Researchers found that middle-schoolers were less likely to be motivated to engage in risky sexual behaviors if they sought information from primarily informational sites rather than ones that are more about interaction with peers.

Many previous studies have found that use of social media is related to poorer health outcomes for adolescents, but this research suggests that “not all social media is the same,” said Eric Anderman, co-author of the new study and professor of educational psychology at The Ohio State University.

“Adolescents have better outcomes when they rely on sites where they can get accurate information rather than sites where they are mostly hearing from other teens.”

The study was published online yesterday (Sept. 15, 2025) in the journal Health Psychology.

The study was a joint project between Ohio State and Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus. It involved 2,691 seventh and eighth graders in a large urban school district in the Midwest.

All students were enrolled in a sexual health class using the Get Real curriculum, which is used nationwide. This includes nine 45–50-minute lessons each year, delivered over two weeks by a professional health educator.  It emphasizes social and emotional skills as a key component of healthy relationships and responsible decision making.

The researchers surveyed the students five times during the seventh and eighth grades, both before and after the Get Real sessions.

At each of the surveys, students were asked about three sexual health issues that were discussed in the Get Real curriculum: their ability to refuse unwanted sex, their ability to negotiate the use of condoms and their intentions to have sex.

Students were also asked to indicate how likely they were to use each of eight social media platforms to get information about sexual health or human sexuality. The platforms were TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Google.

Results showed that, overall, the curriculum helped reduce risky behavior in the students. But their use of social media to investigate sexual health topics did have an impact, Anderman said.

And the results were different for those who relied more heavily on social media that focuses on interactivity with peers – Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and Instagram – compared to less interactive and more informational sites, like YouTube, TikTok and Google.

Use of interactive sites was linked to lower ability to refuse sexual activity, while use of informational sites wasn’t related to that ability, the study found.

Those who relied more on interactive sites had a lower ability to negotiate the use of condoms, while those who used informational sites had a greater ability, results showed.

Finally, the use of interactive sites was linked to higher intentions to have sex, whereas the use of informational social media was unrelated to sexual intentions.

All of these results were found after taking into account a variety of other factors that could relate to sexual decision making, Anderman said.  That includes student GPA, parents’ education, race and ethnicity, and sex and gender.  The researchers also asked students about their honesty in completing the surveys and sensation seeking – their interest in risky activities.

“The bottom line is that using informational social media sites didn’t result in bad things happening, but using interactive sites did,” Anderman said.

The reason may be that interactive sites encourage the spread of misinformation among teens who don’t have accurate knowledge, he explained.

“Many kids do use interactive sites to get sexual health information and they very seldom fact check what they find.”

Anderman said it is important for parents to talk to their children about social media use: Make it clear that not all sites are the same, and they need to be careful about where they go to get information about sexual health.

“Let them know that just because someone tells you something on Snapchat, that doesn’t mean it is true,” he said. 

“Teens need to hear that from parents, they need to hear that from teachers, they need to hear it from multiple places.”

Anderman recalled that one of the seventh graders taking the Get Real curriculum, in an opportunity to ask anonymous questions, asked if it was true that girls could not get pregnant the first time they had sex.

“That’s an example of one of those things kids may be hearing on some social media. We want to make sure that they don’t take these kinds of statements as true, that they go to places where they can get the right information,” he said.

Co-authors of the study were Hyun Ji Lee, a former postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State who is now an assistant professor at Hunter College; Yvonne Allsop, who received her PhD at Ohio State and is now an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University; Yue Sheng, who received her PhD at Ohio State and is now an assistant professor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham; and Mary Kay Irwin, senior director of School-Based Health at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Population Affairs.

Beyond the reduction in self-reported and clinician rated depression, the students’ global well-being increased nearly three-fold and their performance improved on several cognitive tasks. All but one participant also lost weight. 

The 16 students who completed the pilot trial were receiving medication, counseling, or both for major depressive disorder before beginning the keto diet. The findings suggest achieving nutritional ketosis through diet is a feasible adjunctive therapy for depression and pave the way for a larger clinical trial, researchers say. 

The pilot study did not have a non-keto control group for comparison. Previous research has suggested medications and counseling reduce depressive symptoms by about 50% in a similar time period. 

“So many people are suffering right now, so it’s rewarding to potentially bring forward a solution,” said Jeff Volek, PhD, lead author of the study and a professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University. “There is more science yet to do, but because there is evidence of a benefit, expanding accessibility to a well-formulated ketogenic diet as an augmentation to treatment for depression is something to think about.” 

The study is published today (Sept. 9, 2025) in the journal Translational Psychiatry. 

Volek’s lab teamed with Ohio State mental health experts to design and complete the trial with young adults studying at the university. 

Stress, anxiety and depression are the No. 1 impediment to academic performance for U.S. college students, said co-author Ryan Patel, DO, a psychiatrist in Ohio State’s Office of Student Life Counseling and Consultation Service: About 40% of college students report depression symptoms, and about half of them are receiving treatment of some kind. 

“We have a treatment gap in that we have more students suffering from mental health concerns than can feasibly receive professional treatment,” Patel said. “There is a need for finding ways of helping students on a large scale. And nutrition is one way we can do that.” 

Twenty-four students were enrolled in the trial and 16 students – 10 women and six men with an average age of 24 – completed the entire study. 

Participants received extensive education on the keto diet, consisting of fewer than 50 grams of carbs per day combined with higher fat and moderate protein intake. The keto diet converts fat into ketones used by cells in the body and brain as an alternative to glucose, and is designed to put the body in a state of nutritional ketosis, when it has greater access to ketones as both fuel and a signaling molecule.  

“It was very important to make sure participants knew what they were getting themselves into,” said Drew Decker, MS, first author of the study and a graduate student in Volek’s lab. “And a big part of increasing chances for adherence to the diet was talking to each individual about what they like and don’t like to eat so we could tailor some suggestions for how they could structure their diet.” 

The team also provided 10 complete starter meals, offered consistent advice and snacks for the first half of the trial, and communicated throughout the study with participants through a private app. The students were advised to eat when they were hungry and finish eating when they were full, and not to worry about calories. 

At baseline and over the course of 10 to 12 weeks, the students reported depressive symptoms using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-09), the standard instrument to measure the severity of depression in clinical settings, and completed the World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5). They also took a series of cognitive tests assessing episodic and working memory, processing speed, executive function, and attention and inhibitory control. 

Co-author Jennifer Cheavens, PhD, professor of clinical psychology at Ohio State, oversaw clinical assessments of participants before and throughout the trial. 

“One of the things we really wanted to make sure of is that we were providing a treatment for people who met the diagnostic criteria for having major depressive disorder,” Cheavens said. “Each participant had about a 2 1/2-hour interview at the beginning, and then weekly assessments of their symptoms.” 

Students were also screened to ensure that they did not have any contraindications to a ketogenic diet, such as Body Mass Index under 20, eating disorders, pregnancy or high alcohol consumption. 

Results included:

• Participants achieved ketosis, based on a measure of ketone values in their blood, 73% of the time – an indication of good adherence to the diet.
• Self-reported depression scores decreased 37% by week two and reached 69% of improvement at week 10-12. The range of symptom severity varied, but nobody’s symptoms worsened.
• Clinician-rated assessments of depression at week six and week 10-12 decreased by 59% and 71%, respectively.
• By week two, perceived ratings of global wellness had increased two-fold, which improved to nearly three-fold at the end of the intervention.
• As a group, participants lost an average of 11 pounds and their body fat decreased by 2.4% – with most exceeding the clinically significant drop of 5% weight loss.
• As a group, participants’ performance improved on cognitive tasks assessing episodic memory, processing speed and executive function.
• No significant changes in cholesterol or triglycerides were found.

Patel, who met with the students throughout the trial, said the magnitude of the reduction in depressive symptoms linked to the keto diet was notable. 

“The average effect size for medications and counseling after 12 weeks is about 50%, and we saw a substantially greater result,” he said. “That is an impressive finding, that across the board, in this real-world setting, everybody got better, and across the board, our participants did not need more treatment or emergency intervention.” 

For over two decades, Volek has been studying therapeutic applications of ketosis for conditions such as heart disease and cancer as well as athletic performance and soldier health and resilience. 

“The idea is that the ketogenic diet is working through a variety of potentially different mechanisms – there’s a whole range of physiological metabolic adaptations to the diet that could overlap with some of the pathophysiology of depression,” Volek said. 

The team collected a range of biological data on changing levels of proteins related to inflammation and brain function in this pilot that may help inform a future study examining potential mechanisms behind the diet’s effects. 

“We haven’t teased out those mechanisms here because this is a proof-of-concept study for an adjunctive therapy,” Volek said. “This is one of the first really well-controlled studies and it has limitations, but the results encourage us to want to keep pursuing it.” 

This project was supported by a grant from the Baszucki Group Brain Research Fund. 

Additional co-authors included Scott Hayes, Whitney Whitted, Ann Lee, Alex Buga, Bradley Robinson, Christopher Crabtree, Justen Stoner, Madison Kackley, Teryn Sapper and Ashwini Chebbi, all of Ohio State. 

Results also showed that higher use of educational media was associated with both more time spent reading and less overall time in front of a screen – a signal that educational video, app and game use is not replacing reading. 

A clearer picture of first graders’ TV or tablet time and factors related to their use of educational media may reveal opportunities for fitting more screen-based learning into their day, researchers say. 

“We think it’s really important to understand because there is a lot of evidence that children can learn from high-quality educational media, and that using educational media can be more supportive of development and learning than using high levels of entertainment content,” said lead author Rebecca Dore, director of research at The Ohio State University’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy. 

“Kids are using, on average, 2 1/2 hours of media a day. And if we are seeing difficulties or disparities in some of these skills and knowledge that children are developing at this age, can we use educational media as a sort of prompt, or support, for those areas?” 

The study was published recently in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. 

Data for this paper came from reports by parents and caregivers participating in a larger study following children from preschool or kindergarten to fourth grade in central Ohio. 

The 346 caregivers completed a questionnaire in the spring of a child’s first grade school year, reporting on up to three to five TV shows, videos, apps or games the child used the most. The research team then used a systematic coding system to categorize the content as educational or entertainment. 

Researchers characterized the overall amount of educational content as a “small but potentially meaningful portion of children’s media use in this age range.” Dore noted that the range of educational themes varied quite a bit: “Some kids were getting 0% from their most-used content and for some kids, 100% of their most-used content was educational.”

Overall, more apps and games were used for educational purposes than video and TV, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) topics dominated the content coded as educational. 

Socioeconomic status did not affect educational media use, “suggesting that there is somewhat equitable access across socioeconomic status, which I think is really important,” Dore said. 

Although the published study did not examine media outlets, Dore said that follow-up analysis showed that PBS was the provider of 45.2% of the educational TV and video content commonly used by first graders. 

“The objective of those programs is being able to provide free, high-quality public media access to families,” she said. “When educational content is integrated into the plot of a program, children are having to learn the educational content to be able to follow the storyline. That’s the kind of content that PBS tends to produce, which is better than more didactic programming, like: ‘OK, kids, now we’re going to do this lesson.’” 

Results showed that girls used more educational media than boys, perhaps a reflection of other research suggesting that girls lean toward relationship-focused content that might be more common in educational media, and boys tend to favor more action-oriented content. 

Finding that educational media use does not crowd out reading time or extend overall screen time could help ease the minds of parents who might worry about a recommendation that their children tune into more digital educational content. 

There’s no established ideal amount of educational media use among first graders, Dore said – the sweet spot depends on the child, the home environment, and lots of other factors. 

“We need to know what’s out there and what children are actually using of what’s available to understand how to better diversify the content for children and make sure it’s being used by the children who need it most,” she said. “We’re all worried about what enriching activities that children might not be engaging in because they’re spending so much time using screens. So let’s increase the quality of the screen time they’re getting.” 

This work was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences. 

Co-authors were Kelly Purtell, Tzu-Jung Lin and Laura Justice, all of Ohio State.

Researchers at The Ohio State University conducted a study of how different life insurance product types were related to whether households had adequate financial resources if an income earner died.

They didn’t compare permanent and term life insurance directly, but they calculated how likely households with different life insurance products were financially prepared compared to those with no insurance.

The result? Households with both term and permanent life insurance policies were most likely to be ready for income loss after an unexpected death, when compared to those with no insurance.

“There’s a lot of debate in the financial adviser community on whether permanent life insurance or term life insurance is the best tool to protect consumers,” said study co-author Eric Olsen, who did the work while earning his PhD in family resource management at Ohio State.

“Our study suggests having both of them might be ideal for many people.”

Co-author Cäzilia Loibl, professor and chair of consumer sciences at Ohio State, said the results show the value of each type of life insurance product.

“The discussion is often one versus the other, but they have some different purposes and can work well together,” Loibl said.

The most concerning finding was that 56% of the sample did not have adequate financial resources – from insurance or other sources – to deal with the loss of an income earner, Olsen said.

“We need to examine how we can motivate families to build the resources they need to protect themselves in case of the death of an income earner,” he said. “Way too many people aren’t prepared.”

The study was published online recently in the journal Financial Planning Review. The research was led by Youngwon Nam, who did the work while earning her PhD at Ohio State, and who is now an associate professor of consumer science at Seoul National University in Korea. Robert Scharff, professor of consumer sciences at Ohio State, was also a co-author.

Consumers are often confused about differences between term and permanent life insurance, the researchers said. Term life insurance is often cheaper and covers people for a set period of time. Permanent life insurance (also known as cash value life insurance), which includes whole life, universal life and variable life, among others, is more expensive, but lasts for a whole lifetime and includes an investment component.

The researchers used data from the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, conducted by the Federal Reserve Board. This study only included households with more than one person, with at least one being employed full-time. The final sample was 1,818 households.

In this sample, 54% had term life insurance, 8% had permanent life insurance, and 10% had both.

The study was designed to examine financial adequacy: the ability of households to replace the income lost if an income earner died.  Researchers measured financial adequacy three different ways.

Households had life insurance adequacy if their life insurance payout alone could replace lost income; net financial assets adequacy meant assets like savings, stocks, and retirement accounts (minus liabilities) plus life insurance payout could replace income; and net worth adequacy included financial assets and non-financial assets, such as houses and property, (minus liabilities) plus life insurance payout.

The findings showed 11% of the sample had financial adequacy with life insurance alone, 17% had net financial asset adequacy and 16% had net worth adequacy.

So how did the different types of life insurance products compare in helping achieve financial adequacy?

In one analysis, the researchers examined the financial adequacy of households under the net financial asset adequacy scenario.

In this case, households that had both term and permanent life insurance had a 5.58 times higher likelihood of being financially prepared for the death of an income earner than a household with no life insurance.

A household with only term life insurance had a 3.95 times higher likelihood of financial adequacy, and a household with only permanent life insurance had a 3.01 times higher likelihood of financial adequacy.

The results were similar when the researchers looked at how prepared households were under the life insurance adequacy and net worth adequacy scenarios.

Overall, the findings make clear that people need to check to make sure that they have enough life insurance coverage, because most don’t, Loibl said.

And while any kind of insurance is better than none, this study suggests having both term and permanent life insurance may be a strong option for many.

“What kind of life insurance you have does matter in the long term and people need to determine what is best for their situation,” she said.

Researchers at The Ohio State University found success in a social studies curriculum for fourth graders based on teaching what they called “civic competencies.”

Over the course of a school year, findings showed that the students participating in the curriculum significantly improved their argumentation skills and disciplinary thinking.

“This will give them the ability to collaborate, communicate effectively and consider multiple perspectives,” said Tzu-Jung Lin, co-author of the study and professor of educational psychology at The Ohio State University.

“We aim to help cultivate a new generation of responsible community members and citizens who can work together to help solve complex issues,” Lin said.

The study was published recently in the Journal of Social Studies Research.

The research involved 106 fourth-grade students and six social studies teachers from two public school districts in the Columbus area. They participated in a social studies curriculum called Digital Civic Learning (DCL), which was developed at Ohio State.

“Students as young as elementary school start to encounter important issues in the world around them that don’t have a right or wrong answer,” Lin said.

