Neuroscientists launch 5-year study of music education and child brain development

Researchers at USC Brain and Creativity Institute will explore the effects of intense music training on cognitive development in LA Phil's YOLA at HOLA program

The Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) are delighted to announce a longitudinal research collaboration to investigate the emotional, social and cognitive effects of musical training on childhood brain development.

The five-year research project, Effects of Early Childhood Musical Training on Brain and Cognitive Development, will offer USC researchers an important opportunity to provide new insights and add rigorous data to an emerging discussion about the role of early music engagement in learning and brain function.

Through a collaboration with the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles at Heart of Los Angeles (YOLA at HOLA) program, a partnership between the LA Phil and HOLA which provides free instruments and musical training to children from the Rampart District of Los Angeles, researchers with the USC Brain and Creativity Institute — led by acclaimed neuroscientists Hanna Damasio and Antonio Damasio — will track how children respond to music from the very onset of their exposure to systematic, high intensity music education.

Starting when the children are between the age of 6 and 7, to ages 11 and 12, the researchers will use standard psychological assessments and advanced brain imaging techniques to track brain, emotional and social development. The group of children involved in the YOLA at HOLA program will be compared to a control group of children matched in age, socio-economic status and cognitive abilities, but with no musical training.

All children will be followed for five consecutive years, providing a rare chance for researchers to discover the effects of musical training on emotional, social and cognitive aspects of development as they actually occur, rather than inferring later-life effects. The USC Brain and Creativity Institute team began working with YOLA at HOLA students in September 2012.

Postsecondary Enrollment, Graduation Rates, and Student Financial Aid

By extending the time students were tracked for program completion from within 100 percent of normal time to within 200 percent of normal time, graduation rates for undergraduates who were full-time, first-time students in 2007 increased from 21 percent to 37 percent at 2-year institutions and from 46 percent to 69 percent at less-than-2-year institutions, according to new data released by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2011; Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2011; and Graduation Rates, Selected Cohorts, 2003-2008 presents preliminary findings from the spring 2012 data collection of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics within the Institute of Education Sciences.

Other findings include:

• In fall 2011, Title IV institutions enrolled 18.6 million undergraduate and 2.9 million graduate students. Of the 18.6 million undergraduates, 57 percent were enrolled in 4-year institutions, 41 percent in 2-year institutions, and 2 percent in less-than-2-year institutions.

• In fiscal year 2011, public 4-year institutions and administrative offices received 19 percent of their revenues from tuition and fees, compared with 29 percent at private nonprofit entities and 90 percent at private for-profit entities. Additionally, 29 percent of expenses at public 4-year entities were for instruction, compared with 42 percent at public 2-year entities and 54 percent at public less-than-2-year entities.

• Approximately 59 percent of full-time, first-time students at 4-year institutions in 2005 who were seeking a bachelor’s or equivalent degree completed a bachelor’s or equivalent degree within 6 years at the institution where they began their studies.

Lead Policy and Academic Performance: Insights from Massachusetts

Childhood exposure to even low levels of lead can adversely affect neurodevelopment, behavior, and cognitive performance. This paper investigates the link between lead exposure and student achievement in Massachusetts. Panel data analysis is conducted at the school-cohort level for children born between 1991 and 2000 and attending 3rd and 4th grades between 2000 and 2009 at more than 1,000 public elementary schools in the state. Massachusetts is well-suited for this analysis both because it has been a leader in the reduction of childhood lead levels and also because it has mandated standardized achievement tests in public elementary schools for almost two decades.

The paper finds that elevated levels of blood lead in early childhood adversely impact standardized test performance, even when controlling for community and school characteristics. The results imply that public health policy that reduced childhood lead levels in the 1990s was responsible for modest but statistically significant improvements in test performance in the 2000s, lowering the share of children scoring unsatisfactory on standardized tests by 1 to 2 percentage points. Public health policy targeting lead thus has clear potential to improve academic performance, with particular promise for children in low income communities.

NEARLY HALF OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM WANDER OR “BOLT” FROM SAFE PLACES

Children with autism are four times more likely to wander than their unaffected siblings

A new study published today in the journal Pediatrics (Epub ahead of print) found that nearly half of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are reported to wander or “bolt,” and more than half of these children go missing. Led by researchers from the Interactive Autism Network (IAN), the nation’s largest online autism research initiative and a project of the Kennedy Krieger Institute, this study provides the most comprehensive estimate of elopement occurrence in a United States community-based sample of more than 1,200 children with ASD.

“Since the launch of IAN, we have heard from families of children with autism that their children often place themselves in danger by wandering or eloping,” says Dr. Paul Law, senior author and director of the IAN Project at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. “These are the first published findings in the U.S. that provide an estimate of the number of children with ASD who not only wander or elope, but go missing long enough to cause real concern.”

