Category: Educational Psychology

"In our field we have always had a dogma that CO₂ itself, at the levels we find in buildings, is just not important and doesn't have any direct impacts on people," said Berkeley Lab scientist William Fisk, a co-author of the study, which was published in Environmental Health Perspectives online last month. "So these results, which were quite unambiguous, were surprising." The study was conducted with researchers from State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University.

On nine scales of decision-making performance, test subjects showed significant reductions on six of the scales at CO₂ levels of 1,000 parts per million (ppm) and large reductions on seven of the scales at 2,500 ppm. The most dramatic declines in performance, in which subjects were rated as "dysfunctional," were for taking initiative and thinking strategically. "Previous studies have looked at 10,000 ppm, 20,000 ppm; that's the level at which scientists thought effects started," said Berkeley Lab scientist Mark Mendell, also a co-author of the study. "That's why these findings are so startling."

While the results need to be replicated in a larger study, they point to possible economic consequences of pursuing energy efficient buildings without regard to occupants. "As there's a drive for increasing energy efficiency, there's a push for making buildings tighter and less expensive to run," said Mendell. "There's some risk that, in that process, adverse effects on occupants will be ignored. One way to make sure occupants get the attention they deserve is to point out adverse economic impacts of poor indoor air quality. If people can't think or perform as well, that could obviously have adverse economic impacts."

The primary source of indoor CO₂ is humans. While typical outdoor concentrations are around 380 ppm, indoor concentrations can go up to several thousand ppm. Higher indoor CO₂ concentrations relative to outdoors are due to low rates of ventilation, which are often driven by the need to reduce energy consumption. In the real world, CO₂ concentrations in office buildings normally don't exceed 1,000 ppm, except in meeting rooms, when groups of people gather for extended periods of time.

In classrooms, concentrations frequently exceed 1,000 ppm and occasionally exceed 3,000 ppm. CO₂ at these levels has been assumed to indicate poor ventilation, with increased exposure to other indoor pollutants of potential concern, but the CO₂ itself at these levels has not been a source of concern. Federal guidelines set a maximum occupational exposure limit at 5,000 ppm as a time-weighted average for an eight-hour workday.

Fisk decided to test the conventional wisdom on indoor CO₂ after coming across two small Hungarian studies reporting that exposures between 2,000 and 5,000 ppm may have adverse impacts on some human activities.

Fisk, Mendell, and their colleagues, including Usha Satish at SUNY Upstate Medical University, assessed CO₂ exposure at three concentrations: 600, 1,000 and 2,500 ppm. They recruited 24 participants, mostly college students, who were studied in groups of four in a small office-like chamber for 2.5 hours for each of the three conditions. Ultrapure CO₂ was injected into the air supply and mixing was ensured, while all other factors, such as temperature, humidity, and ventilation rate, were kept constant. The sessions for each person took place on a single day, with one-hour breaks between sessions.

Although the sample size was small, the results were unmistakable. "The stronger the effect you have, the fewer subjects you need to see it," Fisk said. "Our effect was so big, even with a small number of people, it was a very clear effect."

Another novel aspect of this study was the test used to assess decision-making performance, the Strategic Management Simulation (SMS) test, developed by SUNY. In most studies of how indoor air quality affects people, test subjects are given simple tasks to perform, such as adding a column of numbers or proofreading text. "It's hard to know how those indicators translate in the real world," said Fisk. "The SMS measures a higher level of cognitive performance, so I wanted to get that into our field of research."

The SMS has been used most commonly to assess effects on cognitive function, such as by drugs, pharmaceuticals or brain injury, and as a training tool for executives. The test gives scenarios — for example, you're the manager of an organization when a crisis hits, what do you do? — and scores participants in nine areas. "It looks at a number of dimensions, such as how proactive you are, how focused you are, or how you search for and use information," said Fisk. "The test has been validated through other means, and they've shown that for executives it is predictive of future income and job level."

Data from elementary school classrooms has found CO₂ concentrations frequently near or above the levels in the Berkeley Lab study. Although their study tested only decision making and not learning, Fisk and Mendell say it is possible that students could be disadvantaged in poorly ventilated classrooms, or in rooms in which a large number of people are gathered to take a test. "We cannot rule out impacts on learning," their report says.