“What we are trying to do with the DCL curriculum is to teach children the process to be a better thinker about these issues and learn how to resolve conflicts around them.”

One part of the curriculum involved what is called disciplinary thinking. This means teaching students how to read, write and think differently depending on the subject matter. In the DCL, students were taught four ways of thinking: geographic, economic, historical and civic.

“When students learn disciplinary thinking, they learn how professionals in each of these four disciplines approach a problem,” said co-author Haeun Park, a doctoral student in educational psychology at Ohio State.

“And later in the curriculum, students learn how to use all of those types of thinking in an interdisciplinary way. For example, students may learn to think about a specific problem from an economics point of view, but also from the view of an historian.”

This interdisciplinary approach can help students with their argumentation skills, which was the other focus of the curriculum. Students were taught how to develop an argument and counterargument about different positions using their disciplinary thinking skills.

In the classes, students honed their disciplinary thinking and argumentation skills through stories. The children were given a story about characters facing some sort of challenge, such as living in a food desert where healthy, affordable food options are limited.

“These stories are designed to be real-life problems that don’t have a set answer,” said study co-author Kevin Fulton, a doctoral student in educational psychology at Ohio State.

“The students can bring their own perspectives to the conversation, and they can agree on all the facts and disagree on what a good solution looks like.”

In order to measure how much the students learned from the DCL curriculum, the researchers had the students write essays at the beginning of the school year and at the end on meaningful problems that were relevant to their lives.

For example, one writing prompt had to do with a school lunch system that used AI to scan faces to see if the student owed money for their meals.

Students had to grapple with the negative ethical and privacy issues of the system as well as the positive user-friendly advantages and come to a decision about whether the AI system should be implemented.

Trained coders rated how well the students did on using disciplinary thinking and argumentation skills in their essays at the beginning of the year, and then again at the end.

The goal was to see if the students improved after taking the DCL curriculum. Results showed they did.

For example, about 27% of students scored 3 out of 4 or above on claim-evidence integration (one of the argumentation skills) in their essays at the beginning of the course. But that increased to 43% at the end of the course.

Use of disciplinary thinking also showed an increase from 27% to 48% after the DCL curriculum was completed.

The researchers said they are hopeful that a curriculum like this could help long-term in healing some of the fractures in our society.

“We believe that if we can embrace these civic competencies, we can find common ground, even with our different beliefs and different backgrounds,” Lin said.

“We can still work together as a group to solve our problems.”

The research was supported by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences.

Other Ohio State co-authors were Adriana Martinez Calvit, Ziye Wen, Yue Sheng, Michael Glassman and Eric Anderman. Saetbyul Kim from the Korean Educational Development Institute was also a co-author.

Decades of basic research into the science of reading have established that this ability is essential to learning to read. However, researchers know less about the science of teaching reading, or how to most effectively and efficiently support children’s achievement of phonemic awareness.

Scholars disagree as to whether young children should be taught phonemic awareness or start with larger units of sound – for example, in compound words such as bat-man or air-port.

A new project, titled Optimizing Early Phonological Awareness Instruction to Support Reading and Spelling Acquisition, will add to the science under the guidance of literacy researcher Shayne Piasta, a professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning. She will work in conjunction with collaborators Beth Phillips, Chris Schatschneider and Lakeisha Johnson at Florida State University.

Funded by a $3.2 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health, the researchers will determine best practices for facilitating young children’s development of phonemic awareness and continued literacy success.

In Ohio, Piasta and her team will identify preschool and kindergarten children in Columbus City Schools and other local schools who may benefit from additional support to develop phonemic awareness. Additional preschool and kindergarten children will participate in Florida.

Some students will receive 6-12 weeks of extra instruction during the school day. They will either start with phonemic awareness or first be taught to manipulate larger units of sound.

The team will follow children from preschool or kindergarten through first grade to see impacts on conventional reading and spelling outcomes. They will also study when phonemic awareness instruction might be most impactful.

“I am thrilled to collaborate with Columbus-area schools and my FSU colleagues on this research,” Piasta said. “Together, we will not only provide extra early literacy instruction to students, but also answer important questions about how and when to teach phonemic awareness. The findings will directly inform classroom literacy practice.”

The results of this project will contribute to the basic science, helping increase understanding of how children learn to recognize sounds in words and how this affects their reading and spelling skills.

The findings also will help guide the creation of learning standards, teaching methods and support programs to better prevent and address children’s reading difficulties.

Curriculum developers and reading teachers alike will be able to use the results to help struggling readers achieve reading fluency.

Piasta’s research group, the Early Literacy and Learning Lab, is located in the College of Education and Human Ecology Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, where she is also a faculty associate.

Comics like “The Family Circus,” “Ziggy” and “Little Lulu” are often seen as simplistic and not worthy of critical attention, argues Michelle Ann Abate, author of the new book Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States.

“There tends to be a belief there isn’t much to analyze there. You don’t need a lot of critical thinking skills to see ‘Little Lulu’ slipping on banana peels and get the joke,” said Abate, who is a professor of literature for children and young adults at The Ohio State University’s College of Education and Human Ecology.

And while some one-panel comics do rely on slapstick gags, wordplay, and simple puns, Abate said she found while researching Singular Sensations that there’s much more to many of the one-panels.

Even comics like “Ziggy” that don’t have a lot of cultural cachet have something to offer when read critically. 

“‘Ziggy’ was often about the hassles of ‘adulting’ before adulting was even a word. ‘Ziggy’ has a lot of clever humor about the everyday setbacks that most people can relate to,” she remarked.  “There’s a lot that resonates even now, decades later.”

As Abate notes, perhaps no other single-panel comic has been more acclaimed and loved than “The Far Side” by Gary Larson.

“It was among the first places in our culture that really celebrated and showcased nerdiness.”

While “The Far Side” doesn’t have a recurring cast of characters, it did have recurring types of characters: mainly nerds of all kinds, from geeky middle-aged scientists to dorky adolescent schoolchildren.

At the time when Larson started “The Far Side” in 1980, nerdiness was not at the center of popular culture and valued in the way it is now, according to Abate.

Even though Larson’s series relied on wordplay and puns, “it was the kind of puns and wordplay that nerds in particular would enjoy and that you don’t see in other single-panel comics before it.”

But it wasn’t just the nerdiness that made “The Far Side” stand out, she said: It was the aesthetics, the way Larson drew the characters, particularly the humans. As one critic said, “his people are grotesque.”

The very first “Far Side” comic showed the combination of nerdy subject matter and awkward, gangly, and even sometimes “ugly” humans that made Larson famous. The foreground showed two crabs talking to one another, while two human youngsters build a sandcastle in the background.

The two crabs were drawn to look friendly and adorable, Abate said. But the kids were distorted and didn’t look cute like the children depicted in most comics. And the caption was true nerdiness: One crab was telling the other, “Yes … they are quite strange during the larval stage.”

The way humans were drawn in “The Far Side” was novel at the time.

“In Larson’s series, no child was cute, no man was handsome, and no woman was beautiful by conventional standards,” Abate wrote.

“The odd, unusual and even unsightly appearance of ‘The Far Side’s’ human characters did not distract readers from the content of the panel. On the contrary, such depictions echoed and even amplified the theme, topic or message.”

Abate said Larson’s aesthetic style defied a longstanding trend in American newspaper comics. Much of the emphasis has been on making the case for comics as fine art. And indeed, many cartoonists, especially graphic novelists, are known for the beauty and skill behind their incredible artwork. But Larson’s drawing is intentionally unflattering and awkward.

“It just really went against the grain of what was happening in comics,” she said.

“It gets readers to think about the aesthetics of ugliness and — paradoxically — what might be called the beauty of ugliness.  Moreover, it also invites us to ponder what we deem ugly and why. It may even get us to learn to value what we thought of as ugly, rather than denigrate it.”

While many people have rightly focused on Larson’s impact on nerd culture, Abate hopes to call more attention to his contribution in the realm of comics aesthetics.  The awkward, unflattering, and gangly way that Larson rendered his nerdy characters, Abate argues, is just as important as the nerdiness of their personalities.  Many online comics — such as “The Oatmeal” and “Hyperbole and a Half” — render their human figures in ways can be seen as echoing and even extending Larson’s style.

Beyond just “The Far Side,” Abate said that single-panel comics deserve more recognition as an important type of cartoon art. Many of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed titles over the years — from “The Far Side,” “Ziggy,” and “The Family Circus” to “Heathcliff,” “Marmaduke,” and cartoons in The New Yorker — have been single-panel.  Comics as we know them and especially as we love them in the United States would not be the same without the single-panel form. 

Singular Sensations examines an array of popular one-panel comics from the 1890s through the present day.  In addition to her discussion of “The Far Side,” she has chapters on political cartoons, comics from The New Yorker, “The Family Circus,” “The Yellow Kid,” “Little Lulu,” the groundbreaking series “Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger” by Jackie Ormes, “Ziggy,” and “Bizarro.”

“Single-panel comics are not only comics,” Abate’s book asserts, “they are examples of the medium at its most concentrated, compact and concise.”

Gary Larson — and his nerdy characters — would likely agree.

In a study comparing weight loss results on low-fat and ketogenic diets with and without the addition of ketone supplements, 11 of 13 pre-menopausal participants who achieved nutritional ketosis reported at least one change in menstrual frequency, intensity – or both – during the intervention.

Women on low-fat diets did not report any change to their periods. All women had lost the same relative percentage of weight. Their average age was 34, and all were healthy but overweight.

“There were six women who hadn’t had a period in over a year – who felt like their typical cycles were over. And their periods actually restarted on the diet,” said Madison Kackley, lead author of the study and a research scientist and lecturer in human sciences at The Ohio State University.

“Our hypothesis after seeing these results is that the presence of ketones may help regulate women’s health in regard to endocrine, cognitive and metabolic influences.”

The study was published recently in PLOS ONE.

As a PhD student, Kackley worked in the lab led by Jeff Volek, senior author of the paper and professor of human sciences at Ohio State, who has been studying the health effects of the very-low-carbohydrate/high-fat ketogenic diet for 25 years.

The keto diet converts fat into ketones used by cells in the body and brain as an alternative to glucose. Supplements also elevate blood ketones without a change in eating habits. All are designed to put the body in nutritional ketosis – the human body’s state when it has greater access to ketones as both fuel and a signaling molecule. 

Nineteen women participated in the weight-loss diet trial – seven on a ketogenic diet alone, six on a keto diet combined with ketone salt supplements, and six on a low-fat diet. Researchers provided all of the food for the six-week study.

Both interventions resulted in clinically significant weight loss, less body fat, healthier cholesterol levels and better insulin sensitivity.

Menstrual history was one of dozens of lifestyle questions researchers asked about in biweekly assessments. Participants’ self-reports about their cycles took Kackley and colleagues by surprise.

“It’s not a validated survey, but when we were reviewing responses, we realized we were changing the majority of these women’s cycles. Even for women who had normal menstrual cycles, their frequency changed,” Kackley said. “One of our participants was 33 years old and had never had a period in her life. She had her period for the first time after being in nutritional ketosis for five days.”

The two women who reported no change to their cycles were taking oral contraceptives. Women who reported menstrual changes were not using birth control.

Digging deeper into findings related to ketone supplementation is one goal of Kackley’s research program going forward. While the addition of keto salts to the diet did not contribute to improved weight or health markers, ketone levels were high in all of the women on the keto diet – including the two whose menstruation didn’t change. The finding hints at an individualized effect of added ketones in the blood.

“It was just the presence of ketones that essentially changed the menstrual cycle,” she said. “So if we’re looking for that signaling effect as opposed to a weight loss effect, then I think ketone supplementation could actually play a role in the grand scheme of hormonal regulation.”

Kackley is now working to pin down the mechanisms that explain this association. She has established a new lab at Ohio State dedicated to studying links between nutrition, exercise and women’s health.

As part of evaluating and selecting a tool to standardize tracking of research participants’ menstrual cycles in future studies, her team is currently monitoring a pilot group of women for the range of changes that occur between and during periods: muscle strength, fat composition, water retention, energy expenditure, hormone levels, body temperature and more. As far as Kackley is aware, this comprehensive data has never been collected before for the purposes of addressing cyclical changes with nutrition and/or exercise.

She envisions identifying interventions that not only help resolve women’s health concerns – such as polycystic ovary syndrome, perimenopause and postpartum depression, which her lab is currently studying – but also take some of the mystery out of menstruation, especially when it’s irregular or stops. An estimated 5 to 7% of women of reproductive age in the United States experience three months without a period each year.

“This research is incredibly important because there are so many unanswered questions for women,” Kackley said. “We’re trying to change things for women and give them some control – something we historically haven’t had over our reproductive status.”

The Department of Human Sciences in Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology provided seed funds for Kackley’s lab. Metagenics Inc. provided the study supplements.

Additional co-authors include Alex Buga, Teryn Sapper, Christopher Crabtree, Bradley Robinson, Justen Stoner, Drew Decker and Loriana Soma of Ohio State, and Milene Brownlow and Annalouise O’Connor of Metagenics.

In the study of 30 people with a range of experience levels in handling a rifle, researchers at The Ohio State University found that a ballistic simulator captured data on the shooters’ accuracy, decision-making and reaction time – down to the millimeter in distance and millisecond in time – on a consistent basis. 

In addition to confirming that the simulator – called the VirTra V-100 – is a dependable research tool, the findings could lead to establishing the first-ever standardized performance scores for virtual reality ballistics training. 

“To our knowledge, we’re the first team to answer the question of whether the simulator could be converted to an assessment tool and if it’s credible to use it day-to-day,” said Alex Buga, first author of the study and a PhD student in kinesiology at Ohio State. 

“We’ve figured out how to export the data and interpret it. We’ve focused on the three big challenges of marksmanship, decision-making and reaction time to measure 21 relevant variables – allowing us to put a report in a user’s hand and say, ‘This is how accurate, precise, focused and fast you are.’” 

The study was published online June 6 in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 

U.S. military leaders and law enforcement agencies have shown an interest in increasing the use of virtual reality for performance assessment, said Buga and senior study author Jeff Volek, professor of human sciences at Ohio State. Earlier this year, an Ohio Attorney General Task Force on the Future of Police Training in Ohio recommended incorporating virtual reality technology into training protocols. 

Volek is the principal investigator on a $10 million U.S. Department of Defense grant focused on improving the health of military service members, veterans and the American public. As part of that initiative, the research team is investigating the extent to which nutritional ketosis reduces detrimental effects of sleep loss on cognitive and physical performance in ROTC cadets – including their shooting ability as measured by the VirTra simulator. Verifying the simulator’s results for research purposes triggered the attempt to extract and analyze its data.

“We were using it as an outcome variable for research, and we found that it has very good day-to-day reproducibility of performance, which is crucial for research,” Volek said. “You want a sensitive and reproducible outcome in your test where there’s not a lot of device or equipment variation.”

Because the lab also focuses on human performance in first responders, researchers’ conversations with military and law enforcement communities convinced Buga that data collected by the simulator could be more broadly useful. 

“I created a few programs that enabled us to calculate the shooting data and produce objective training measures,” he said. “This equipment is close to what the military and police use every day, so this has potential to be used as a screening tool across the country.” 

Users of the simulator operate the infrared-guided M4 rifle by shooting at a large screen onto which different digitally generated visuals are projected – no headset required. The rifle at Ohio State has been retrofitted to produce the same recoil as a police or military weapon. 

The study participants included civilians, police and SWAT officers, and ROTC cadets. Each was first familiarized in a single learning session with the simulator and then completed multiple rounds of three different tasks in each of three study performance sessions. 

In the first task, participants fired at the same target a total of 50 times to produce measures of shooting precision. The decision-making assessment involved shooting twice within two seconds at designated shapes and colors on a screen displaying multiple shape and color choices. In the reaction-time scenario, participants shot at a series of plates from left to right as rapidly as possible. 

Internal consistency ratings showed the simulator generated good to excellent test-retest agreement on the 21 variables measured.

All participants were well-rested and completed the study sessions at about the same time of day. Self-evaluations showed that participants’ overall confidence about their shooting performance increased from their first to final sessions. They also rated the simulator as a realistic and a low-stress shooting assessment tool. 

