.

Nerves of endearment: how a gentle touch affects emotions

A soft and tender caress between two people can trigger a flood of emotions, and now we may have some idea why.

Research published in Neuron today suggests that certain sensory nerve cells, known as C tactile (CT) afferents, are involved in stimulating the emotions caused by gentle physical contact.

Francis McGlone, from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, and colleagues argue that these cells, which are found in the skin of most mammals including humans, are critical for mediating social behaviours and even in giving beings a sense of “self”.

The senses of touch

There is a general tendency to lump all our somatic senses into a single classification: the “sense of touch”. This is inaccurate, since what we call touch actually comprises several distinct sensory systems.

Mammals sense pain and temperature changes via a primordial system of nerve cells that run within the spinal cord and brain. This system can signal the temperature in the environment or the presence of harmful stimuli, and typically trigger behaviours in the search of a suitable and safe environment.

Discriminative touch, a neural process operating in pathways well separated from these primordial systems, allows us and other mammals to localise tactile stimuli on our skin.

These sensors are incredibly sensitive: they can recognise tiny details of external materials, identify the shapes of objects and allow blind people to read Braille.

Do disruptive classes really get better if they include more girls?

Classrooms are highly complex environments. Maintaining a positive classroom environment, especially in classrooms that include potentially disruptive children with emotional or social problems, is very difficult, and the processes that teachers can use to achieve this are poorly understood.

But a new study has concluded that in mixed gender classrooms, the presence of more girls can apparently minimise the potentially negative effects of a difficult to manage pupil on classroom culture and attainment.

Conducted by Michael Gottfried and Aletha Harven at the University of California, this study touches on two significant and sometimes emotive topics in education: differences between boys and girls and the inclusion in schools of children with social, emotional and behaviour difficulties.

Keeping the classroom happy

Despite evidence that most behaviour in schools is good, debates around the inclusion of pupils with social and emotional needs still too often centre on the affects their inclusion has on peers and staff.

In their paper, Gottfried and Harven speculate that pupils who show aggression, immaturity, hyperactivity or more internalised behaviours such as anxiety or withdrawal absorb the teacher’s attention, leaving less time for teachers to focus on other pupils’ social, emotional and academic development.

Children who understand emotions become more attentive over time

What is going on in the minds of young children when it seems they are daydreaming or appear to be scatterbrained?

A study that my coauthor, Susanne A Denham, and I conducted recently shows that inattentive children may sometimes be absorbed in trying to figure out the emotions of their parents, siblings, teachers and friends.

Young children are vitally interested in which emotions these important people in their small social world are feeling in respect to them and others, why they are doing so and whether their emotional displays are “real” or “fake.”

We found that children who have a better knowledge of emotions have no need to ponder these questions. They become free to pay attention to their social partners, to play and to academic learning, among many other things.

Why emotion knowledge matters

The research project, named “Elefant” – short for “Emotional Learning is fantastic” – surveyed 261 children from 33 kindergartens in Lower Saxony, a state in northern Germany, as well as their teachers and parents.

Two separate surveys over an interval of 14 months were conducted. The study tested children’s “emotion knowledge”: that is, their ability to identify facial expressions of emotions and typical situations that give rise to emotions, such as happiness when receiving a birthday gift.

Pediatrics Group to Recommend Reading Aloud to Children From Birth

In between dispensing advice on breast-feeding and immunizations, doctors will tell parents to read aloud to their infants from birth, under a new policy that the American Academy of Pediatrics will announce on Tuesday.

With the increased recognition that an important part of brain development occurs within the first three years of a child’s life, and that reading to children enhances vocabulary and other important communication skills, the group, which represents 62,000 pediatricians across the country, is asking its members to become powerful advocates for reading aloud, every time a baby visits the doctor.

“It should be there each time we touch bases with children,” said Dr. Pamela High, who wrote the new policy. It recommends that doctors tell parents they should be “reading together as a daily fun family activity” from infancy.

This is the first time the academy — which has issued recommendations on how long mothers should nurse their babies and advises parents to keep children away from screens until they are at least 2 — has officially weighed in on early literacy education.

