November 27, 2021
The Effectiveness of Preschool & Football Concerns for Parents
The Effectiveness of Preschool & Football Concerns for Parents
Guest(s) Appearing on this Episode | ||
Suzanne Bouffard Suzanne Bouffard has written about education and child development for The New York Times, Parents, greatschools.com, and The Harvard Education Letter. Her most recent book is The Most Important Year: Pre-Kindergarten and the Future of Our Children (Avery, 2017). Her first book, Ready, Willing, and Able (with Mandy Savitz-Romer, Harvard Education Press, 2012) covered challenges and strategies for first generation college-bound youth. Suzanne has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Duke University and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. She was a writer and researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for ten years. She lives with her husband and two young children in Massachusetts. Suzanne's Website |
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Robert Stern Dr. Robert Stern is Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Anatomy and Neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine, where he is also Director of the Clinical Core of the BU Alzheimer’s Disease Center (one of only 27 centers funded by the National Institutes of Health, NIH), and Director of Clinical Research for the BU Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center. A major focus of his research involves the long-term effects of repetitive brain trauma in athletes, including the neurodegenerative disease, CTE. He has funding from NIH and the Department of Defense for his work on developing methods of detecting and diagnosing CTE during life, as well as examining potential genetic and other risk factors for this disease. His other major areas of funded research include the assessment and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, the cognitive effects of chemotherapy in the elderly, thyroid-brain relationships, and driving and dementia. Dr. Stern has also published on various aspects of cognitive assessment and is the senior author of many widely used neuropsychological tests, including the Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (NAB). Dr. Stern has received several NIH and other national grants, has published over 250 journal articles, chapters, and abstracts, and is a Fellow of both the American Neuropsychiatric Association and the National Academy of Neuropsychology. He is on several editorial boards and is on the Medical and Scientific Advisory Boards of the MA/NH Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association and Concussion Legacy Foundation, and is also a member of the Mackey-White Traumatic Brain Injury Committee of the NFL Players Association. Dr. Stern has testified before the US Senate Special Committee on Aging. He appears frequently in national and international print and broadcast media for his work on CTE and AD. He also appears in the feature length documentaries, “League of Denial” (PBS Frontline, 2013), “Head Games” (2012), and “I Remember Better When I Paint” (2009). Learn More About Dr. Stern |
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Julia A. Leonard My research aims to use discoveries from cognitive science and neuroscience to help children thrive in school and in life. Specifically, I am interested in understanding what environmental factors support both children’s approach to learning and their capacity to learn. Few things are more central to children’s relationship to learning than their feelings about effort, especially their judgments about how hard they should try when things get difficult. While many studies suggest that the ability to persist on difficult tasks affects children’s academic achievement, relatively little is known about how young children learn about when and how to deploy effort. Given that effort is a limited resource, it makes sense to not try hard at everything. In work with Dr. Laura Schulz, I explore how young children learn from environmental factors (e.g., social and statistical) about when effort will pay off. Our goal is to elucidate the sources of evidence children use to make inferences about when a task is worth the effort. This research may help parents and educators to foster effortful behavior when it matters most. Children’s ability to learn is rooted in their neural architecture, which rapidly develops and changes with early life experience. In work with Dr. John Gabrieli, I look at how differential early life environments impact neural structure, function, and cognition. Currently, this work focuses on elucidating the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive success in children from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. My hope is that a better understanding of resilience will inform tailored interventions across diverse environments. Julia's Website |
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