The low stress and well-rested conditions were important to establishing baseline performance measures, the researchers noted, which then would enable evaluating how injuries and other physical demands of first-responder professions affect shooting performance. 

“This simulator could be used to assess the effectiveness of specific training programs designed to improve shooting performance, or to evaluate marksmanship in response to various stressors encountered by the same law enforcement and military personnel,” Buga said. “These novel lines of evidence have enabled us to push the boundaries of tactical research and set the groundwork for using virtual reality in sophisticated training scenarios that support national defense goals.” 

Additional co-authors, all from Ohio State, included Drew Decker, Bradley Robinson, Christopher Crabtree, Justen Stoner, Lucas Arce, Xavier El-Shazly, Madison Kackley, Teryn Sapper, John Paul Anders and William Kraemer.

In the first work to introduce the concept, researchers have outlined the role an AI concierge, a technologically advanced assistant, may play in various areas of the service sector as well as the different forms such a helper might embody. 

Their paper envisions a virtual caretaker that, by combining natural language processing, behavioral data and predictive analytics, would anticipate a customer’s needs, suggest certain actions, and automate routine tasks without having to be explicitly commanded to do so. 

Though such a skilled assistant is still years away, Stephanie Liu, lead author of the paper and an associate professor of hospitality management at The Ohio State University, and her colleagues drew insight from several contemporary fields, including service management, psychology, human-computer interaction and ethics research, to detail what opportunities and challenges might arise from having an AI concierge manage human encounters. 

“The traditional service industry uses concierges for high-end clients, meaning that only a few people have access to them,” Liu said. “Now with the assistance of AI technology, everybody can have access to a concierge providing superior experiences.”

On that premise, the benefits of incorporating AI into customer service are twofold: It would allow companies to offer around-the-clock availability and consistency in their operations as well as improve how individuals engage with professional service organizations, she said. 

Moreover, as the younger workforce gravitates to more tech-oriented jobs and global travel becomes more common, generative AI could be an apt solution to deal with the escalating demands of evolving hospitality trends, said Liu. 

“The development of AI technology for hotels, restaurants, health care, retail and tourism has a lot of potential,” she said. 

The paper was published recently in the Journal of Service Management. 

Despite the social and economic benefits associated with implementing such machines, how effective AI concierges may be at completing a task is dependent on both the specific situation and the type of interface consumers use, said Liu. 

There are four primary forms a smart aide might take, each with distinctive attributes that would provide consumers with different levels of convenience, according to Liu. 

The first type is a dialogue interface that uses only text or speech to communicate, such as ChatGPT, a conversational agent often used to make inquiries and garner real-time assistance. Many of these interactive devices are already used in hotels and medical buildings for contactless booking or to connect consumers with other services and resources. 

The second is a virtual avatar that employs a vivid digital appearance and a fully formed persona to foster a deeper emotional connection with the consumer. This method is often utilized for telehealth consultations and online learning programs.  

The third iteration is a holographic projection wherein a simulated 3D image is brought into the physical world. According to the paper, this is ideally suited for scenarios where the visual impact is desired, but physical assistance itself is not necessary. 

The paper rounds out the list by suggesting an AI concierge that would present as a tangible, or touchable robot. This form would offer the most human-like sensory experiences and would likely be able to execute multiple physical tasks, like transporting heavy luggage. 

Some international companies have already developed these cutting-edge tools for use in a limited capacity. One robotic concierge, known as Sam, was designed to aid those in senior living communities by helping them check in, make fall risk assessments and support staff with non-medical tasks. Another deployed at South Korea’s Incheon International Airport helped consumers navigate paths to their destination and offered premier shopping and dining recommendations. 

Yet as advanced computing algorithms become more intertwined in our daily lives, industry experts will likely have to consider consumer privacy concerns when deciding when and where to implement these AI systems. One way to deal with these issues would be to create the AI concierge with limited memory or other safewalls to protect stored personal data, such as identity and financial information, said Liu.  

“Different companies are at different stages with this technology,” said Liu. “Some have robots that can detect customers’ emotions or take biometric inputs and others have really basic ones. It opens up a totally different level of service that we have to think critically about.”

What’s more, the paper notes that having a diversity of concierge options available for consumers to choose from is also advantageous from a mental health standpoint.

Because AI is viewed as having less agency than their human counterparts, it might help mitigate psychologically uncomfortable service situations that could arise because of how consumers feel they might be perceived by a human concierge. This reduced apprehension regarding the opinion of a machine may encourage heightened comfort levels and result in more favorable responses about the success of the AI concierge, said Liu. 

Ultimately, there’s still much multidisciplinary testing to be done to ensure these technologies can be applied in a widespread and equitable manner. Liu adds that future research should seek to determine how certain design elements, such as the perceived gender, ethnicity or voice of these robotic assistants, would impact overall consumer satisfaction. 

Researchers surveyed over 9,000 U.S. teachers shortly before and during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic about their perception of the instructional emphasis in their schools. Participants also reported whether they had been subjected to physical, verbal or property violence – by students, parents, colleagues and/or administrators. 

Results showed that a school culture focused on performance was associated with higher levels of all types of teacher-directed violence before and during COVID-19, while school emphasis on mastery of material was related to lower levels of violence aimed at educators. 

“What was really striking was this performance culture predicted all kinds of increased violence by students, whether it be physical violence, verbal threatening or property violence,” said Eric Anderman, lead author of the study and professor of educational psychology at The Ohio State University. 

“It wasn’t the mastery part. It was when there’s this focus on grades and test scores – ‘you’ve got to get good grades, school is all about grades’ – that’s when kids acted out against teachers.” 

Given the evidence that nearly half of U.S. teachers are highly unsatisfied, the authors concluded that fostering a school culture of deep engagement in learning could make students happier and teachers safer. 

The study was published online Feb. 20 in the Journal of School Violence. 

Anderman and colleagues surveyed a total of 9,363 teachers of pre-K to high school classes in suburban, urban and rural districts across the United States over two time periods: between fall 2019 and March 2020, and during the 2020-2021 academic year. 

Among the types of violence teachers reported included objects being thrown at them, obscene remarks or gestures directed their way, and damage to personal or classroom property. When assessing school culture, they rated such statements as “Teachers believe all students can learn,” an indication of a climate focused on mastery, or “Teachers treat kids who get good grades better than other kids,” signaling a climate focused on performance and grades. 

Statistical analysis of the data controlled for numerous variables to look specifically for the link between school climate and violence directed at teachers. 

In addition to those connections, the study showed that this violence didn’t stop during and shortly after the COVID-19 lockdown. About 65% of surveyed teachers reported at least one incidence of verbal threats or property damage by students before the pandemic, compared to 32% and 26% of teachers reporting similar incidents, respectively, in 2020-21. Over half of teachers reported violence by parents before COVID-19, a figure that dropped to 29% early in the pandemic. 

“The rates are lower, but the rates are still there,” Anderman said. “People say no one was in schools then. That’s not true. A lot of times teachers were in the building, but the students were at home. And some of the violence occurred over Zoom.” 

Student violence toward teachers was more common overall, but the study showed the same relationship trend between school culture and rates of teacher-directed violence by parents, colleagues and administrators. 

“If the school was really focused on grades, you had more instances of parents, colleagues and administrators doing things that were harmful to teachers,” Anderman said. “But if the school focused on mastery – if people in school said this is a place where we really encourage kids to learn as much as they can to master material – you for the most part get less of the colleagues and parents and administrators engaging in any type of violence perpetrated against teachers.” 

Anderman described a mastery climate as one in which students who take longer than a peer to solve a math equation aren’t considered worse students, and where students who perform poorly on a test might be given a do-over to try to bring up their grade. With mastery, grades still matter – but encouraging kids to really learn is the larger goal. 

On the other hand, pushing students to get good grades can lead to frustration, a major predictor of aggressive behavior, he said. 

“This is something we can change that doesn’t cost millions of dollars to change,” Anderman said. “This is taking time to really think about when we’re talking to kids, how much are we stressing the grades? This is about changing the way we talk to kids about what learning is about and what is really important.” 

This study was part of the work of the American Psychological Association Task Force on Violence Against Teachers and School Personnel. 

Co-authors included Ohio State postdoctoral researchers Andrew Perry and Hyun Ji Lee, and task force members from DePaul University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Center for Justice Innovation; Rutgers University; and the University of California, Berkeley.

A new national study found that double majors had a substantial protection against earning shocks – an average of 56% - compared to those who had a single major.

Think of a double major as a form of insurance against downturns in an occupation or the broader economy, said Andrew Hanks, lead author of the study and associate professor of consumer sciences at The Ohio State University.

“Someone with a single major is going to experience the full effect of a negative fluctuation in wages, while a double major will be somewhat shielded,” Hanks said.

The value of a double major is largest for those who major in two unrelated fields – say engineering and business – compared to those who major in two related fields, such as two social sciences.

Findings showed those with two unrelated majors were buffered by earnings shocks by 64%, compared to 36% for those with related majors.

The study was published today (Jan. 29, 2024) as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.

The study examined data from the American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.  The researchers analyzed data from 2009 to 2019.

In the dataset, 10% of participants - 145,826 people – had double majors. Of those, 70% were in unrelated fields and 30% were in related fields.

The advantage for double majors appears to be that they have more diverse skill and knowledge sets, said study co-author Bruce Weinberg, professor of economics at Ohio State.

People with double majors have diversified their human capital, similar to what investors do with their financial capital when they invest in a wide range of companies, industries and countries, Weinberg said.

“It is odd that we’ve spent so much time thinking about diversification in financial markets and so little time thinking about diversification in human capital markets,” Weinberg said.

Diversification shows up in several ways in the findings.  For example, double majors are less likely to work in occupations that are closely related to their majors, the study found.

And, relatedly, they are more likely to work in jobs that require a diverse set of skills and knowledge, said Xuechao Qian, an economics PhD graduate of Ohio State and now the Lazear-Long Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University.

“If you have a broader range of knowledge, a broader range of skills, that makes you more valuable to an employer than someone with a more narrow skill set,” Qian said.

“You’re going to be more versatile in response to income shocks than those who are better in a smaller set of skill or knowledge areas.”

Another possible expected advantage to double majors would be that they earn more than those with a single major.  Somewhat surprisingly, that doesn’t seem to be true in this or other studies. Any income boost from a double major seems to be relatively small.

“The biggest return to being a double major isn’t in terms of having higher earnings,” Weinberg said.  “It’s in the form of having greater protection for whatever earnings you have.”

The researchers confirmed their findings using a different data set, the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG).

The NSCG dataset allowed the researchers to explore one issue with their results. It is possible that it isn’t having a double major itself that helps people – it is the fact that people who pursue double majors have special interests and abilities that protect them from income shocks later in life.

Using NSCG data, the researchers took into account parental education and the quality of schools attended by those with double majors, which may give some indication of whether they have special abilities that could explain the protection they enjoy.

But the results suggest that these indicators don’t explain away the value of double majors in later life.

“We can’t say for sure that there isn’t something about people who get double majors that helps explain why they fare better against income shocks,” Weinberg said.  “But actually getting the double majors seems to play some role.”

The findings suggest some ways that colleges might help their students diversify their human capital, according to the researchers.

First, double majors might be encouraged by fostering collaboration between different academic departments.

Also, career counseling could highlight the advantages to students of diversifying their human capital.  Even if students don’t enroll in a double major, counseling could help them be more thoughtful about their choice of minors and the breadth of classes they take.

And it is never too late to learn, the researchers said.

“Diversifying skills and knowledge throughout your career could help you weather labor market volatility,” Hanks said.

Other co-authors on the study were Shengun Jian, an economics PhD graduate of Ohio State, now at Wuhan University in China; and Bo Wang, a family resource management PhD graduate of Ohio State, now at Nankai University in China.

By Ashley L. Landers, Assistant Professor of Human Sciences, The Ohio State University

Native American children are still disproportionately represented in the U.S. child welfare system. grandriver/E+ via Getty Images

Native American mothers whose children were separated from them – either through child removal for assimilation into residential boarding schools or through coerced adoption – experience the kind of grief no parent should ever feel. Yet theirs is a loss that is ongoing, with no sense of meaning or closure.

While some families have eventually been reunited, far too many languish in the child welfare system, where Native American children are overrepresented as a result of discrimination and racial bias, structural racism and increased exposure to poverty.

A panel I attended years ago in California was composed of three birth mothers representing three generations of Native American women who had lost a child to foster care or adoption. While each story was unique, they had one thing in common: a never-ending grief that had stayed with them long after they were separated from their children.

I still vividly recall that, with a lump in her throat, one of these mothers said, “I can still hear my baby crying.” Those mothers and their stories left a lasting impression on me and my colleagues, which was the catalyst for a new line of research for us. After listening to the panel, my collaborator Sandy White Hawk, a Sicangu Lakota elder of the Rosebud Tribe in South Dakota, responded, “We have to do something for our birth mothers. We cannot let them pass to the other side carrying this grief.”

I am an assistant professor of human sciences and I conduct research in partnership with the First Nations Repatriation Institute. This work focuses on the health and well-being of Native American families that have experienced family separation by way of the foster care system and adoption.

For the past 10 years, we have explored the outcomes of fostered and adopted children and what happens when families are reunified.

Foster care and adoption

The adoption era refers to a period of time beginning in the 1950s with the Indian Adoption Project, a collaborative effort between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Child Welfare League of America. It aimed to promote the adoption of Native American children into non-Native homes and has been criticized as another attempt at forced assimilation into non-Native American culture and the destruction of Native American families.

The adoption era continued until the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which aimed to protect the best interests of Native American children by establishing federal standards for their removal and placement. An estimated 25% to 35% of Native American children were removed from their families prior to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.

The Indian Child Welfare Act protects Indian children by prioritizing placement with extended families, within the tribe or with an Indian family.

The child welfare system tracks when children leave the system through reunification with family of origin. Reunification can occur after aging out of foster care at age 18 or being adopted.

To date, there is no way to consistently track how many fostered and adopted Native American children have reunited with their family of origin. However, our team’s studies suggest that more than 80% of Native American people who were fostered or adopted eventually reunify.

Separated families

The loss of a child to foster care, adoption or both is not uncommon in the United States. In 2021, approximately 606,031 children were involved in the foster care system. According to the latest data provided by the Children’s Bureau, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in September 2021 more than 391,000 children were residing in foster care and over 113,000 were waiting to be adopted. In addition, more than 54,240 children were adopted through public child welfare agencies in 2021.

Legislation known as the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 requires only that states report adoptions that occur in public child welfare agencies. Therefore, the statistics above do not account for the thousands of children who are adopted, often as infants, through private agencies outside of the child welfare system. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine the total number of children adopted each year in the U.S.

This is especially true for Native American children. Alarming numbers of Native American children remain involved in the child welfare system. Allegations of abuse and neglect of Native children at the hands of their parents and other caregivers are twice as likely to be investigated, and Native American children are four times more likely to be placed out of the home than white children.

In my view, the rights of Native American caregivers to raise their children have been violated by systematic practices of child removal that targeted Native American families. Until recently, Native American mothers have been omitted from research on the grief and loss of birth parents.

Systematic child removal and adoption has left generations of Native American families with unreconciled grief and loss. Alison Wright/Corbis Documentary via Getty Images

Ambiguous loss

As a family therapist, I have sat with hundreds of families that were grieving the loss of a loved one, particularly a child lost to miscarriage, stillbirth and even death. Still, I was struck by the grief of Native American birth mothers. This grief was different. While it sounded like the grief that follows the death of a child, these children had not died. They were taken. They were alive but still lost.

While my colleagues and I have spoken with dozens of Native American birth mothers over the years, we interviewed eight of them who lost a child to adoption for what is called a phenomenological study. Phenomenology is used to explore the lived experiences of a group of people who experienced a similar event or phenomenon.

We wanted to understand the lived experiences of these mothers. We asked them how they became a birth mother, how their child came to be adopted and how this experience affected their health and well-being.

Our study found that these Native American birth mothers experienced ambiguous loss, which is a loss that remains unverified and without resolution.