While highly educated, ambitious parents who are already reading poetry and playing Mozart to their children in utero may not need this advice, research shows that many parents do not read to their children as often as researchers and educators think is crucial to the development of pre-literacy skills that help children succeed once they get to school.

Reading, as well as talking and singing, is viewed as important in increasing the number of words that children hear in the earliest years of their lives. Nearly two decades ago, an oft-cited study found that by age 3, the children of wealthier professionals have heard words millions more times than have those of less educated, low-income parents, giving the children who have heard more words a distinct advantage in school. New research shows that these gaps emerge as early as 18 months.

Why do heavier children do worse at school? It’s not their fault

Negative stereotypes towards heavier individuals starts to affect long-term life opportunities from a young age. A number of studies in recent years have suggested that bigger children fare less well in school than their slimmer peers.

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children followed nearly 6,000 children in the south-west of England and found that higher body weight at age 11 predicted lower scores on standardised tests at age 11, 13, and 16. This was particularly the case in girls, and a decline that was not explained by lower IQs.

Other studies, mostly conducted in the US, have reported similar findings, suggesting that students classified as “obese” tend to be awarded lower grades than their peers in both secondary and tertiary education, despite no differences in intelligence or conscientiousness, and no actual difference on standardised tests of maths or language ability.

So are fatter students really under-performing in school, or do their teachers just think they are? And why?

Anti-fat attitudes – from teachers

The answer is probably a bit of both. Researchers think low expectations and anti-fat attitudes among teachers probably play a role. Some of the existing research has been criticised for taking a cross-sectional approach, like a snapshot at a point in time. This makes it impossible to tell whether low expectations are leading to under-performance or if it’s the other way around. But a new study published by a team from the Harvard School of Public Health may help to answer this question.

The researchers followed a nationwide cohort of kindergarten children for around ten years. This particularly study looked at how weight change between the ages of ten and 14 affected teacher ratings of the children’s abilities, taking a range of other factors like socioeconomic status, family situation, exercise and television time, and so on, into account.

American Kids Are Poorer Than They Were Decades Ago, Education Report Shows

Poverty, which affects a growing number of American students, begins its negative impact on learning as early as the beginning of kindergarten, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report released Thursday.

Teachers reported that kindergarten students from affluent households in the 2010-2011 school year were more likely to have positive approaches to learning than those whose families live below the poverty line, according to the center's annual report, called The Condition of Education 2015. A positive approach to learning includes paying attention in class, keeping belongings organized and enthusiasm for learning.

Female students, students who were older at the start of the school year, students who came from two-parent households, and students whose family income was more than twice the poverty threshold were more likely to have positive approaches to learning, according to teachers. Black students, male students and students whose parents did not graduate high school tended to have poorer approaches to learning. Students who demonstrated positive approaches to learning in kindergarten were more likely to have top scores in first grade.

"Research suggests that living in poverty during early childhood is associated with lower than average academic performance that begins in kindergarten and extends through elementary and high school," the report says. "Living in poverty during early childhood is also associated with lower than average rates of school completion."

Keeping roofs cooler to cut energy costs

A simple paint-on coating might cut home energy use and urban pollution, a teen’s research suggests.

PITTSBURGH, Pa. — The roof of a house can get pretty hot in the summer. Even if there is an insulated attic below, some of that heat can work its way into the living space. That can make air conditioners work harder and pump up electricity bills. But a thin, paint-like coating could help keep roofs cooler, a teen researcher finds. And in urban areas, widespread use of her new roofing treatment might even cut the formation of lung-irritating ozone on hot days.

Shingles come in many colors, but dark ones are especially popular, says Jesseca Kusher. The 18-year old attends Spartanburg Day School in South Carolina. Like most dark objects, shingles absorb a lot of heat from sunlight. In the summer sun, they can easily reach 73.5° Celsius (164° Fahrenheit), she notes. If those shingles reflected more sunlight, they’d stay cooler. And that could help cut down on home cooling bills. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, air conditioning consumes about 5 percent of all the energy used in the United States. Cooling buildings costs the nation about $11 billion each year.