The next step for the Berkeley Lab researchers is to reproduce and expand upon their findings. "Our first goal is to replicate this study because it's so important and would have such large implications," said Fisk. "We need a larger sample and additional tests of human work performance. We also want to include an expert who can assess what's going on physiologically."

Until then, they say it's too early to make any recommendations for office workers or building managers. "Assuming it's replicated, it has implications for the standards we set for minimum ventilation rates for buildings," Fisk said. "People who are employers who want to get the most of their workforce would want to pay attention to this."

Funding for this study was provided by SUNY and the state of New York.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The original article was written by Julie Chao.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

1. Satish U, Mendell MJ, Shekhar K, Hotchi T, Sullivan D, Streufert S, Fisk WJ, et al. Is CO₂ an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO₂ Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2012; DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1104789

The study was published last week in a special volume of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looks at how experiences beginning before birth and in the years after can affect the course of a person's life.

Known as epigenetics, or the study of changes in gene expression, this research examined a process called DNA methylation where a chemical molecule is added to DNA and acts like a dimmer on a light bulb switch, turning genes on or off or setting them somewhere in between. Research has shown that a person's life experiences play a role in shaping DNA methylation patterns.

The research team discovered that childhood poverty, but not socioeconomic status as an adult, was correlated with the marks or methylation patterns left on genes.

"We found biological residue of early life poverty," said Michael Kobor, an associate professor of medical genetics at UBC, whose CMMT lab at the Child & Family Research Institute (CFRI) led the research. "This was based on clear evidence that environmental influences correlate with epigenetic patterns."

The amount of stress hormones produced by adults was also linked with variations in DNA methylation. Like the chicken and the egg, Kobor says it is unknown whether increased stress as an adult could leave marks on DNA or whether the marks may play a role in the amount of stress hormones released.

Kobor, who is a Mowafaghian Scholar at the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP), and his colleagues also found that methylation patterns were predictive of future immune responses, suggesting that early life experiences could play a role in our response to illness later in life.

Journal Reference:

1. L. L. Lam, E. Emberly, H. B. Fraser, S. M. Neumann, E. Chen, G. E. Miller, M. S. Kobor. Factors underlying variable DNA methylation in a human community cohort. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; 109 (Supplement_2): 17253 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1121249109

The way legislators, experts and other opinion leaders discuss the role of parents and schools in reducing educational inequalities has changed dramatically since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first passed in 1965. Put simply, parents were viewed as part of the problem then, with schools seen as the solution. In recent years, with No Child Left Behind and more school choice options, these roles have flipped.

"There has been a continued focus on reducing educational inequalities; however, there are stark contrasts in the way policymakers and experts talked about what they saw as the root problems and how to solve them from 1965 to 2001 — especially the roles of parents and schools," said Emily Meanwell, sociology doctoral student in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington.

The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act was the federal government's first major education policy and is described by Meanwell as "one of the most important education policies in American history. Created to reduce educational inequalities found across the country, its goal was to increase opportunities for poor and disadvantaged children as part of the War on Poverty."

It's notable, Meanwell says, that the act did not focus on content or curriculum, explicitly forbidding a national curriculum. Nor did it explicitly address race. Meanwell wrote that race and desegregation already were addressed in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

"No Child Left Behind explicitly addresses achievement gaps between racial groups," Meanwell said. "The original law was technically race-neutral."

The federal education law has been reauthorized eight times, most recently in 2002 with the reauthorization of NCLB. Meanwell analyzed testimony given by a range of experts during congressional hearings in 1965 and 2001. In the early years, testimony portrayed parents as part of the problem when students' home lives and experiences left them ill-prepared for school. Schools, then, with the help of extra funding, were expected to bring these students up to speed. Instead of focusing on "inputs," as in children's school readiness or school funding, No Child Left Behind focuses more attention outputs, largely in the form of standardized test scores. This casts schools more as the problem, particularly when they report poor test scores. Parents now are seen as part of the solution, with access to accountability data in the form of test scores and more school choice options.