In Native American culture, mothers are revered as “life givers.” The loss of a child to adoption stripped Native American birth mothers of this respected role and of their dignity.

Loss is often linked to death, but there are other types of losses. In ambiguous loss, there is no closure or resolution. Ambiguous loss is different from other kinds of loss. It is unfathomable, confusing and immobilizing.

There are two primary types of ambiguous loss. One is a psychological absence with physical presence, such as when a loved one has dementia. Another is physical absence with psychological presence, such as the loss of a child to the foster care or adoption system.

The downstream effects

Our research suggests that many Native American birth mothers felt forced to surrender their children to adoption because they were young and lacked resources. In many cases, they were unable to say goodbye or hold the baby. They felt ashamed and unworthy.

In addition to the unresolved grief, these mothers became vulnerable to mental health and substance abuse problems.

From my perspective, there are glaring and unanswered questions on the ethics and well-being of foster and adoption practices for children separated from Native American families. Native American adults who were fostered, adopted or both have also reported experiencing profound grief that parallels the ambiguous loss felt by Native American birth mothers.

The healing of Native American birth mothers will be an ongoing and collective effort. One by one, Native American birth mothers are telling their stories. These stories are gaining momentum. What happened to one woman happened to many others.

Credit to Sicangu Lakota elder Sandy White Hawk, founder and director of First Nations Repatriation Institute, whose vision guides this work. White Hawk is a senior author on studies that emerge from this work.

Ashley L. Landers, Assistant Professor of Human Sciences, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By

Eric M. Anderman, Professor of Educational Psychology and Quantitative Research, Evaluation, and Measurement, The Ohio State University

Tzu-Jung Lin, Professor of Educational Psychology, The Ohio State University

Students become more emotionally engaged with history when it’s presented in an interactive way, research shows. SDI Productions via Getty Images

The eyes of the fifth graders in Ms. Evans’ class widened as they saw a dazzling light on the classroom smartboard and the phrase, “Let’s do the Time Warp!”

Ms. Evans, who teaches at a large suburban school in central Ohio, told her students that they were about to take a trip to a Native American community as it existed in the 19th century.

“We are now traveling back in time to Florida in the 1800s to visit a village of the Seminole,” Ms. Evans told her class excitedly as she began to read aloud the story of Seminole leader Osceola.

In the story, Osceola says, “The white man wants our groves of orange trees, our fine harbors, our full forests, and warm fertile lands. But they are ours. Here are our fish and birds and animals, the graves of our fathers, the grounds of our children.”

Immediately, a beautiful village appears on their Chromebooks. The students are welcomed by the Seminole before they engage with a series of interactive slides. They are introduced to the foods the Seminole eat, the clothes they wear and their daily experiences. They are invited to stay and live with the Seminole while they visit. However, on this first day of the history unit, students do not yet know that soon Osceola will face captivity by U.S. troops, who trick him into meeting for a truce.

The experience exemplifies the kinds of social studies lessons that our research group – Digital Civic Learning – has been developing since 2020 to enable students to use immersive storytelling to better understand different perspectives on complex historical issues, as well as current social ones. We’ve been working with elementary school teachers from several school districts in Ohio.

Overcoming a narrow view of history

Whereas other curricula may emphasize memorization of facts and dates, our approach emphasizes dialogue among students to make learning history more exciting.

In our view as educational psychologists, the need for such an approach is made clear by national data, which shows that American teenagers’ knowledge of U.S. history has been declining for the past decade.

Some of the history curricula currently used in schools are rooted in settler colonialism, which focuses on the displacement of Indigenous populations with new settlers, and often minimizes the perspectives of underrepresented populations.

Our approach integrates technology, immersive learning – such as an up-close look at the daily lives of the Seminole – and collaborative small-group discussions into daily social studies instruction.

The interactive experiences that students have with the Seminole were created using Google Slides. The slides consist of illustrations, story narrations, easy-to-read texts and interactive activities developed by our team. Beyond history, we also created units in geography, government and economics. Each unit was designed for upper elementary school students and delivered to students over two weeks.

Discussing dilemmas

Students actively participate in small-group discussions on the third and ninth day of each unit.

In our Seminole example, students are asked to reflect on the Treaty of Payne’s Landing, signed in 1832. The treaty required the Seminole to give up their land in Florida in exchange for new land in the West.

They discuss the dilemma that Osceola faced when deciding whether to accept the treaty in order to maintain peace, or to refuse to agree to the new treaty so that the Seminole could stay on their land.

Our approach to teaching history also emphasizes connections with current events, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline. The construction of the pipeline will help the economy by creating jobs and making the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil. However, the pipeline will be built on land owned by Native Americans who are deeply concerned that the pipeline will lead to contamination of groundwater and soil.

Students learn about a related situation in which the federal government has been debating whether to approve the construction of another pipeline in Minnesota that would go directly through Native American land. Working in groups, students come up with reasons for being either for or against the construction of the pipeline.

Based on our analysis of student discussions and essays over the course of this unit, we’ve found that through these immersive learning and interactive practices, students work more collaboratively and are more likely to consider multiple perspectives in civic debates.

Surveys also found that students who participated in the curriculum became more emotionally engaged with learning history – in part by making emotional connections with story characters – as they developed a deeper understanding of how historical events affect people’s lives.

Eric M. Anderman, Professor of Educational Psychology and Quantitative Research, Evaluation, and Measurement, The Ohio State University and Tzu-Jung Lin, Professor of Educational Psychology, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

That young person might be experiencing homelessness, a condition that is rising among youth in our society. 

Homelessness among youth is not rare. Recent United States estimates indicate that 1 in 30 adolescents (ages 13-17) and 1 in 10 young adults (ages 18-25) experience homelessness each year.

To complicate matters, youth are disproportionately burdened by the opioid epidemic. Their reported rates of opioid use, often used to escape from the depression and trauma of homelessness, is up to 79%. The result: mental health issues, drug overdose and suicide.  

Yet research to end homelessness and prevent or intervene in drug use and mental health problems among these youth has lagged that of adults, which puts this segment of the nation’s future – our youth – in jeopardy. 

Researchers at The Ohio State University are committed to working to change these discouraging numbers. An interdisciplinary team that includes service providers in the community has begun a groundbreaking five-year, $6.9 million grant project.  

Funding comes from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse and its Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative. 

The project will provide nurses, counselors and mental health service professionals with a tested approach to intervene in opioid use. It is titled “Building Social and Structural Connections for the Prevention of Opioid Use Disorder among Youth Experiencing Homelessness: A Randomized, Controlled Trial Examining Biopsychosocial Mechanisms.”

The two principal investigators are Jodi Ford, professor in Ohio State’s College of Nursing, assistant director of the Martha S. Pitzer Center for Women, Children, and Youth, and director of the Stress Science Lab, and Natasha Slesnick, distinguished professor and associate dean for research in Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology.

“Our research, and that of others, shows that exposure to adverse childhood and life experiences is linked to irregular patterns of cortisol, a primary stress hormone, and high levels of inflammation in the body,” said Ford. “That phenomenon may contribute to depression and death by suicide, as well as substance use, often used to reduce symptoms of psychological distress.”   

Ford’s and Slesnick’s research will be conducted in collaboration with Star House, the only drop-in center in Columbus serving youth experiencing homelessness. Ford said the project will document how evidence-based interventions targeting substance use, as well as connections to community services and safe and supportive people and places, can help prevent opioid and other substance misuse in Columbus’ population and across the country. 

Slesnick founded Star House in 2006. “We needed a 24/7 drop-in center because these youth tend to avoid services such as community shelters,” she said. “They cite issues such as predation by older adult shelter clients and fear of being returned to foster care or home settings where they had negative experiences.”  

An independent nonprofit since 2017, Star House provides young people ages 14-24 with immediate access to safety and acceptance. Their basic needs, such as meals, showers and computer access, are met. And each year, 1,200 unduplicated youth are accessing those services. Crucial, stabilizing resources are offered through mental health therapy, job-search support and help transitioning to housing. 

In addition to serving the youths’ needs, the location hosts ongoing best-practice studies by Ford, Slesnick and other researchers. The researchers can interview youth, gather and analyze data to determine how best to meet their needs, and invite them to return for follow-up interviews. 

In this project, the research team will train the therapists and youth advocates at Star House to implement evidence-based interventions, which include a motivational and substance use/mental health intervention and an advocacy intervention focused on linkage to community and social supports.

“Our goal is to test the real-world effectiveness of the interventions individually and in combination to understand which is most effective in preventing opioid use disorder and other substance use and in improving mental health outcomes as well as homelessness,” Slesnick said.

“We also will conduct the first cost-benefit analysis on this approach, which has not been done before,” she said. “Knowing the cost of the interventions will help agencies plan for their adoption. Our goal is for this work to have practical benefit to those serving youth across the country.” 

The team will examine whether the interventions work, how they work and if they work for all youth or only specific groups.  

“We will be investigating the social connections of youth, their social isolation in the community and relationships to stress biology,” Ford said. “Specifically, we’ll examine how the intervention enhances social connections and a sense of belonging and reduces toxic stress associated with the significant adversity these youth experience daily.” 

Slesnick emphasized the importance of prioritizing youth well-being.

“By confronting and dismantling the barriers faced by youth, who aren’t fortunate to have caring adults in their lives, such as unstable housing and limited education, we can forge a pathway to a healthier and brighter future for generations to come,” she said. 

“We appreciate partnering with Star House to help the youth in our community, as well as to inform community intervention practices around the country,” Ford said. “Youth experiencing homelessness have many strengths, and like all youth, they need the care and support of individuals and communities to help them experience a healthy transition into adulthood.” 

Ford’s and Slesnick’s research team for the project will include Professor Xin Feng and Associate Professor Tansel Yilmaz, both with the College of Education and Human Ecology; College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Christopher Browning, Department of Sociology; and Beth Boettner, a research scientist in the Institute for Population Research, College of Arts and Sciences.  

By Shayne Piasta

Professor of Reading and Literacy, The Ohio State University

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adult Americans read below the sixth grade level. Teresa Short/Moment via Getty Images

Reading ability among U.S. students remained low in 2022, with 37% of fourth graders and 30% of eighth graders scoring below the basic proficiency levels for reading set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Although the COVID-19 school shutdowns are responsible for some of the learning loss, the numbers weren’t particular good prior to the pandemic, either – reading scores for U.S. students have been low for decades.

SciLine interviewed Dr. Shayne Piasta, a professor of reading and literacy at The Ohio State University and a faculty associate at the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy. Piasta discussed the various methods of reading instruction and how to get kids to love it.

Below are some highlights from the discussion. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

What is meant by the ‘science of reading’? And what are the misconceptions?

Shayne Piasta: The science of reading refers to the accumulated knowledge base we have from scientific research about the reading process, its components, how reading skills develop and how we can best support those who are learning to read.

One of the misconceptions I see is that the science of reading is equated with phonics instruction.

But the science of reading is a knowledge base, not a specific approach. Phonics instruction is a specific approach, whereby one is explicitly and intentionally teaching children all of those important links between letters and sounds, both at an individual letter level – like learning the alphabet – and at higher skill levels, such as learning about some complex spelling conventions that we have in the English language.

Although phonics instruction is a necessary component in learning to read, phonics instruction alone, without attending to other key reading components, such as language, comprehension, and concept and background knowledge, is insufficient.

What critical components are needed for a reading curriculum to be successful?

Shayne Piasta: First and foremost, I would expect a reading program to have a scope and sequence, meaning there is predetermined content of what’s going to be covered. And then that it’s in a particular order, often building from more simple skills or concepts to more complex ones.

This might apply to phonics instruction, where we’re going from simple letter sound correspondences and building up to more complex associations between letters, spelling patterns and how words are pronounced.

Any successful reading program should have a scope and sequence. It should definitely have it for the phonics component, but it should have it for other components as well.

What role does background knowledge play in learning to read?

Shayne Piasta: We’re learning more and more about how critical concept knowledge and background knowledge are for successful reading.

To understand the meaning being conveyed by text, which is the ultimate goal, children use the information they already know to make sense of text. A famous example involves a study in which children read a written passage about baseball. Children who knew a lot about baseball best understood the passage, regardless of reading ability.

This highlights the role of concept and background knowledge as foundations for understanding text meaning, and thus, reading comprehension.

Any reading curriculum should have opportunities for children to build those skills – to learn about our world, to make connections with the world, to make connections across different sources and types of information. This is particularly important given the diversity of classrooms. Educators cannot assume that children share certain knowledge or backgrounds.

Teachers need to provide opportunities to discuss and learn about concepts that children will read about. This includes topics like baseball as well as academic concepts like photosynthesis. And then they bring that conceptual and background knowledge with them when they’re going to read a new piece about a certain topic so they can actually make sense of it.

Again, it’s not phonics only. It’s phonics and these opportunities to support knowledge building as well as language skills.

Are any approaches especially effective for children from marginalized backgrounds?

Shayne Piasta: There are many evidence-based practices for building language for both children who speak English only and those who are English learners. This includes exposing children to more complex grammar during conversations and using routines to improve awareness of new vocabulary words.

The science of reading applies to all learners. Most practices that we would recommend are going to be helpful for students from a range of different backgrounds. That being said, it’s important to be able to identify the strengths and the learning needs of individual children.

How can parents support kids who are learning to read?

Shayne Piasta: For parents, I would recommend focusing on creating positive literacy environments at home. That is, having children see you reading, having children see you writing, and being clear about how literacy plays a role in your everyday life – not just having storybook time together or reading together, but doing activities like making grocery lists together.

Or maybe you could point out, “Hey, I’m reading these instructions so I can put together this piece of Ikea furniture.” So you’re really highlighting all of the important roles that literacy plays in daily life. In doing so, you can help children build positive connections with those reading opportunities so that it’s fun, engaging and something they want to do.

Watch the full interview to hear more.

SciLine is a free service based at the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories.

Shayne Piasta, Professor of Reading and Literacy, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Still, he named the beloved yellow bird character in “Peanuts” Woodstock after the famous counterculture music festival that was attended and celebrated by the younger generation who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, including many who saw themselves as hippies.

The question is why, says Michelle Ann Abate, author of the new book Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts.

Based on her critical analysis of the strips featuring Woodstock, Abate said she believes the character can be seen to represent the young people of the time in a positive and affirming way.

The way Woodstock was portrayed suggests Schulz didn’t share the sentiments of many others of his generation, who often criticized and sometimes reviled the Woodstock generation, said Abate, who is a professor of literature for children and young adults at The Ohio State University’s College of Education and Human Ecology.

“Charles Schulz saw the young people of the time in a different light than many other people of his generation,” she said.

“I believe you can view the character Woodstock as his critique of how young people were judged by adults of the time.”

Although the little yellow bird had appeared in “Peanuts” since the 1960s, Woodstock was first given the name in a June 22, 1970, strip.  While Schulz acknowledged that he named his character after the music festival, he was cryptic about his reasoning behind the name, Abate said.

But Abate believes there is little doubt that he was meant to represent the young adults of the time.  In fact, Snoopy even called Woodstock “a bird hippie” in several strips, she noted.

And it was telling how Schulz depicted this “bird hippie.”

“Of all the characters in ‘Peanuts,’ Woodstock is arguably the kindest, sweetest and most unassuming,” Abate writes in the book.

The character Woodstock is not portrayed in the way many adults viewed the young people who attended the music festival.

“The little bird is presented as innocently childlike, not immaturely childish,” Abate wrote. “Both in his relationship with Snoopy and his interactions with other characters, Woodstock is good, kind, gentle, sweet and caring.”

Another clue that Woodstock may represent the younger generation of the time was how he communicated in the strip.  His speech was shown as “chicken scratch” in the strip, and the only character who could understand him was Snoopy.

Abate noted that older generations often complain that they can’t understand younger people and talk about how they “speak a different language.”  That’s literally true of Woodstock in “Peanuts.”  It’s telling that Snoopy was the one who could understand him, given that he calls himself “groovy” in the strip, she said.

“Snoopy is a very sympathetic character in ‘Peanuts’ and is able to blur the lines between animals and humans, between different generations and different mindsets,” she said.