So Jesseca looked into ways to make shingles reflect more light. She mixed tiny particles — a powder — made from any of several different substances into a clear paint-like coating. One coating got graphite, the same material in pencil lead. Another recipe included gypsum. That’s a soft mineral often found in the drywall used in construction. She even tried adding mica. That’s a mineral used in some lampshades. It readily breaks into small, glittering flakes.

Each of these powders came in several colors. In each of Jesseca’s test recipes, her reflective powder accounted for 40 percent of the weight of the final mixture. She also prepared some of the paint-like coatings with no additive. That would let her judge whether a powder — versus the transparent goop it was added to — affected a shingle’s reflectivity, she explains.

Jesseca used four different colored shingles. She painted each of her concoctions onto bits of each color of shingle and let them dry for 24 hours. Then, to simulate how the shingles would heat up in summer, she placed each postage-stamp-size sample under a 150-watt sun lamp. (Those bulbs send out radiation across a wide band of wavelengths, similar to those emitted by the sun.) Each test sample was irradiated for 15 minutes, or until the untreated shingles reached a temperature of 73.5 °C, whichever came first. To measure how hot each sample got, the teen used an instrument that measures the infrared radiation (heat) emitted by an object.

Studying? Don’t answer that text!

Multitasking impairs learning, according to new research by teen brothers.

PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Cell phone use and texting are increasingly common, especially among teens. And that could be a problem. Texting affects learning and performing on tests, a new study finds. On average, students who responded to texts while working got lower scores. This trend held even for teens who felt they could multitask effectively.

Many students think that multitasking has no effect on how they perform in school, says Colter Norick, 17. (Multitasking is when a person tries to do more than one thing at the same time.) So the Montana teen and his 16-year-old brother Colin decided to test that notion.

They recruited 47 classmates at Columbia Falls High School to take part in a two-phase experiment. The goal was to gauge how well these students understood written material. Each participant had to read a paragraph or two about a certain topic, then answer a question about it.

In the first phase, the teen participants had 15 minutes to digest and then answer questions about six readings. Throughout this testing, the volunteers encountered no distractions.

A little later, Colter and Colin had their recruits tackle a new set of readings. This time, the brothers used a computer program to send texts to the volunteers’ cell phones every 90 seconds. In each text, a fictional character named “Bob” asked questions that required a reply. One example: What’s your favorite type of music?

Back off, bullies!

Study finds higher risk of mental health problems among the bullied than the maltreated.

Growing up can sometimes seem like a roller coaster. There are ups and downs and unexpected turns. Abuse or neglect by an adult can make the ride even rougher. But being tormented by another child can leave especially lasting scars. That’s the finding of a new study.

Bullied kids face a high risk of mental health problems as teens and as young adults. Indeed, kids tormented by bullying may be worse off than those who had suffered physical abuse or neglect, the study found.

Bullying is a global problem. About 1 in 3 children worldwide report being bullied at some time by other kids.

Dieter Wolke works at the University of Warwick in England. Until recently, most studies of child victims focused not on bullying but on maltreatment, this psychologist says. Maltreatment includes physical or emotional abuse, neglect or other behaviors that can harm a child.

Wolke’s team wanted to better understand how bullying’s long-term effects compare to those due to maltreatment. They focused on 4,026 children in the United Kingdom and 1,420 more in the United States. Information about bullying and maltreatment was collected for American children to age 13. They collected the same information for British youth up to age 16. The researchers also gathered data on each individual’s mental health as a young adult.

Among the Americans, 36 percent of bullied kids had mental problems later. Those problems included anxiety, which is a state of excessive worry. They also included depression. That is a feeling of hopelessness that can last a long time. Among kids who had been maltreated by adults, 17 percent later suffered mental health problems. That was less than half the rate seen in people who had been bullied as school kids.

Brain food: diet’s impacts on students are too big to ignore

As their children submit themselves to the ordeal of all-important end-of-year exams, parents of high school and university students may be wondering what they can do to help. One thing they ought to consider in particular is diet and its potential impact on academic outcomes.