"Poor students were framed as trapped in failing schools, and needing parents to rescue them, in 2001. This is a reverse of the framing in 1965, when they were portrayed as trapped in culturally impoverished families and needing schools to rescue them," Meanwell said.

Meanwell discussed her paper, "Federal Education Policy and Inequality: Cultural Logics and Discursive Framing in Congressional Hearings, 1965-2001," on Aug. 18, during the Accountability Policies and Student Achievement session at the American Sociological Association's 107th Annual Meeting taking place in Denver, Colorado. The research is partially funded by a National Academy of Education Spencer Fellowship.

A study by Indiana University sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco found that working-class and middle-class parents often take very deliberate — but different — approaches to helping their children with their school experiences.

Working-class parents, she found, coached their children on how to avoid problems, often through finding a solution on their own and by being polite and deferential to authority figures. Middle-class parents, on the other hand, were more likely to encourage their kids to ask questions or ask for help.

These self-advocacy skills taught by middle-class parents not only can help the children in school — because these parents know that in educational settings teachers often expect and reward such behavior — but they could help later in life in other institutional settings.

"Youth who do not learn to advocate for themselves might have more difficulty interacting with social service providers, financial service providers, legal authorities and other bureaucratic institutions," said Calarco, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology in IU's College of Arts and Sciences.

Calarco discussed her research on August 19 during the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Her study focuses on the interaction between parents, children and teachers during the students' fourth- and fifth-grade years at a public elementary school. Her school observations took place at least twice a week, and then she interviewed the students and parents the summer following their fifth-grade year.

Conducted while Calarco was a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, the study is among the first to provide evidence that parents from different social classes teach their children different lessons about interacting with institutions. It also shows that parents help to perpetuate inequalities not only through what they do for their children, such as equipping them with different resources or opportunities, but also through what they teach children to do for themselves.

Calarco characterized both working-class and middle-class parents as "relentless" when it came to teaching their children important lessons. This sometimes even involved role-playing, when the middle-class parents wanted their children to solve their problem on their own — but couldn't quite leave it to chance. She also found the students very receptive.

"Even very shy middle-class children learned to feel comfortable approaching teachers with questions, and recognized the benefits of doing so," she said. "Working-class children instead worried about making teachers mad or angry if they asked for help at the wrong time or in the wrong way, and also felt that others would judge them as incompetent or not smart if they asked for help. These differences, in turn, seem to stem not from differences in how teachers responded to students — when working-class students did ask questions, teachers welcomed and readily addressed these requests — but from differences in the skills, strategies and orientations that children learn from their parents at home."

Substantial racial and ethnic disparities were found for a broad set of harmful health-related issues in a new study of 5th graders from various regions of the U.S. conducted by Boston Children's Hospital and a consortium of research institutions. Black and Latino children were more likely than white children to report everything from witnessing violence to engaging in less exercise to riding in cars without wearing seatbelts. At the same time, the study found that children of all races and ethnicities did better on these health indicators if they had more highly-educated parents with higher income or had the advantages of attending certain schools. Although white children were more likely to have these advantages than black or Latino children, when children with similar advantages were compared, racial and ethnic differences for most health indicators were smaller or even absent.

The study is the most ambitious effort to date to investigate the potential drivers of racial and ethnic health disparities among preadolescents. Results emphasize the key role that schools and family income and education may play in health disparities. Mark A. Schuster, MD, Ph.D., Chief of General Pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital and William Berenberg Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, led a research team that conducted the study. Between 2004 and 2006, they interviewed about five thousand 10- and 11-year-olds and their parents, in and around Birmingham, AL, Houston, TX, and Los Angeles, CA. Findings were published in the August 23 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"We found wide gaps between black and white children and between Latino and white children, in 5th grade," says Dr. Schuster, who began the research while at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. "When we delved deeper, we found that factors like the child's school, household income, and parents' education were strongly related to children's health. When these key factors are taken into account, differences related to race and ethnicity are not as large. But substantial differences remain, particularly between black and white children. More work is needed to identify what is causing these disparities, so that we can find ways to improve all children's health."