The connection between Snoopy and Woodstock was apparent even before Woodstock was given the name.

In 1964, Schulz published a sequence of strips where the little yellow bird and his feathered friends engaged in a series of demonstrations.  What the birds are protesting is not made known – their signs simply show punctuation marks or symbols. But after two full weeks of weekday strips, Snoopy declares that he always supports the “underbird.”

Schulz had a soft spot for the underdogs and their struggles, including young people, Abate said.

When “Peanuts” first started in 1950, it was about the struggle of young people growing up during that time, which was very different from the issues faced by those growing up in the 1960s and ’70s.

Abate said Charlie Brown and his peers might be called the “dour children,” while the Woodstock Generation were often called “flower children.”

“In the ’50s, Schulz was presenting kids as being depressed, being anxious, being philosophical, being anything but carefree and innocent,” Abate said.

“Initially, it was radical to suggest that young people weren’t all cute and innocent.  And then by the ’70s it became radical to say they were.”

But in both cases, “Peanuts” challenges mainstream beliefs about youth and youth culture, she said.  Woodstock played a big role in that after he was introduced.

“In the same way that the hippie movement was short-lived but enjoyed a long legacy, Schulz’s bird was physically small but had a big thematic impact … He changed one of the core messages in ‘Peanuts’,” Abate wrote.

Abate doesn’t offer a new view of just Woodstock in Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos.  She devotes chapters to other major and minor characters, including Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Lucy, reconsidering them in new lights.

Even though the last original “Peanuts” strip was published in 2000, the impact of the work has lived on. “Peanuts”-related shows continue to air on television and fans still buy a wide variety of “Peanuts” merchandise.

“‘Peanuts’ has really kept a foothold in popular culture, even 20 years or so after Schulz’s death,” Abate said.

“And more than that, it still is relevant. It is hard to imagine there is a cartoonist working today who has not been influenced in some way by Schulz and his work.”

_{Alt text for featured image:}

_{Peanuts comic strip, 12/14/2003, 10 panes. Pane 1 contains the title “Classic Peanuts featuring ‘Good ol Charlie Brown’ by Schulz.” Woodstock (a small yellow bird) is sitting next to a standing Snoopy (a medium white beagle with black ears) on the roof of Snoopy’s red doghouse. Snoopy is looking away from Woodstock into the distance with a pensive look on his face. Pane 2, Snoopy stands at military attention and says “Ahem.” Woodstock rolls his eyes. Pane 3, Snoopy thinks “Gentlemen, once again it has come to my attention that certain food items are…” which Woodstock scribbles onto a notebook. Pane 4, Woodstock looks down at his notebook as a few snowflakes fall from the sky. Pane 5, a large number of snowflakes fall from the sky. Pane 6, as the snow continues to fall, Woodstock holds his arms out to the side and chirps at Snoopy, but what he is communicating is not obvious to the viewer. Pane 7, Woodstock puts down his notebook and Snoopy looks up to the sky, and with an open mouth and shaking fist thinks “Stop snowing on my secretary!!”. Pane 8, only a few snowflakes fall from the sky as Snoopy and Woodstock look into the sky. Pane 9, the snow has completely stopped and Woodstock and Snoopy both have an empty expression. Pane 10, Woodstock looks back at his notebook and Snoopy side glances at the audience with a wry smile and thinks “A good secretary is worth protecting!”}

By Kui Xie and Eric M. Anderman, The Ohio State University

Students can use AI chatbots to break down a complex assignment into smaller steps. Maskot/Getty Images

Since ChatGPT can engage in conversation and generate essays, computer codes, charts and graphs that closely resemble those created by humans, educators worry students may use it to cheat. A growing number of school districts across the country have decided to block access to ChatGPT on computers and networks.

As professors of educational psychology and educational technology, we’ve found that the main reason students cheat is their academic motivation. For example, sometimes students are just motivated to get a high grade, whereas other times they are motivated to learn all that they can about a topic.

The decision to cheat or not, therefore, often relates to how academic assignments and tests are constructed and assessed, not on the availability of technological shortcuts. When they have the opportunity to rewrite an essay or retake a test if they don’t do well initially, students are less likely to cheat.

We believe teachers can use ChatGPT to increase their students’ motivation for learning and actually prevent cheating. Here are three strategies for doing that.

1. Treat ChatGPT as a learning partner

Our research demonstrates that students are more likely to cheat when assignments are designed in ways that encourage them to outperform their classmates. In contrast, students are less likely to cheat when teachers assign academic tasks that prompt them to work collaboratively and to focus on mastering content instead of getting a good grade.

Treating ChatGPT as a learning partner can help teachers shift the focus among their students from competition and performance to collaboration and mastery.

For example, a science teacher can assign students to work with ChatGPT to design a hydroponic vegetable garden. In this scenario, students could engage with ChatGPT to discuss the growing requirements for vegetables, brainstorm design ideas for a hydroponic system and analyze pros and cons of the design.

These activities are designed to promote mastery of content as they focus on the processes of learning rather than just the final grade.

2. Use ChatGPT to boost confidence

Research shows that when students feel confident that they can successfully do the work assigned to them, they are less likely to cheat. And an important way to boost students’ confidence is to provide them with opportunities to experience success.

ChatGPT can facilitate such experiences by offering students individualized support and breaking down complex problems into smaller challenges or tasks.

For example, suppose students are asked to attempt to design a hypothetical vehicle that can use gasoline more efficiently than a traditional car. Students who struggle with the project – and might be inclined to cheat – can use ChatGPT to break down the larger problem into smaller tasks. ChatGPT might suggest they first develop an overall concept for the vehicle before determining the size and weight of the vehicle and deciding what type of fuel will be used. Teachers could also ask students to compare the steps suggested by ChatGPT with steps that are recommended by other sources.

3. Prompt ChatGPT to give supportive feedback

It is well documented that personalized feedback supports students’ positive emotions, including self-confidence.

ChatGPT can be directed to deliver feedback using positive, empathetic and encouraging language. For example, if a student completes a math problem incorrectly, instead of merely telling the student “You are wrong and the correct answer is …,” ChatGPT may initiate a conversation with the student. Here’s a real response generated by ChatGPT: “Your answer is not correct, but it’s completely normal to encounter occasional errors or misconceptions along the way. Don’t be discouraged by this small setback; you’re on the right track! I’m here to support you and answer any questions you may have. You’re doing great!”

This will help students feel supported and understood while receiving feedback for improvement. Teachers can easily show students how to direct ChatGPT to provide them such feedback.

We believe that when teachers use ChatGPT and other AI chatbots thoughtfully – and also encourage students to use these tools responsibly in their schoolwork – students have an incentive to learn more and cheat less.

Kui Xie, Professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Technologies, The Ohio State University and Eric M. Anderman, Professor of Educational Psychology and Quantitative Research, Evaluation, and Measurement, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

That said, researchers found that simply living close to a food store isn’t an automatic key to sustained weight-loss – especially a market that carries mostly highly processed convenience foods.

Overall, the analysis of data from hundreds of bariatric surgery patients in central Ohio showed an association between close proximity to food stores and better weight loss two years after the surgery. 

A closer look at store products affected whether that proximity was beneficial, showing that living within a five-minute walk of a store with a low-quality selection of foods was actually linked to less weight loss at the two-year post-operative point. 

“Being in closer proximity to lower-quality stores predicted less weight loss, but being in closer proximity to higher-quality stores didn’t predict more weight loss,” said Keeley Pratt, associate professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University and the lead author of two studies detailing these findings. “So the lower-quality stores were really driving poor outcomes.” 

The studies were published in Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases and Obesity Surgery. 

The research team examined neighborhood characteristics and other social determinants of health that may help or hinder continued weight loss in the two years after bariatric surgery. 

The analysis included select data from the electronic health records of all patients who received bariatric surgery at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center from 2015 to 2019 in Franklin County, Ohio. Data included race, insurance type, procedure and percentage of total weight loss from two to 24 months after surgery. 

Researchers combined health records with census and county data, which enabled the team to count not just the number of food stores, parks/recreational areas and fitness facilities in the county, but precisely where they were relative to patients’ home addresses. 

Bariatric surgery reduces the size of the stomach and leads to rapid weight loss, which requires patients to initially eat a soft diet in small quantities and gradually transition back to a more varied diet, being coached for six months by a dietitian and nurse practitioner. 

“What we see then is from six months to a year and after a year, if that volume of food increases because of not maintaining healthy behaviors or returning to previously eaten foods that weren’t as healthy, that weight can come back on,” said Pratt, who also has a faculty appointment in general surgery. “That being said, that doesn’t mean that what patients can eat is readily available to them where they live – that’s the link we’re trying to figure out. Our patients know what to eat, so it’s not an education or a knowledge issue, but it could be an access issue.” 

Previous research has shown that living in healthier areas has helped people manage their weight, but very few studies had looked at the social determinants of health that affect patients who have had a significant surgery to achieve their weight loss, she said. 

The patient sample consisted of 772 patients who had undergone one of two types of stomach-reduction surgery. Of those, 60% were white and 82% were women. 

The initial study found that while Black surgery patients had higher levels of poverty and unemployment than white patients, consistent with previous studies, those variables did not negatively affect weight loss outcomes. Nor did living near open spaces or fitness and recreation facilities. 

Access to a higher number of food stores within a 10-minute walk was linked to a greater percentage of weight loss among all patients. But there was some nuance: Black patients with access to a higher number of food stores within a 10-minute walk experienced greater weight loss over two years. For white patients, the best distance for sustained weight-loss was a five-minute walk from stores. 

Researchers later categorized food stores as low-, moderate- or high-diversity based on their product selection, which roughly translated to corner or convenience stores, specialty markets and full-service supermarkets. 

For all patients, living within a five- or 10-minute walk from moderate- or high-diversity stores had no effect on weight loss, but having one low-diversity store within a five-minute walk or up to two low-diversity stores 10 minutes away was linked to less sustained weight loss. 

The researchers noted that living near these stores was not an indicator that patients actually shopped at the markets closest to their homes – but the nature of the most available food stores could be an indicator of larger economic forces at play. 

“The real goal is to figure out how to make linkages from the clinic to the community and the community to the clinic,” Pratt said, suggesting Ohio State could partner with stores to upgrade their food selection and with fitness facilities to provide patient discounts. 

“This is really a starting point to figuring out how we can aid patients in Franklin County and, eventually, beyond, to make sure post-operative weight loss is equitable, and the resources are equitable, for all patients following surgery.” 

This work was funded by the Ohio State Center for Clinical and Translational Science Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Translational Science and Human Health Pilot Grant and the Kathleen Kelly Trust in the Department of Human Sciences. 

Co-authors on one or both studies, all from Ohio State, include Andrew Hanks, Harvey Miller, LeeAnn Swager, Michael Outrich, Lindsay Breslin, Jamie Blalock, Sabrena Noria, Stacy Brethauer, Bradley Needleman and Brian Focht.

By

Matthew J. Mayhew 
Professor of Higher Education, The Ohio State University 

Christa Winkler 
Assistant Professor of Higher Education Leadership, Mississippi State University 

Musbah Shaheen 
PhD student in Higher Education and Student Affairs, The Ohio State University

Do students’ views of people with different beliefs really change on campus? AP Photo/Darron Cummings

Our research team has studied college students’ attitudes toward evangelicals, a topic that tends to prompt strong reactions.

Some liberals don’t see the topic as worthy of discussion – why study whether Americans appreciate a privileged group with strong influence on society? Meanwhile, many conservatives are adamant that evangelical perspectives are not tolerated, let alone welcome, on U.S. university campuses.

Yet our findings about students’ attitudes underscore important lessons about fostering tolerance and appreciation on campus for any group. Views of evangelicals are particularly interesting, since they highlight the complexities of social privilege: how individuals can feel discriminated against, even when their community as a whole is influential.

Surveying students

The Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey, or IDEALS, surveyed 9,470 college students from 122 institutions across the country at three times: the beginning of their first year, the end of their first year, and the end of their senior year, which wrapped up in spring 2019. As part of this project, conducted by a team of researchers from Ohio State University, North Carolina University and the nonprofit Interfaith America, we asked students about their attitudes toward religious, spiritual and secular groups, including but not limited to atheists, Jews, Muslims and evangelicals.

We asked students to indicate their responses to four statements on a scale of 1, or “disagree strongly,” to 5, or “agree strongly”:

1) In general, people in this group make positive contributions to society.

2) In general, individuals in this group are ethical people.

3) I have things in common with people in this group.

4) In general, I have a positive attitude toward people in this group.

Our analysis controlled for other variables – such as the institution’s type, selectivity and size, and students’ race, gender, sexual orientation, major and political affiliation – to home in on the specific ways the campus learning environment was related to students’ views about different religious groups.

Compared with their attitudes toward other religious groups on campus, students’ appreciation for evangelicals grew at a slower pace, but still grew. On average, students’ responses showed an increase of over 40% in appreciation toward evangelicals by the end of their first year. By the time students graduated, they demonstrated another 30% increase between the end of their first year and fourth year of college.

Campus climate

After seeing that students’ views of evangelicals improved, on average, we wanted to better understand why.

First, we looked at the experiences students said were related to their gains, such as whether they took a religious studies course. Then, we conducted 18 case studies at institutions of various sizes and affiliations to learn about campus culture and hear from hundreds of students in focus groups. In these groups, we showed students data on the gains reported by their peers on campus and asked them why they thought these gains were made.

We found that appreciation increased for students on campuses they consider committed to inclusion for people of faiths, and people of no faith – regardless of whether the institutions were public or private, large or small, selective or not.

Some students talked about the impact of simply living and studying alongside people from different backgrounds. Many named the influence of interfaith and multifaith centers, spaces dedicated to bringing people from different religions together.

For example, a student at a Protestant-affiliated institution who identified as agnostic noted that she had “experienc[ed] a lot of toxic Christianity” growing up. She credited her interactions with a “progressive Christian” chaplain at her campus’s interfaith center with helping her understand that Christian beliefs and identities are diverse, and not limited to the type of faith she was introduced to as a child.

Members of a Christian group at California State University Long Beach worship in a lecture hall in 2014. Scott Varley/Digital First Media/Torrance Daily Breeze via Getty Images

Survey data also suggested that, on average, students whose views of evangelicals improved reported having at least two curricular experiences related to religion. This included many type of activities: for example, enrolling in a course specifically designed to enhance knowledge of different religious traditions; reflecting on one’s own religion in relationship to other perspectives as part of a class; and discussing other students’ religious or nonreligious backgrounds in class.

Personal relationships

How students related to one another was another important theme that often came up in discussions about views of evangelicals.

Evangelicals have to negotiate a seeming paradox: As Protestant Christians, who have long held influence in U.S. culture and politics, they belong to a privileged group. Yet many evangelical students say they feel unwelcome and misunderstood because of their beliefs.

Many non-Christian students who themselves feel marginalized because of their identities wrestle with how to make their evangelical peers aware of their relative privilege, and of how their beliefs and actions might affect other students.

For example, one student who identifies as atheist at a small, secular college recalled a Christmas tree put on their door by another student. “The person has literally no idea that that could possibly be upsetting,” they said, but added it was “a very sweet thing to do.” In other words, they believed that the other student was likely ignorant of why the Christmas tree could bother other students, but acting out of good intentions, tempering their anger about the unwelcome decoration.

Many students discussed developing empathy and humility. A Catholic student attending a Catholic college summarized, “Myself being a more liberal Christian, I’m not as accepting of the close-minded evangelical Christian … but that’s kind of being close-minded myself. … So I have to examine myself and be like, ‘I’m okay with them being them, even if I don’t agree with them.’ They’re saying, ‘All of these people are saying let’s accept everybody, but you’re not accepting me.’ And I said, ‘That’s absolutely right.’ … Even in political realms, too, I don’t agree with you, but I need to be okay with you.”

Finally, student gains in appreciation also seemed to stem from recognition that evangelicals are diverse, not one homogeneous group – as with the student who appreciated her conversations with the Christian chaplain at her campus’s interfaith center.