Unfortunately, there’s relatively little research into the effect of nutrition on scholastic performance in young adults. But we do know that what we eat affects brain power.

Research findings

Let’s start with a brief overview of what the research says. Regular meals three times a day have been linked to higher academic performance in Korean adolescents, in a study from 2003.

In Norwegian teenagers, regular meals (lunch and dinner) were negatively associated with self-reported learning difficulties in mathematics. While foods reflecting a less healthy diet (including soft drinks, sweets, snacks, pizza, and hot dogs) were linked with learning difficulties in maths.

In the same 2013 Norwegian study, regular breakfast was associated with fewer learning difficulties, not only in maths but also in reading and writing.

In a 2008 Canadian study, higher academic achievement was reported in adolescents who consumed more fruits, vegetables and milk. Increased fish consumption positively influenced academic grades in Swedish teens, according to a paper published in 2010.

Another 2010 paper showed that, in Iceland, adolescents who had poor dietary habits (with higher consumption of chips, hamburgers and hot dogs) had lower academic achievement. In contrast, adolescents with higher fruit and vegetable consumption achieved higher academic scores.

Does the food children eat for breakfast fuel exam grades?

We don’t have to look far to find information on the benefits of eating a healthy, balanced diet. Good eating habits, like regularly having breakfast and eating fruit and vegetables, have been linked to positive outcomes for our bodies. But how does food influence how we think?

A recent US study showed that giving free school breakfast to poorer students can lead to improvements in maths, reading and science. These improvements were related to better eating habits and didn’t happen as a result of more time spent in school. The findings of the study support other research, which has also found a link between good nutrition and improvements in school grades.

Why nutrition makes a difference

Cognition, which is the way we think about, remember and use information, is an important part of learning. For example, to learn skills such as reading and maths we need to be able to pay attention to certain facts, hold thoughts in our memory and switch between different pieces of information. Research has shown that food, especially breakfast, can influence how well we are able to perform these cognitive tasks.

In a 2012 UK study of 1,386 children aged between six and 16, those who had breakfast performed better on tests of memory and attention than those who didn’t have breakfast.

But, further research has shown that what we eat is also important. For example, the glycaemic index of food, which shows how quickly the carbohydrates from foods are used up by the body, has been found to have an effect on cognitive performance. When children eat foods with a low glycaemic index, such as bran flakes, which release energy more slowly, their attention and memory performance is better than when they eat high glycaemic foods, such as chocolate-coated cereal.

When it comes to school grades, some researchers have suggested that memory and attention are especially important for learning and these are cognitive processes that seem to be influenced by food intake.

Children’s attention problems at age seven linked to lower GCSE grades

As thousands of 15 and 16-year-olds prepare for their GCSEs, new research has found that children who display inattentive behaviours at age seven are at risk of worse academic outcomes in these examinations. This was the case even after their IQ and their parents’ social and educational backgrounds were taken into account.

The results of our study, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, were based on analyses of behavioural and academic data of participants in Children of the 90s, a population-based study at the University of Bristol. The research team, from the universities of Nottingham and Bristol, studied more than 11,000 children.

Childhood behaviour problems can be apparent to parents and teachers during the early years of primary school. These include difficulties such as inattention, poor concentration, being easily distracted, losing interest easily, daydreaming, not listening or being disorganised. They can also include oppositional or defiant behaviours, such as frequent temper tantrums, arguing with adults and not doing as adults ask.

Few representative large-scale studies have assessed whether these behaviours pose an independent risk for educational achievement during adolescence. It has not been clear whether the risk of lower grades from increasing levels of inattention applies across the whole population, or only for those children with the most severe problems, such as those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

In the study, parents and teachers completed questionnaires about the child’s behaviour at age seven. These assessed a range of different behaviours including inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity and oppositional/defiant problems. This information was then compared with the children’s academic achievements by looking at their GCSE examination results at age 16. We also took the child’s IQ and parents’ education and socio-economic status into account as these are linked with both early behaviour problems and academic outcomes.