Participants in the study included families of 1,218 children with ASD and 1,076 of their siblings without ASD recruited through an online questionnaire. The primary outcome measured by researchers was elopement status beginning at age 4, when elopement and wandering are increasingly atypical behaviors. “Missing” status was a secondary outcome; a child who eloped and had gone missing long enough to cause concern was coded as missing, whereas those who had not were coded as non-missing. The study’s findings on elopement prevalence, characteristics correlated with elopement and qualitative measures of family stress are presented below.

Elopement Prevalence

*49 percent of children with ASD attempted to elope at least once after age 4.

*Of those who attempted to elope, 53 percent of children with ASD went missing long enough to cause concern.

*From age 4 to 7, 46 percent of children with ASD eloped, which is four times the rate of unaffected siblings.

*From age 8 to 11, 27 percent of affected children eloped compared with 1 percent of unaffected siblings.

Elopement Behavior

*When eloping, 74 percent of affected children eloped from their own home or someone else’s home. Children also eloped from stores (40 percent) and classroom or schools (29 percent).

*Close calls with traffic injury were reported for 65 percent of the missing children.

*Close calls with drowning were reported for 24 percent of the missing children.

*Elopement attempts peaked at age 5.4 years. Of parents reporting on the “worst year ever,” 29 percent said that their child attempted to elope multiple times a day; an additional 35 percent reported that attempts occurred at least once per week.

*While eloping, children with Asperger disorder were more frequently described by their parents as anxious; children with ASD were more frequently described as happy, playful or exhilarated. In either case, elopement was goal oriented, with the intent to go somewhere or do something.

Characteristics of Eloping

*Children who have eloped are older, more likely to have an ASD, present more severe autism symptoms and have lower intellectual and communication scores than non-elopers.

*Children who were reported as missing were older, more likely to have experienced skill loss and less likely to respond to their name. They were also more likely to have lower intellectual and communication scores than non-missing children.

*On average, children were missing for 41.5 minutes.

Impact of Elopement on Family

*56 percent of parents reported elopement as one of the most stressful behaviors they had to cope with as caregivers of a child with ASD.

*50 percent of parents reported receiving no guidance from anyone on preventing or addressing their child’s elopement behavior.

*After children went missing, parents most frequently contacted neighbors (57 percent). Parents also called police (35 percent), school (30 percent) and store personnel (26 percent).

About the Interactive Autism Network (IAN) Launched in 2007, the IAN Project connects individuals on the autism spectrum and their families with researchers nationwide to accelerate the pace of autism research and aid advocacy efforts for improved services and resources. Housed at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, MD, this innovative online initiative has nearly 43,000 participants who contribute information to create the largest pool of autism data in the world. For more information or to join the search for answers, visit www.ianproject.org.

Testing Can Be Useful for Students and Teachers

Pop quiz! Tests are good for:
(a) Assessing what you’ve learned;
(b) (b) Learning new information;
(c) (c) a & b;
(d) (d) None of the above.

The correct answer?

According to research from psychological science, it’s both (a) and (b) – while testing can be useful as an assessment tool, the actual process of taking a test can also help us to learn and retain new information over the long term and apply it across different contexts.

New research published in journals of the Association for Psychological Science explores the nuanced interactions between testing, memory, and learning and suggests possible applications for testing in educational settings.


One of the criticisms of multiple-choice tests is that they expose test takers to the correct answer among the available options. This means that you only have to recognize the correct answer, you don’t have to rely on retrieval processes that are known to enhance later recall. Psychological scientist Jeri Little and her colleagues investigated whether multiple-choice tests could actually be designed to call upon these retrieval processes. If the alternative answers are all plausible enough, they hypothesized, test takers would have to retrieve information about why correct alternatives are correct and also about why incorrect alternatives are incorrect in order to be able to distinguish between the two.

In two experiments, the researchers found that properly constructed multiple-choice tests can, in fact, trigger productive retrieval processes. They also found that multiple-choice tests had one potentially important advantage over tests in which only the question is presented. Both kinds of tests helped test takers remember the information they been tested on, but only the multiple-choice tests helped them recall information related to incorrect alternatives. These findings suggest that multiple-choice tests can be constructed in ways that exercise the very retrieval processes they have been accused of bypassing.

School Readiness and Early Childhood Success among Young Children in Black Immigrant Families

This report examines levels of school readiness among young children by race/ethnicity and nativity, helping fill a significant gap in knowledge about the early childhood experiences of young children in Black immigrant families.


Using a nationally representative US birth-cohort study (the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort), the authors identify the contextual factors - such as family circumstances, parenting practices, and enrollment in center-based child care - that encourage early school success. They conclude that these immigrant children do quite well.

A Better Affirmative Action: State Universities that Created Alternatives to Racial Preferences

The Supreme Court of the United States will hear the Fisher v. Texas argument on October 10. The case could dramatically alter or eliminate race-based admissions policies at colleges and universities. In a new report, A Better Affirmative Action, Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg and Policy Associate Halley Potter of The Century Foundation look at socio-economic solutions to racial preferences in Affirmative Action.