As a research team, we found this project’s findings left us considering ways to address deep divisions in the U.S. today. Some principles apply to fostering respect in many other situations beyond religion, and beyond college, from our offices at work to the halls of Congress: intentionally but empathetically engaging with one another’s differences.

Matthew J. Mayhew, Professor of Higher Education, The Ohio State University; Christa Winkler, Assistant Professor of Higher Education Leadership, Mississippi State University, and Musbah Shaheen, PhD student in Higher Education and Student Affairs, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This work, led by Ohio State University exercise science and biomedical researchers, is funded by a $10 million grant from a U.S. Department of Defense program focused on improving the health of military service members, veterans and the American public.

“Many Americans, including a significant number of military service members – and especially veterans – are suffering from poor metabolic health,” said principal investigator Jeff Volek, professor of human sciences at Ohio State. “Despite billions of dollars in investments by the private and public sectors, traditional drug and lifestyle treatments have had limited success in curtailing the complications attributed to poor metabolic health, which include disrupted sleep, obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart failure and chronic kidney disease.

“We expect that whatever we find here will have huge relevance across the board both within and outside the military.”

Two-plus decades of studies have included Volek’s findings that the very-low-carbohydrate/high-fat ketogenic diet, which converts fat into ketones used by cells in the body and brain as an alternative to glucose, does not drive up saturated fat in the blood, can help endurance athletes burn fat and holds promise at keeping soldiers fit for service. The popularity of the diet, and scientific evidence of its health benefits and weight-loss results, has spawned the development and marketing of products that can be ingested to rapidly elevate blood ketones without a change in eating habits. 

“A big part of the grant is studying both of those strategies to augment ketosis – the ketogenic diet and ketone-based beverages,” Volek said. The ketone drinks, formulated as ketone esters, are designed to put the body in nutritional ketosis – the human body’s state when it has greater access to ketones as both a fuel and signaling molecule. 

“Does the ketogenic diet produce different effects than the ketone esters? Is one better than the other? My work has found the ketogenic diet provides robust health benefits, but there could be some health benefits attributed to taking ketones and not changing the diet. It’s a whole new area of investigation.”

Studies exploring ketone esters’ impact on blood ketone levels and factors influencing individual variation in response to ingesting them are one of four independent project areas that will run concurrently. The other three are intended to expand knowledge about nutritional ketosis in the context of addressing life circumstances and health problems of particular concern for the military: inadequate sleep, chronic kidney disease and heart failure.

“This will be the first work to specifically explore how ketone esters and a ketogenic diet impact clinical outcomes, such as cardiac function and exercise capacity, in patients with heart failure,” said Orlando Simonetti, professor of cardiovascular medicine at Ohio State and co-leader of one of the projects. “We’re hopeful that the imaging and physiological performance data we collect in this study will pave the way for future research on nutritional ketosis as a preventive and treatment for cardiovascular disease.” 

All branches of the military are affected by the general population’s poor metabolic health, which complicates recruitment, lowers soldier readiness and can harm post-service quality of life. The disrupted sleep and range of stressors associated with training and active duty can have compounding effects on both the body and the brain, increasing risk for obesity and reduced mobility as well as mental health and neurological problems later in life. 

The grant, a DOD Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program – Focused Program Award, is called STAK, short for Strategies to Augment Ketosis. Volek’s lab is leading coordination of the work. The Buck Institute, an aging research firm, and Virta Health, a company co-founded by Volek that has created a nutritional therapy program to treat and reverse type 2 diabetes at scale, have received sub-awards under the STAK grant to lend additional expertise.

The funding supports four projects:

• Optimization of ketone delivery strategies: Clinical studies will explore ketone ester dosing, formulation and timing of delivery, as well as study participant health markers, to gauge the supplements’ physiological and metabolic effects. Researchers aim to create evidence-based guidelines for use of ketone ester compounds based on individual characteristics and soldier performance requirements. Volek’s lab will partner with the Buck Institute on this project.
• Ketone-conferred resiliency against sleep restriction: High-quality sleep is key to military mission readiness and success, but isn’t always possible to get in the field. This trial will gauge the extent to which ketone esters and a ketogenic diet reduce detrimental effects of sleep loss on cognitive and physical performance in ROTC cadets under demanding physical conditions. Project leader William Kraemer, in human sciences at Ohio State, will collaborate on the work with Ohio State brain imaging and sleep specialists.
• Ketone therapy to improve exercise tolerance in heart failure: Simonetti, a frequent research collaborator with Volek, will co-lead this project with Ohio State Wexner Medical Center cardiologist Yuchi Han. The team will examine effects of ketone esters and a ketogenic diet in patients with type 2 diabetes and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, a type of the disease marked by typical heart failure symptoms despite the heart’s close-to-normal blood pumping capacity. A randomized, double-blind, crossover trial will compare exercise capacity and cardiac function in participants taking ketone esters, eating a ketogenic diet or eating a mixed standard of care diet. Ohio State researchers will partner with Virta Health, using the company’s continuous remote care model to manage patient participation for six months after completion of the trial.
• Delay or prevention of progression of diabetic nephropathy: Virta Health scientists will lead this two-year longitudinal study, examining whether the continuous remote care model – which includes biomarker monitoring – and a uniformly delivered ketogenic diet slow or even reverse progression to chronic kidney disease in veterans with type 2 diabetes.

Recruitment and enrollment of study participants is expected to begin in early 2023. Ketone esters used in the studies were developed by Juvenescence.

Project 1 will be led by Brianna Stubbs of the Buck Institute. Additional investigators include John Newman of the Buck Institute, Audra Hanners of Ohio State’s College of Nursing, and Madison Kackley and Teryn Bedell from Volek’s lab.

Additional Project 2 investigators include Scott Hayes, associate professor of psychology, and Ulysses Magalang, medical director of sleep medicine at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center.

Additional Project 3 investigators include Ohio State Wexner Medical Center physicians Joshua Joseph, an endocrinologist; Ayesha Hasan, medical director of the cardiac transplant program; and Sitaramesh Emani, an interventional cardiologist.

Project 4 will be led by Amy McKenzie, Robert Ratner and Stephen Phinney of Virta Health.

The study, done in China, found that teachers in the Chinese equivalent of professional learning communities (PLCs) were more willing to share their knowledge and expertise when they rated their PLC leaders as being higher in humility.

The reason was that humble leaders made teachers feel more empowered to share their knowledge because they felt psychologically safe to take risks, said study co-author Roger Goddard, Novice G. Fawcett Endowed Chair and professor of educational studies at The Ohio State University.

“A little humility on the part of leaders goes a long way in helping groups be more productive and collaborative,” Goddard said.

“When people feel their leader admits mistakes and is open to learning from others, everyone contributes more and makes these groups more effective.”

Goddard conducted the study with Yun Qu of Beijing Normal University in China and Jinjie Zhu, a doctoral student in education at Ohio State.  The study was published online recently in the journal Educational Studies.

In the United States and elsewhere, PLCs are designed to facilitate professional development through discussions in which teachers share their best practices and what they have learned through their experiences in the classroom.

“Teachers can feel fairly isolated in the classroom,” Goddard said. “PLCs help teachers build a sense of community and learn from each other about how to improve classroom instruction.”

In China, the equivalent of PLCs are called Teaching Research Groups (TRGs). The leaders of TRGs are experienced teachers who are not traditional administrators, but do serve as supervisors and coordinators and are involved in teacher evaluations, lesson planning and teacher selection.

This study involved 537 teachers from 238 TRGs in a variety of both urban and rural schools in China.

Teachers rated their TRG leaders on three dimensions of humility: their willingness to view themselves accurately, such as admitting when they didn’t know how to do something; their appreciation of others’ strengths; and their teachability, such as being open to other teachers’ advice.

Results showed that teachers who rated their TRG leaders as being higher in humility were more likely to report that they shared their knowledge and expertise in TRG meetings.

“The whole point of these groups is for teachers to share their knowledge, so the fact that humble leaders inspired individuals in their groups to be more willing to do this is very significant,” Goddard said.

The study also found why humble leaders were so effective in helping their teachers share their knowledge.

Results showed that in TRGs with more humble leaders, teachers reported higher levels of psychological safety – they felt they could take risks and knew that others would not act in a way to undermine their efforts.

That feeling of safety led them to feel more psychologically empowered: They felt their jobs had meaning, they had autonomy to do their work, and they felt they were competent and that their work had impact in the school.

So humble leadership led to teachers feeling psychologically safe, which made them feel empowered and ultimately led them to share their experience and knowledge more fully with their colleagues, Goddard said.

“This feeling of teachers that they could safely share their knowledge comes from having a leader who has humility – an openness to learning from others, a willingness to revise opinions, and an appreciation for the strengths of others,” he said.

While this research was done in China, Goddard said he believes the results would be similar in the United States and elsewhere.

“There’s a lot of evidence that suggests trust is a key part of successful organizations. And feeling psychologically safe and empowered to share your knowledge in the workplace is part of building trust, and that’s what humble leaders help create,” he said.

“That is as true in the United States as it is in China.”

In the same way, the results should be applicable outside of education.

“Many of the same principles that make successful organizations cut across cultures and fields.  It makes sense that humble leaders will build trust and better relationships that will increase the effectiveness of any groups that have to work together,” Goddard said.

Researchers said this is the first study assessing whether the health risks linked to the condition known as metabolic syndrome, which affects about one-third of Americans, may be diminished by green tea’s anti-inflammatory benefits in the gut.

“There is much evidence that greater consumption of green tea is associated with good levels of cholesterol, glucose and triglycerides, but no studies have linked its benefits at the gut to those health factors,” said Richard Bruno, senior study author and professor of human nutrition at The Ohio State University. 

The team conducted the clinical trial in 40 individuals as a follow-up to a 2019 study that associated lower obesity and fewer health risks in mice that consumed green tea supplements with improvements to gut health.

In the new study, green tea extract also lowered blood sugar, or glucose, and decreased gut inflammation and permeability in healthy people – an unexpected finding.

“What this tells us is that within one month we’re able to lower blood glucose in both people with metabolic syndrome and healthy people, and the lowering of blood glucose appears to be related to decreasing leaky gut and decreasing gut inflammation – regardless of health status,” Bruno said.

Articles on the glucose results and lowered gut permeability and inflammation were published recently in Current Developments in Nutrition. 

People with metabolic syndrome are diagnosed with at least three of five factors that increase the risk for heart disease, diabetes and other health problems – excess belly fat, high blood pressure, low HDL (good) cholesterol, and high levels of fasting blood glucose and triglycerides, a type of fat in the blood. 

The tricky thing about these risk factors that constitute metabolic syndrome is that they are often only slightly altered and do not yet require drug management, but still impose great risk to health, Bruno said.

“Most physicians will initially recommend weight loss and exercise. Unfortunately, we know most persons can’t comply with lifestyle modifications for various reasons,” he said. “Our work is aiming to give people a new food-based tool to help manage their risk for metabolic syndrome or to reverse metabolic syndrome.” 

Forty participants – 21 with metabolic syndrome and 19 healthy adults – consumed gummy confections containing green tea extract rich in anti-inflammatory compounds called catechins for 28 days. The daily dose equaled five cups of green tea. In the randomized double-blind crossover trial, all participants spent another 28 days taking a placebo, with a month off of any supplement between the treatments. 

Researchers confirmed that participants, as advised, followed a diet low in polyphenols – naturally occurring antioxidants in fruits, vegetables, teas and spices – during the placebo and green tea extract confection phases of the study so any results could be attributed to the effects of green tea alone. 

Results showed that fasting blood glucose levels for all participants were significantly lower after taking green tea extract compared to levels after taking the placebo. Decreased gut inflammation due to the green tea treatment in all participants was established through an analysis that showed a reduction in pro-inflammatory proteins in fecal samples. Using a technique to assess sugar ratios in urine samples, researchers also found that with green tea, participants’ small intestine permeability favorably decreased. 

Gut permeability, or leaky gut, enables intestinal bacteria and related toxic compounds to enter the bloodstream, stimulating low-grade chronic inflammation.

“That absorption of gut-derived products is thought to be an initiating factor for obesity and insulin resistance, which are central to all cardiometabolic disorders,” Bruno said. “If we can improve gut integrity and reduce leaky gut, the thought is we’ll be able to not only alleviate low-grade inflammation that initiates cardiometabolic disorders, but potentially reverse them.

“We did not attempt to cure metabolic syndrome with a one-month study,” he said. “But based on what we know about the causal factors behind metabolic syndrome, there is potential for green tea to be acting at least in part at the gut level to alleviate the risk for either developing it or reversing it if you already have metabolic syndrome.” 

Bruno’s lab is completing further analyses of microbial communities in the guts of study participants and levels of bacteria-related toxins in their blood. 

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center at Ohio State. 

Ohio State co-authors of both papers include Min Zeng, Geoffrey Sasaki, Sisi Cao, Yael Vodovotz and Joanna Hodges. Avinash Pokala and Shahabeddin Rezaei also co-authored the paper on glucose reduction.

On May 6, the gift was recognized during a check presentation ceremony and luncheon. This event highlighted the intention to “launch professionals into a field that nurtures relationships while it nourishes people.”

Mitchell and Cameron Mitchell Restaurants are among the first major donors to the Scarlet & Gray Advantage program, which will empower eligible Ohio State students to earn their bachelor’s degrees — debt-free.

Inspired by this program, they are creating the Cameron Mitchell Matching Gift Fund. Individuals or companies that contribute $100,000 or more will qualify for a 1-to-1 match from the fund to create new endowed scholarship funds or add to an existing fund in support of hospitality management undergraduate students.

“I am so appreciative of Cameron Mitchell Restaurants’ commitment to our university,” said Ohio State President Kristina M. Johnson. “This gift is building tremendous momentum behind our Scarlet & Gray Advantage program and making an extraordinary impact on our undergraduate students in hospitality management, up-and-coming restaurateurs and leaders.”

“We deeply value our longstanding partnership with Cameron Mitchell Restaurants, which has appreciably enhanced the experiences of our students in hospitality management,” said Erik Porfeli, chair of the College of Education and Human Ecology’s Department of Human Sciences. “We believe this gift will inspire our students to pursue careers in the restaurant and events industries and spark their imaginations.”

The founder and CEO of Cameron Mitchell Restaurants acknowledged the timeliness of the commitment, and that Ohio State is the right place to direct this support. The goal is to assist students who want to build careers in hospitality, as well as add vitality to an industry that has been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This creates an incredible opportunity to partner with a renowned educational institution to support the hospitality leaders of tomorrow while strengthening the talent pipeline in central Ohio,” said Mitchell. “It is our passion and responsibility to foster the next generation of talent to ensure they have the resources needed to grow and thrive in the rewarding field of hospitality.”

David Miller, president and COO of Cameron Mitchell Restaurants, highlighted the strength of the Columbus community’s hospitality educational resources. This partnership with Ohio State aligns with the company’s values and enables it to cultivate talent.

“I look forward to seeing the positive outcomes of our support for years to come as graduates hopefully make the decision to grow their hospitality careers,” Miller said.

By expanding access for students with financial need, this gift will help the broader hospitality community recruit an increasingly diverse array of dedicated professionals.

“As a former lecturer in the hospitality program at Ohio State, I have had the privilege of helping foster a passion for the industry among rising stars,” said Melissa Johnson, vice president of Cameron Mitchell Premier Events and Community Relations. “Being able to support students as they enter the field has far-reaching impacts for Cameron Mitchell Restaurants as well as the entire hospitality industry.”

“We are thankful for this gift to scholarships and our hard-working students, a generous endorsement from Cameron Mitchell Restaurants and Cameron Mitchell — who has long been committed to our Buckeyes and their bright futures,” said Michael C. Eicher, Ohio State’s senior vice president for Advancement and president of The Ohio State University Foundation.

To discuss a related gift opportunity, contact Pablo Banhos, executive director of the Office of Advancement for the College of Education and Human Ecology.

Ohio State University researchers have developed a compound consisting of insulin bound to a string of amino acids that includes an antioxidant group. An earlier study in mice, published in Biomaterials, suggested this nanomaterial’s anti-diabetes properties included improving glucose consumption and availability as fuel for the brain. 