The researchers examined 16 important health-related measures. Some key disparities included:

• Black children were four times more likely and Latino children were two times more likely than white children to see a threat or injury with a gun.
• Black children were more likely to smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol than Latino and white children.
• Rates of obesity were nearly twice as high among black and Latino children, who also reported less vigorous exercise than white children.
• Black and Latino children were much more likely to report worse overall state of health.
• Black and Latino children were significantly more likely to experience discrimination (because of a wide variety of characteristics, like race and ethnicity, weight, and income).
• Black and Latino children were less likely than white children to wear a seatbelt or a bike helmet.
• Black children reported higher levels of being victimized by peers than Latino and white children.

The study suggests that these disparities, which have been much more extensively studied in adolescents, have already begun at younger ages and that interventions and policies may need to start earlier than adolescence to help reduce racial and ethnic differences in child health. These behaviors, experiences, and outcomes can have serious, long-term effects, so that improving them may improve adult health as well. For instance, unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death in children and adolescents, and patterns of not using seatbelts or bike helmets set as children may persist as they grow older. Likewise, violence is the leading cause of death for black male adolescents, and the study found that one in five black children had already witnessed violence by fifth grade. Victimization by peers and obesity during childhood could also have psychological and physical health consequences later in adolescence and adulthood.

"Significant disparities in behaviors and experiences that raise health concerns are already present during elementary school," says Schuster. "We should be thinking about these issues when children are young enough to prevent bad outcomes before they occur. Our research suggests that schools may be a key leverage point for addressing gaps among different racial and ethnic groups. We need to figure out what we can learn from the schools that are doing better, even when they're in similar communities to schools that are not doing as well. Is it a visionary principal, committed teachers, a strong commitment to health education, an engaged PTA? We need to learn more."

Young children in lower-income families who live in high-cost areas don't do as well academically as their counterparts in low-cost areas, according to a new study.

The study, by researchers at Child Trends and the University of California (UCLA), appears in the journal Child Development.

"Among families with incomes below 300 percent of the federal poverty threshold — that's below $66,339 for a family of four — living in a region with a higher cost of living was related to lower academic achievement in first grade," according to Nina Chien, a research scientist with Child Trends, who coauthored the study.

"This is the first study to show that income isn't enough," Chien added. "Cost-of-living differences also matter for children's development, particularly for children from lower-income families."

Researchers used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, a nationally representative sample of more than 17,500 children at more than 2,000 schools who started kindergarten in 1998. They estimated the relation among such factors as cost of living, family income, material hardship, parents' investments in their children's educational activities, as well as assessments of parents' psychological well-being (such as moms' reports of depressive symptoms and conflict in the marriage), parenting practices (such as warmth and having routines), and school resources.

Researchers then looked at these factors in relation to children's academic achievement (as measured by teachers' reports and tests of how well the children read and did math), and social-emotional development (as measured by teachers' reports of children's behavior problems and social skills).

In addition to the pattern for all families with incomes below 300 percent poverty, findings specific to families below 100 percent of the federal poverty level pointed to further differences. Among children who lived in families below 100 percent of the federal poverty threshold, those who lived in a higher-cost area (compared to those in a lower-cost area) had parents who made fewer investments in educational activities and went to schools with fewer resources.

"This makes sense," Chien notes. "For poor families already struggling to meet basic needs such as housing, utilities, and food, living in a higher-cost area meant that families had little left over to afford educationally enriching materials or activities for their children."

Differences for lower-income families according to cost of living in the area of residence held even when taking into account a comprehensive set of demographic variables. The pattern was not seen in children from more affluent families, suggesting that their academic achievement wasn't as sensitive to cost-of-loving variations.

"Many government assistance programs are applied by income and don't take into account variations in cost of living," Chien notes. "Our findings suggest that poor and lower-income families living in higher-cost areas may have a greater need for public assistance to offset the higher costs of basic expenditures."

For the human brain, learning a new task when rules change can be a surprisingly difficult process marred by repeated mistakes, according to a new study by Michigan State University psychology researchers.