Here’s news from Scientific American:

Learning a new language can grow one’s perspective. Now scientists find that learning languages grows parts of the brain.

Scientists studied the brains of students in the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy, who are required to learn new languages at an alarmingly fast rate. Many must become fluent in Arabic, Russian and the Persian dialect Dari in just 13 months. The researchers compared the brains of these students to the brains of medical students who also have to learn a tremendous amount in a very short period of time, but without the focus on languages.

The brains of the language learners exhibited significant new growth in the hippocampus and in parts of the cerebral cortex. The medical students’ brains showed no observed growth.

I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Showing Students That They Make Their Brain Stronger By Learning and to The Best Resources For Learning The Advantages To Being Bilingual.

I have a chapter in my new book, Self-Driven Learning, that includes lesson plans and strategies to deal with rudeness in class.  It focuses a lot on how just seeing rude behavior being done to another person affects you.

In additions, I’ve posted The Best Ways To Deal With Rudeness In Class.

Here’s an interesting quote from a researcher and author on how rudeness affects people — whether it’s directed at them or they just witness it (it appeared in The Harvard Business Review):

So one of the things that we found in a series of experiments– so consistently found– was that people that experience, or even witness incivility, literally, it shuts their cognitive functioning down, and they don’t process things as well.

So, for example, they’re not able to remember things as well. And they’re far less creative. And so consistently we see that people just don’t process as well immediately after this. And that there are costs as a result.

Here are the newest additions to The Best Resources For Helping Teens Learn About The Importance Of Sleep:

Sleep is More Important than Food is from The Harvard Business Review.

Sleep Stealers: What’s Keeping Children From Getting Enough Shut-Eye? is from TIME.

Bright Screens Could Delay Bedtime is from Scientific American.

Why Sleeping May Be More Important Than Studying is from Mind Shift.

LBUSD’s proposed later school start times may boost achievement, research shows is from a Florida newspaper.

A new study finds that the more power people feel they have, the more self-control they exhibit. Researchers:

…speculated that power holders may be willing to wait for the larger rewards because they feel more connected with their future selves, a consequence of experiencing less uncertainty about their futures along with an increased tendency to see the big picture.

This is just more evidence backing up recommendations I make here and in my books to share power with students in the classroom. It’s also connected to other recent research I’ve written about that has found poverty tends to contribute towards the loss of self-control and not the other way around.

I’m adding it this info to The Best Posts About Helping Students Develop Their Capacity For Self-Control.

NPR had an interesting piece on this morning with classroom implications.

It was called Can You Learn To Like Music You Hate? A study found that the more people learned about music theory and how it worked, the more interested they became in music that they had previously disliked. Before, as the article describes, it was like “hearing a language you don’t understand” — just “noise.”

We’ve all heard students say, “I hate to read,” or “I hate to write,” or some variation. It’s not any great revelation to teachers, but it just reinforces that the greater the sense of self-efficacy, the greater the interest and intrinsic motivation. I’ve previously posted about other research that reached the same conclusion.

By the way, NPR had another intriguing piece on this morning that is worth a read — Control The Chaos With ‘Secrets Of Happy Families.’ It, too, has classroom implications.

Earlier this month, I posted a fairly popular piece titled Surprise, Surprise: Study Finds That Relationships Promote Perseverance & Cash Bonuses Do Not.

It referred to a new study which found that high school seniors being mentored by college students were much, much more likely to attend college than if students were just given a $100 bonus to do so.

Thanks to Sarah Sparks at Education Week, I just learned that “the Institute of Education Sciences’ What Works Clearinghouse has just given this study its rare seal of quality approval.”

I’m adding this post to The Best Resources On The Value & Practice Of Having Older Students Mentoring Younger Ones.

Here are three new additions to The Best Resources For Helping Teens Learn About The Importance Of Sleep:

Are Sleepy Students Learning is by Daniel Willingham.

Disease and sleep: Recent studies find new links is a great infographic from The Washington Post.

Last week, I wrote about a new study suggesting that 94% of students use their cellphones in class for personal purposes (see The Best Posts On Student Cellphone Use In Class).

Reading, Writing and… Facebook? is a new article on the same study from Psych Central, and gives more details on the research. Here’s an excerpt:

About 94 percent of the pupils admitted to accessing social media or file-sharing sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, during class, from time to time or even more frequently.

Some 95 percent take pictures or make recordings during class for non-study purposes; 94 percent send e-mails and text messages; 93 percent listen to music during class; and 91 percent actually talk on their phones during class.

The researchers also sought to determine the frequency of the students’ cell phone use during class (from “never” to “very often”). The data indicates that on average, every pupil uses a cell phone in 60 percent of his or her classes, the researchers said.

Last week, I wrote about a new study the reinforces what most teachers have experienced — that student motivation is the key to academic growth, not IQ (see Is This The Most Important Research Study Of 2012? Maybe).

TIME Magazine has just published an article on the same study, and it appears that they spoke directly to the researchers. Here’s an excerpt:

“Students with high IQ have high math achievement and students with low IQ have low math achievement,” Murayama says. “But IQ does not predict any growth in math achievement. It determines the starting point.”

So the children who improved in math over the years were disproportionately those who said they “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with statements such as, “When doing math, the harder I try, the better I perform,” or “I invest a lot of effort in math, because I am interested in the subject”– even if they had not started out as high-achieving students. In contrast, kids who said they were motivated purely by the desire to get good grades saw no greater improvement over the average. As for study strategies, those who said they tried to forge connections between mathematical ideas typically improved faster than kids who employed more cursory rote-learning techniques.

I’ve posted a lot about the value of encouraging students to be positive, and for us to do the same. You can find a collection of those posts, which include specific strategies I use, in My Best Posts On Why It’s Important To Be Positive In Class and in The Best Resources On “Gratitude”, and I write even more specifically about it in my upcoming book.

Today, Scientific American published an article reviewing the research that shows the benefits — to those talking and to those listening — of people sharing their positive experiences. Check it out at Share your Good News, and You will be Better Off.

The research in the article isn’t anything new to this blog’s readers — you can find all of it in my previous posts on the topic. But it is useful to have it all in one article. I did, though, especially like how it ended with an Albert Schweitzer quote:

“Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.”

Here are new additions to The Best Resources For Helping Teens Learn About The Importance Of Sleep:

For God’s Sake, Let the Kids Sleep! is from The Wall Street Journal.

Just A Little More Sleep Makes Kids Ready To Learn is from Annie Murphy Paul.