In a new study, the team compared the therapeutic effects of the experimental compound to the effects of insulin alone and the nanomaterial alone in mouse models of type 1 diabetes. The measures of blood sugar control and insulin-related gene activity in the brains of mice treated with the combination therapy came close to those of healthy animals, and these same mice did better on tests of their thinking and memory.

Previous research has linked both type 1 and type 2 diabetes to problems with cognitive function and higher risk for dementia, but “neurological complications of diabetes are the least addressed,” said Ouliana Ziouzenkova, associate professor of human sciences at Ohio State and senior author of the study. 

“We found in mice that our molecule and insulin combined was better than each treatment alone in reversing diabetes-related problems, and produced a dramatically improved cognitive performance compared to all other groups.”

The research is published in the journal Pharmaceutics.

The molecule the scientists used to bind to insulin’s chemical structure, called AAC2, was developed in the lab of study co-senior author Jon Parquette, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State.

Parquette and collaborators created a series of molecules out of small chains of amino acids and, to make AAC2, the addition of a structural fragment of the antioxidant coumarin. The chains are designed to stack like bricks and stick to each other in a way that enables them to self-assemble into nanofibers that carry a positive electrical charge. The electrical forces hold insulin and AAC2 together to form a supramolecular complex.

“That’s important because of lot of things that happen on a biological scale seem to be on the nanometer scale. Proteins, cell surfaces, viruses are all nanoscale objects,” he said. “So if you can make things that function on that scale you have a better ability to intervene in biological processes.”

The bodies of people with type 1 diabetes don’t make a sufficient amount of insulin, and in people with type 2 diabetes, the body cannot properly use insulin to transfer sugar from the blood to muscle and fat cells, and many other cells in the body, that use glucose for energy. The brain, a major organ requiring the use of glucose for fuel, relies on specific transporters to deliver glucose – transporters whose function can be damaged by irregularities in glucose levels such as those that occur in diabetes.

In this study, experiments were conducted in mice that were chemically and genetically engineered to have insulin deficiencies that cause high levels of blood sugar, the hallmark of type 1 or type 2 diabetes. Researchers injected the animals every three days with either human insulin alone (used to distinguish treatment from insulin produced by the mice), the AAC2 molecule alone, or the AAC2 molecule bound to the human insulin as a combination therapy.

The team found that only the combination therapy produced steady glucose levels in the mice over a long period of time and positively influenced gene expression and neurotransmitter transport in their brains. The mice treated with the combination therapy also performed better on cognitive behavioral tests than animals treated with only insulin or the nanofiber AAC2.

Results suggested that these benefits relate to how insulin’s interactions with the nanomaterial influence two aspects of glucose use in the body: the breakdown of glucose for energy metabolism, and the use of glucose for storage and structural needs. Together, these positive impacts of the therapy can reestablish a healthy energy balance, Ziouzenkova said.

“Our concept provided a balanced metabolic effect involving a completely unique pathway that is induced by this supramolecular complex,” she said.

Research will continue on the exact mechanisms affecting the brain, any long-term side effects and how the compound degrades in the body. Ziouzenkova said the promising findings with diabetes suggest this amino acid-based nanofiber platform may be useful in enhancing treatments for other neurological and metabolic disorders. Kristy Townsend, associate professor of neurosurgery, has joined the research team to explore these directions.

This work was supported by the Ralph and Marian Falk Medical Research Catalyst Award, the National Science Foundation, the Kathleen Kelly Award, the National Institutes of Health, the National Center for Research Resources, the National Cancer Institute and the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, and Ohio State’s Food Innovation Center, Office of International Affairs and Center for Advanced Functional Foods Research and Entrepreneurship.

Additional Ohio State co-authors include Aejin Lee, McKensie Mason, Tao Lin, Shashi Bhushan Kumar, Devan Kowdley, Jacob Leung, Danah Muhanna, Yuan Sun, Joana Ortega-Anaya, Lianbo Yu, Julie Fitzgerald, Courtney DeVries, Zachary Weil and Rafael Jiménez-Flores.

Brown spoke about the historic development during a March 8 event at The Ohio State University marking International Women’s Day. “A View on the SCOTUS Nomination from One First to Another: Understanding the Necessity and Anticipating the Challenges of the First Black Woman Appointed to the United States Supreme Court” was presented by the College of Education and Human Ecology at the Ohio Union’s U.S. Bank Theater.

When President Joe Biden announced Feb. 25 that he was nominating Jackson to fill the seat of retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, McGee Brown, an alumna of Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law, said she was filled with pride.

“It was just such an amazing time. It was a great time to be a Black woman lawyer in America, to see her step up, a woman who is enormously qualified,” McGee Brown said. “It’s not like she just went to law school, she went to Harvard, both undergrad and for law school. … It’s not just that she went to Harvard, she was the editor of the Law Review.”

Jackson’s nomination is unprecedented in many ways, McGee Brown said. Since the U.S. Supreme Court was established in 1789, 114 justices have served on the bench, according to Supremecourt.gov. Of those, 108 have been white men.

If confirmed, Jackson will be the third African American to serve on the Supreme Court, following Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. She will be the sixth woman, following Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett.

“It is beyond comprehension that a court that makes decisions that impact all of America is composed of people who represent less than half of America,” McGee Brown said. “If we are going to have a court that purports to make decisions that impact all of us, the court should look like more of us. I don’t think that’s an illegitimate goal at all.”

McGee Brown said she can relate to Jackson’s trailblazing status. McGee Brown was appointed to the Ohio Supreme Court by former Democratic governor Ted Strickland in December 2010 to fill the seat vacated by Justice Maureen O’Connor, whom voters elected chief justice in November 2010. McGee Brown assumed the office on Jan. 1, 2011, and was defeated in her 2012 bid to keep that office by Justice Sharon L. Kennedy.

“Ohio has had 161 Supreme Court justices,” said McGee Brown, who is now a partner in the Columbus office of law firm Jones Day. “Twelve have been women and four have been Black.”

McGee Brown recalled that her January 2011 swearing-in ceremony at the King Arts Complex in Columbus was such a momentous occasion that it drew spectators from all over Ohio.

“I remember standing up, looking out at that crowd, and in that moment, the tears just started coming,” McGee Brown said. “It was in that moment that I realized that it wasn’t really about me, it was about all of them. Those people came because it’s what they had worked for, for decades.”

While skeptics may focus on Jackson’s race and gender, her qualifications for the nation’s highest court are solid, McGee Brown said.

“She has the intellectual acumen, the training, the precision and brilliance that she’s going to be able to argue her case profoundly,” McGee Brown said. “And I know what will happen is that even when she’s on the losing side, she will write a dissent that will set the path, set the tone for the cases that come after.”

Researchers found that inattention led to hyperactivity in the students, and both together contributed to higher levels of cheating.

The issue is important because many students with attention problems don’t get an official diagnosis, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, said Eric Anderman, lead author of the study and professor of educational psychology at The Ohio State University.

“Students diagnosed with ADHD get a lot of support and help in school, but many other kids with attention problems fall through the cracks,” Anderman said.

“They don’t get the help they need that could help them do better in school and avoid cheating.”

Anderman conducted the study with Richard Gilman of Terrace Metrics and Xingfeiyue Liu, a doctoral student, and Seung Yon Ha, a postdoctoral scholar, both in education at Ohio State. Their results were published recently in the journal Psychology in the Schools.

The researchers studied 855 adolescents from three midwestern public schools, two suburban and one rural. Data was collected twice from the students, about one year apart.

The students completed a standardized measure of inattention that asked them to rate how much they felt they had trouble paying attention to their teacher, how forgetful they were, whether they had a short attention span, and similar questions.

Students’ hyperactivity was rated by their responses to questions like whether they had trouble sitting still and whether they talked over other people.

To evaluate cheating, students rated how true it would be to say they used cheat sheets when they took tests, copied answers from other students, and similar statements.

The results showed that students with higher levels of inattention reported higher levels of hyperactivity, and students who were more hyperactive reported a higher rate of cheating.

Hyperactivity by itself was not linked to more cheating.

“Inattention is the driver here, the issue that leads to problems in the classroom,” Anderman said.

“The student is not paying attention, so he gets out of his seat and goofs around, and when you put both together, that is a perfect setup for more cheating.”

The study took into account a wide variety of other factors that have been linked to cheating, including depression, learning disabilities, gender, ethnicity, grade point average and whether students qualified for special education services – and inattention still was related to cheating.

In addition, the researchers also examined how disruptive students were in class, based on reports from their peers.  That didn’t influence cheating.

“Once you account for inattentiveness and hyperactivity, we found that disruptiveness wasn’t related to cheating. That is not what is driving cheating behaviors,” Anderman said.

Generally accepted rates of ADHD are between 7-9% of students aged 17 and younger. Studies suggest, however, that up to three times as many students have problems with attention or hyperactivity, but either don’t meet the criteria for the ADHD diagnosis or have never been evaluated.

That doesn’t mean they don’t need help, Anderman said.

“There are so many evidence-based programs that can help these students who have problems with attention learn to self-regulate, to learn how to be a learner,” Anderman said.

“If they had access to these programs, they could learn in class and they wouldn’t have to cheat. And these students are not learning partially because of attention issues they can’t help.”

Data collection for this study was supported by grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shiver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Justice.

Children in some of Columbus’ economically disadvantaged neighborhoods – Linden, Hilltop and Southside – experienced even lower enrollment than the county average.

These were among several findings from a seven-month long early childhood “landscape scan” conducted by the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, in partnership with the city of Columbus and Future Ready Columbus.

Arya Ansari, assistant professor of human development and family science and co-author of the study, explained one likely cause for under-enrollment: Families lack access to high-quality early childhood programming.

And the problem is worse in three high-need Columbus neighborhoods that were studied: 70% of parents in that sample said they had a hard time finding quality care for their children.

“This is truly problematic because once children fall behind at age 5, they oftentimes continue to stay behind throughout their educational careers,” Ansari said. “This is the impetus for investing in early childhood education,” he said, to address this “massive opportunity gap.”

Children’s early learning experiences are profoundly important and influence how well they do in kindergarten and later schooling. To inform and guide local efforts to expand early childhood programming, policy leaders from the city of Columbus asked researchers at the Crane Center to conduct the study. Quality early childhood learning has been a priority area for Columbus Mayor Ginther as well as City Council members such as President Pro Tempore Elizabeth Brown.

The report that came from that work, Early Care and Education (ECE) in Franklin County: The ECE Landscape Study, was recently published and shared with stakeholders and media at a press briefing. The event also featured Brown; Anneliese Johnson, principal of A. Sophie Rogers School for Early Learning; Jennifer Cheeks, local parent & Early Head Start prenatal educator, and parent Quisean Jennings.

The findings from the study came from online surveys and focus groups, including 41 interviews with English- and Spanish-speaking families. Researchers developed a rigorous methodology that enables decision makers to generalize the findings across the nearly 70,000 Franklin County households with children under the age of 5.

They examined a wide range of data points and parental perceptions. These included basic demographics of parents and children; whether children are in formal care settings or in private homes; what types of home‐learning environments and activities they were engaged in; and barriers as well as enablers to child care access.

The study found important differences in the types of activities children experienced, depending on their early learning setting. For instance, children cared for in their own home during the workweek were significantly more likely to play with an adult or alone. In contrast, children cared for in someone else’s home or in a daycare or early learning center were far more likely to play with other children.

When describing the disparities in enrollment and quality of experiences, Ansari said, “Children in (formal) early childhood education programs are three to four times more likely to be engaging in cognitively enriching and academically stimulating activities such as reading books, working on numbers, arts and crafts, relative to children who are being cared for in the home environment.”

The study was funded by the city of Columbus. Other members of the Crane Center study team and authors of the report include: Laura Justice, Elizabeth Cooksey, Mikyung Baek, Britt Singletary, Janelle Williamson and Allie Hamilton.

Designed to groom postdocs of color to become top-performing faculty, the two-year fellowship created a pathway to the professoriate in the college – a “grow your own” model for hiring and retaining faculty of color.

“This initiative required us to think differently about how we diversify faculty in our college at a time when many institutions continue to use traditional approaches that have failed to address the cultural environment of the unit,” said Dean Don Pope-Davis. “We chose to be disruptive by consistently asking ourselves, ‘Is what we are doing transformative, consistent with our core values and sustainable?’”

Senior Associate Dean Noelle Arnold, who directs the postdoctoral program, said scholars of color typically don’t get the same start as other faculty.

“Research has shown that new faculty of color often lack doctoral mentorship beyond the dissertation,” said Arnold, director of the college’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Global Engagement. “We provided significant mentoring for research, teaching, service and grant writing – designed to foster belonging, efficacy and successful metrics for the professoriate. This fellowship was our way of not only diversifying our faculty but also being a part of the solution to some negative statistics.”

Less than 15% of all postdoctoral scholars become tenure-track faculty, according to a national survey. A small percentage of those are diverse. Also, in 2018, Black and Hispanic faculty accounted for 18% of tenure-track positions, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, but just 7% held tenured positions.

So it’s significant that five of Ohio State’s cohort were hired by the college to date. The program’s success hinged upon building a supportive and inclusive culture through intensive mentoring, professional development and research assistance. The multi-tiered approach included opportunities for community and college engagement on special projects to foster an immediate sense of belonging and engagement with the community.

The end-game, for both the fellows and the college, was for them to find their place at the college table and to emerge as highly accomplished scholars. A comprehensive process for monitoring progress kept the scholars on track each semester, Arnold said.

Cohort support brings success

The effort panned out. Since starting the fellowship in 2019, the eight postdoctoral scholars received more than $4 million in grant funding and authored more than 30 publications. 

Among those hired is Rhodesia McMillian, now an assistant professor of educational policy. In April, after months of working with faculty mentors and the college’s Office of Research, Innovation and Collaboration, she received a Spencer Foundation grant to analyze federal court appeals involving K-12 schools.

“My (graduate) professors didn’t have those types of resources,” she said. “They had to fend for themselves.”

The postdocs were offered competitive salaries, moving expenses, a technology package and professional development. Faculty mentors were paid to serve as coaches, signaling the importance of the effort. The fellows were encouraged to pursue independent research paths and not “kowtow to a larger project at the college,” McMillian said.

“I have yet to experience a point of divergence,” she said. “Even if it’s not said explicitly, it’s felt explicitly: When I succeed, the college, and consequently the university, succeeds.”

Dinorah Sánchez Loza, among the cohort and now assistant professor of multicultural and equity studies in education, credits leadership and hands-on mentoring.

“What has been most striking is the holistic approach to providing an atmosphere of support and genuine investment in our success,” she said. “All along the way I benefited from knowing my scholarship and I were valued here – something I did not think I could expect from such a large university.”

Bigger, in this case, is better

The large cohort was cohesive, critical for retention. Together they received bimonthly sessions from teaching award recipients, grant writing assistance and professional development on time management. Some collaborated on grant proposals and – when the pandemic curtailed their social gatherings – had informal FaceTime meetups. They bonded.

“The cohort model is a key feature that contributed to developing a diverse scholarly network, and, importantly, a sense of community,” said Kristen J. Mills, who was hired as an assistant professor of higher education and student affairs.

The program’s design goes beyond numbers, Arnold said, but the cohort size was key because representation and belongingness matter. The college more than doubled its number of postdoctoral scholars of color when hiring the eight fellows in 2019.

How colleges recruit also matters. As part of the dean’s initiative, candidates for the fellowship were brought together in 2019 for three days of events, including a banquet, poster sessions, meetings with faculty and university leadership, and seats at the first Olivia J. Hooker Lecture featuring author Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

“I’ve had friends in the (academic) job market say, ‘I just felt like the token,’” said Autumn Bermea, now an assistant professor of human development and family science. “It didn’t feel like that at all. When we came for interviews, it felt very much like, ‘We are here to nurture you, and we value what you’re going to bring to help the department grow.’”

The keys to building a diverse faculty

Just after Steven Stone-Sabali applied for the fellowship, he was offered a tenure-track position at another Midwestern university. Ohio State countered by offering him a visiting professor position and all the supports of the postdoc program. He accepted and has now been hired as an assistant professor of school psychology.