Real impact on grades

We looked at the impact on children’s GCSE results in two ways. First, we looked at how many had achieved five “good” GCSE grades – five A*-C grades including English and Maths. This is a minimum expected level to access further education and is a key indicator that is published in school league tables. We found that for each one-point increase in inattention symptoms (based on a full scale of 0-18) at age seven, there was a 6-7% increased likelihood, on average across the whole sample, of not achieving the minimum level of five “good” GCSE grades at age 16.

How technology is changing speech and language therapy

From robots that play peekaboo, to speech recognition software that analyses TV shows, tech is being used to aid human communication.

Speech and communication skills are at the heart of human relationships – without them we couldn’t share ideas and emotions. But technology is carving out a special role in boosting those skills. Pioneering research shows just how machines are helping people to make themselves understood.

Here we look at three projects where a range of academic specialists and industry partners have come together to develop and widen access to their innovations.

Kaspar the robot: helping children with autism communicate 

Meet Kaspar: he can be talked to, tickled, stroked, played with and you can even prod and poke him and he won’t run away. Kaspar, developed at the University of Hertfordshire by a team under professor Kerstin Dautenhahn, is a child-like talking robot with a simplified human face and moveable limbs and features. He’s designed to help children with autism develop essential social skills through games such as peekaboo and learning activities.

Kaspar, the size of a small child, was “born” back in 2005 and has been developed since thanks to funding raised by the university. The multi-disciplinary scope of the project, spanning robotics, psychology, assistive technology and autism therapy, harnesses technology to assist communication. But this broad approach means it falls between research council stools and misses out on their grants, says Dautenhahn.

Initially, Kaspar has been used to help children in schools under the supervision of researchers. In the latest phase of the research, redesigned, wireless and more personalised versions of the little robot – controlled using a tablet - will to go out directly to schools and families in the next few weeks.

Parents and teachers will play games such as encouraging autistic youngsters to mimic and discuss different facial expressions, or even to pinch him and discuss why he cries out and looks sad, recording the results for the Hertfordshire team to analyse. “This is a new field study phase where Kaspar will go out into the world without the helping hand of researchers,” says Dautenhahn, whose work has combined both academic research – including collaboration with psychologists and clinicians - and the nuts and bolts of developing the robot as a potential mass product.

It is Kaspar’s highly predictable, simplified interactions that appeal to autistic children who may be overwhelmed by the complexity of everyday human communication, she believes.

“His simplicity appeals to children, and the fact that they can respond to him in their own time. If you are silent for 60 seconds, Kaspar won’t mind – he doesn’t make judgments.”

What’s the optimum amount of homework to set a teenager?

Coaxing teenagers to sit down and do their homework is never an easy task. But is it actually worth their while to slave away for hours on end every evening? Not according to a new study of Spanish secondary school students which has concluded that the optimum amount of homework for children is around one hour a day.

Researchers at the University of Oviedo studied the maths and science homework and test results of 7,451 adolescents with an average age of around 13. They found a relationship between the amount of homework completed and children’s attainment. But the authors acknowledge they can’t say definitively that one hour of homework a night in total actually causes better test results.

Previous research in this area is both inconsistent and inconclusive. Some has shown the positive effects of homework and some its negative effects. In 2012, The Guardian reported on Department of Education research showing that two to three hours per day produced greater effects on achieving the highest results. In 2014, research at Stanford University found that too much homework can have a negative impact on children.

Homework can help to establish a routine and to develop independent learning skills that will be useful for professional life. Conversely, it could be argued that working at home in the evenings is the beginning of an unhealthy work-life balance and that there are academic drawbacks in studying instead of sleeping.

Not all children need to study the same

It’s unclear whether the children in the Spanish study achieve more as a result of doing the “optimum” amount of homework. Children of different abilities may take different amounts of time to complete their homework. If we subscribe to the idea that there is an “optimum” time, then we are effectively saying that children who work more quickly should complete more homework than children who work more slowly, which is arguably a disincentive for the fastest – and probably the most able – children.

The study also acknowledges that the nature of the homework has more influence over the outcomes than the time taken to complete it. This is an important point and is underpinned by a common sense view that an hour of inappropriate homework will be less effective than 45 minutes of appropriate homework.