children

An individual’s capacity to learn is often treated as static across his or her lifetime.  Studies that identify changes in IQ (a widely used, standardized measure of intellectual abilities) are generally unable to attribute that change to a real increase or decrease in intelligence as opposed to measurement error in testing, and much of the variation in IQ remains unexplained.

The evolution of the contemporary human species is often portrayed as a slow process over many tens of thousands of years that culminated in our now-fixed modern state and form. But research from the University of Edinburgh (U.K.), Université du Québec à Montréal and Université de Sherbrooke in Canada suggests that the genetic mechanisms by which humans evolved continue to operate.

In 2009 the United State reported the lowest number of births in five years, after a steep and steady decline from the reported 2007 rates. What lies between these two data points? Recession. Graphing birth rates in the United States alongside per capita income tells a compelling story of two closely linked statistics.

Few public health events over the past decade have galvanized the attention of the American public like the outbreak of the H1N1 virus in 2009. Health officials scrambled to build models predicting how the disease might spread and to find measures to mitigate its impact.

Policy decisions concerning education programming and early interventions are increasingly driven by documented results from long-term academic studies. The Chicago Longitudinal Study (CLS) has now tracked the education and post-education experiences of 1,539 families, most of which participated in the Child-Parent Center (CPC) Education Program (the second-oldest federally funded preschool program, behind Head Start).

Studies have shown that young people growing up in poorer neighborhoods experience multiple forms of deprivation, including resource-poor schools, elevated levels of crime and violence, and restricted labor markets. In 1994 a federal program called “Moving to Opportunity” (MTO) used vouchers to help a group of randomly assigned families move from “highly distressed” public housing projects to neighborhoods with less poverty.