The college’s “public-facing focus” on diversity clinched Stone-Sabali’s decision to come to Ohio State.

“Announcing their values unapologetically signaled something to me in terms of it might be a safer space to embrace my research,” which examines discrimination of students of color in the educational mental health care system, he said. “My research looks at race, essentially. How people respond to that topic can go any type of way. I felt like my research would have a safe home and be supported. I didn’t have to tone it down or be concerned about how people perceive my work.”

Having college leadership proactively back its commitment to diversification signaled the college’s priorities early on, Stone-Sabali said.

“In Black psychology, we have a cultural mistrust of others,” he said. “It’s been shown to be a protective factor, because Black individuals have been harmed in the past by society. So supporting diversity has to be more than just talk; there has to be action to support that.

“The narrative is that all these universities want to diversify. But for some odd reason, they can't figure out how to do it. The dean has done it. That says something.”

See articles in Inside Higher Education and Diverse Issues in Higher Education. 

Seven colleges have top 10 graduate and professional programs in the latest rankings: the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business (Fisher), Education and Human Ecology, Engineering, Law (Moritz), Nursing, and Public Affairs (John Glenn). U.S. News’ rankings of graduate and professional programs cover just a small portion of the programs offered at Ohio State, and not all programs are ranked each year.

“The excellence displayed across the university reflects Ohio State’s focus on developing the next generation of leaders throughout society,” said Executive Vice President and Provost Bruce A. McPheron. “Our comprehensive scope and focus on collaboration across disciplines acts as a force multiplier, preparing our graduate and professional students for leadership roles.”

Ohio State enrolls more than 14,000 graduate and professional students in 90 doctoral and 110 master's programs.

The Top 10 graduate and professional programs include dispute resolution (2), pediatric primary care nurse practitioner (3), business supply chain/logistics (4), psychiatric/mental health nurse practitioner (5), student counseling and personnel (5), doctor of nursing practice: administration (6), higher education administration (8), public management and leadership (8), education administration and supervision (9), business production/operations (9), nursing master’s (9), adult/gerontological primary care nurse practitioner (10), biological/agricultural engineering (10), part-time MBA (10), social stratification (10) and sociology of population (10).

Below are some highlights from U.S. News’ 2022 rankings of Ohio State graduate programs, by college.

The College of Arts and Sciences has five of its social sciences and humanities programs newly ranked this year. Political science is ranked 17th, sociology is ranked 18th, and economics, English and history are each ranked 30th among programs in the United States. Additionally, political science, which ranks sixth among programs at public universities, houses top specialties in American politics (11), international politics (12), political methodology (13) and comparative politics (20). Sociology, ranking eighth among programs at public universities, boasts two specialties ranked 10th in the nation: social stratification and sociology of population. Finally, English’s specialty in American literature after 1865 is ranked 13th.

Led by its MBA for Working Professionals Program (WPMBA), Fisher College of Business is home to two graduate programs highly ranked in the 2022 list. The WPMBA program was 10th among all U.S. programs (rising three spots), and fifth among U.S. publics — up two spots. Its full-time MBA program was 14th among U.S. publics. In addition, several specialty areas were highly ranked: supply chain management (4) and productions/operations (9).

The College of Education and Human Ecology ranks 28 out of 277 graduate education programs nationwide, putting it in the top 10% of similar programs. Three of its specialty graduate education programs were ranked in the top 10 nationally, and four additional programs made the top 20 list.

The College of Engineering’s graduate program is ranked first in Ohio and 16th among all public universities. Several departments within the college also placed among the top programs in the nation. The Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering ranked 10th among its peers within American universities. The Department of Materials Science and Engineering retained its rank of 12th overall. Other top 25 engineering disciplines at Ohio State include nuclear engineering (15), industrial/manufacturing engineering (16), aerospace engineering (19) and computer engineering (22). Overall, 216 engineering schools that grant doctoral degrees were surveyed. Ohio State Engineering is ranked 30th overall.

Moritz College of Law ranked best in Ohio and 40th in the nation out of 193 accredited law schools. The specialty program in dispute resolution is ranked second in the nation and five programs rank in the top 25 in the country: dispute resolution, criminal law, contract law, health law, and legal writing.

The College of Medicine ranked 28th in the ranking of Best Medical Schools–Primary Care, moving up 10 spots versus last year, and ranked 33rd among Best Medical Schools–Research, moving up one spot. In addition, Ohio State ranked seventh for Most Diverse Medical Schools, a new category this year. Specialty programs in surgery ranked 17th, anesthesiology ranked 18th and pediatrics ranked 21st. This recognizes the College of Medicine as one of the most diverse institutions in the country, providing top-tier medical and graduate education programs.

The College of Nursing’s master of science in nursing and doctor of nursing practice (DNP) programs were recognized for excellence in academic rigor and outcomes, with several specialization tracks singled out as top-five programs among public institutions. The rankings included ninth overall and third among public colleges for the master of science in nursing and 18th overall and eighth among public colleges for the DNP programs. This is the third consecutive year that the College of Nursing’s master’s program ranks in the nation’s top 10 and that its DNP program ranks in the nation’s top 20.

The John Glenn College of Public Affairs is ranked 13th in the country out of 285 ranked schools, placing it among the top 5% of public affairs graduate professional degree programs. No other public affairs program in Ohio is ranked in the top 50 schools. The college is also rated in eight out of 12 specialties ranked by U.S. News.

The College of Public Health is ranked first in Ohio and in the top 25 in the nation among 188 public health schools and programs accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health. The college’s specialty program in health care management — the Master of Health Administration — was also ranked first in the state and seventh overall in the most recent analysis of those programs.

A number of Ohio State programs earned high marks in previous years and the magazine reprints rankings from previous years in some fields.

By Donna Ford

Professor of Special Education, The Ohio State University

Black students are underrepresented in gifted education programs. ER Productions Limited via DigitalVision/Getty Images Plus

Editor’s note: Amid numerous articles about how Black students lag behind others in educational achievement, occasionally you may hear about a young Black “prodigy” who got accepted into college at an early age. According to Donna Y. Ford, an education professor at The Ohio State University, there could be far more Black prodigies. But it would take the right support from families, who may not be familiar with some of the characteristics of gifted students and the existence of gifted programs, and educators, who often overlook the talents of Black students. Indeed, while Black students represent 15.5% of the student population in the U.S., they represent only 9.9% of all students in gifted and talented programs. In the following Q&A with education editor Jamaal Abdul-Alim, Professor Ford – who has been a consultant for Black families thinking about sending their gifted children to college early – argues that public schools are holding back Black talent rather than cultivating it. The Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Jamaal Abdul-Alim: Why do public schools so often fail to identify gifted Black students?

Donna Ford: The No. 1 reason for the underrepresentation of Black students in gifted education is the lack of teacher referrals, even when Black students are highly gifted. I definitely think stereotypes and biases hinder educators from seeing Black students’ gifts and talents. In most schools in the U.S., if you are not referred by an educator, you will not move through the identification pipeline for gifted education programs and services, as well as Advanced Placement. It starts and it stops with teachers.

This is why Black families have reached out to me. They’re saying, “This predominantly white-female discipline” – meaning teachers – “is doing my child an injustice.”

They’re saying, “I’m frustrated, I don’t know what to do other than pull my child out and home-school.” You don’t see a lot of Black home-schooling. If the parents are able to do it, they have the means.

Abdul-Alim: Are these children really prodigies or do they just have parents who are just really actively involved and concerned about their children’s education, and recognize the public schools are doing them a disservice?

Ford: There’s a lot of controversy in the field about how children become gifted, no less a prodigy. To me, it’s not just nature or nurture. It’s both. So nature is they have the capacity, the potential. And then nurture is they have the experience, the exposure, the opportunity, access. And that includes the families who have the means and wherewithal to advocate for their children or to nurture whatever potential is there. But personally and professionally, I believe that the most important factor – for students being very gifted and prodigies – is the environment. That means their families, and their cultural, social and economic capital.

Abdul-Alim: But doesn’t that kind of point away from the idea of these children being “prodigies”? Because if the thing they have in common is well-educated parents who have high incomes, it seems like almost any child in that situation could achieve similar educational results.

Ford: A prodigy just means that you have children who are performing at the level of an adult; that’s the basic definition of a prodigy. So that has nothing to do with their income and families, education, etc. It is about how they are performing. They’re playing the piano like an adult who has taken lessons. They picked up on these skills and skill sets very easily. Or they are inventing mathematical formulas that you would only see adults doing. They’re in middle school and can do the work of college-level students. You can have this potential, but if you don’t have these opportunities at home, at school, even in the community, then the gifts and talents that you have may not come to fruition at the highest level.

Abdul-Alim: When families come to you about whether or not to enroll their young child in college, what do you generally advise them to do or to consider?

Ford: There’s a lot of variables to consider. One is the child’s emotional and social maturity. I think their size is important. Are they small for their age? That can contribute to some social and emotional issues, in particular bullying or isolation. Do they have siblings who are older who might be intimidated or negatively affected by their younger sibling being accelerated?

[Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter.]

Abdul-Alim: What is your advice to families who can’t afford to home-school, but who have children who could very well be higher-performing if given the opportunity? How does society provide opportunities for children who fall in that category?

Ford: I want the families to become familiar with what the barriers are. So when Black families have contacted me about their child not being identified as gifted or not being challenged like their white classmates, then I point them to the Civil Rights Data Collection website, which is run by the U.S. Department of Education. I have them look specifically at what the data says for representation in gifted programs and Advanced Placement classes. I ask them to look at suspension and expulsion by race and corporal punishment, if that exists in their schools, which it does in some states, and very last, take a hard and critical look at all the data.

You can go straight to data for your child’s district or school building. And so, they can come armed with these demographic data showing underrepresentation in gifted and Advanced Placement, but overrepresentation in certain categories of special education as well as discipline, such as suspension and expulsion. And when they come informed, then sometimes – not always – the educators are put on notice. And they do what they’re supposed to do anyway, which is share information with families about how to gain the resources and opportunities that their children need.

Donna Ford, Professor of Special Education, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The course, “Infection Prevention 101 for Public Spaces,” explores best-in-class infection prevention strategies for helping to keep public spaces safer, including scientific context and practical tips.

“This online class helps those responsible for the cleaning and disinfection of public spaces understand not only how to reduce the spread of infection but also why this foundational knowledge is so critical to elevating overall health and wellness in the workplace,” said Anne Turpin, a senior lecturer in Ohio State’s Hospitality Management program who teaches the course.

Turpin, who has 20 years of experience in the hospitality industry, worked with faculty, infection prevention specialists and other professionals to develop the course content.

“Successful completion of the certificate program is valuable on many levels,” Turpin said. “It serves as a visible commitment to healthier environments for guests, patients and team members and it serves as a free professional developmental opportunity for individuals."

While the course focuses on health care and hospitality, the content is also relevant to other industries adjusting to their “new normal” amid the COVID-19 pandemic, including retail, offices, schools, restaurants and more, Turpin said.

Experience Columbus, the destination marketing organization for the city, has adopted the course as part of its Live Forward Pledge, designed to help restart the city’s tourism economy following the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We recognize that there is an opportunity to further educate hospitality industry workers with foundational knowledge about infectious disease prevention,” said Brian Ross, president and CEO of Experience Columbus and an alumnus of Ohio State’s Hospitality Management program.

“This information is of the utmost importance to keeping the city’s 43 million annual visitors and 2 million-plus residents safe and healthy.”

CloroxPro, a company that makes cleaning products for businesses, hospitals and schools, provided support to help create and launch the course.

“Cleaning and disinfecting have always played an important role in overall public health,” said Doe Kley, a senior infection preventionist in the CloroxPro Healthcare division, who is a content expert for Ohio State’s Hospitality Management program and supported development of the course.

“Better understanding of the science of infection prevention enables businesses to implement effective long-term plans to reduce the spread of many pathogens in addition to COVID-19.”

The course consists of the following:

• Video 1: Introduction to Infection Prevention in Public Spaces
• Video 2: Where Do Infectious Agents Hide
• Video 3: Transmission of Diseases
• Video 4: Cleaning, Disinfection, Product Selection

“Infection Prevention 101 for Public Spaces” is available on the university’s ScarletCanvas platform.

Now, after giving $7.5 million to The Ohio State University College of Human Ecology in July for children’s literacy, the professor emerita has again shown her commitment to paying it forward. Her new $2 million gift supports Literacy Collaborative, the college’s comprehensive school literacy model for grades K-8. 

The Literacy Collaborative is a nonprofit venture designed to lift the expertise of teachers and help them fulfill their dreams for their students.

Jamie Lipp, interim lead for Literacy Collaborative and Reading Recovery, calls the gift a blessing. “Not only will it help us be more financially secure, but it will allow us to grow and expand, have some flexibility. It’ll be used over five years to address needs within the project.” 

Training in how to use the long-standing model in schools has been self-sustaining for decades. But with district budget cuts due to the pandemic, Pinnell’s gift will ensure a funding stream to sustain the college’s Literacy Collaborative trainers. 

The trainers currently work with 25 school districts in five states, including Ohio. According to the most recent data, the coaches and teachers in the districts enhanced the learning of 8,640 students that academic year.

“Our society benefits when we have fully literate citizens,” said Don Pope-Davis, dean of the College of Education and Human Ecology. “By creating Literacy Collaborative, Dr. Pinnell has enriched our college’s reputation as a leader in supporting young children’s education. We appreciate her latest gift to keep Literacy Collaborative strong.” 

Literacy Collaborative boosts whole-school literacy learning  

“Teacher expertise, teachers’ knowledge and skills, make more of a difference to student learning than any other single factor,” Lipp said. “Literacy Collaborative is an investment in teacher expertise. It provides long-term professional development, which is known to hone professional skills over time.”

Wendy Reed, a college-level Literacy Collaborative trainer, said the model does not assume there is only one way to teach. “The trainers guide coaches and teachers to be responsive based on learners’ strengths and needs,” she said. “We train them to recognize the assets kids bring to their learning, to gather data showing what each child is learning and to build on it.” 

Joining the collaborative begins with training for a school building’s chosen literacy coach, who receives 230 hours over 12 to 15 months.

“Initial coach training is rigorous,” said Shelly Schaub, also a college-level Literacy Collaborative trainer, “yet districts come back year after year for ongoing professional learning.” 

When the building coach is ready to move forward, the collaborative trains leadership at all levels of the building, from classroom teachers to administrators. 

“As everyone becomes trained, they know it’s not about learning to teach a particular program or curriculum,” Lipp said. “You are building their literacy understanding and creating expert teachers who are equipped and empowered to make instructional decisions and feel confident that those decisions are based on the needs of those learners.” 

School moved from F to B in two years

Schools join the collaborative in a variety of ways and for different reasons. “Some realize their students are not making the gains they would like to see,” said Schaub. “Rather than purchasing a resource to hand to teachers, they decide to invest in teacher professional learning and tend to find their way to Literacy Collaborative.” 

Southeast Primary School, serving K-2 in the Southeast City Schools District of rural Ravenna, Ohio, took this route. After two years as principal, David Fesemyer concluded that the school’s talented, highly educated teachers were working incredibly hard for results that, based on data, didn’t align with the effort. 

“Fifty percent of our kids were a grade level behind (in literacy development) when they came to us in kindergarten,” he said of the school’s approximately 300 students. “When they left … at the end of second grade, 50% were still behind.” 

The district’s curriculum director, Kim Davis, recommended Literacy Collaborative.

Teacher buy-in is essential in adopting the collaborative. Fesemyer had built trust among his school’s teachers, and they liked the idea of an investment in their talent.

Plus, “he took all of the teachers ... to a school that was using Literacy Collaborative,” said Michelle Rentsch, previously the Southeast Primary literacy coach and now principal since Fesemyer’s retirement. “They could actually see the work being done in a classroom to make sure they felt, ‘Yes, we can see ourselves doing this.’”

Once trained, Rentsch said she gained access to the college’s trainers for questions, as well as “an amazing community of coaches in Ohio. It’s like a huge family of support,” she said. “My training at Ohio State was by far the best I ever had in my career.” 

In a record two years, the district’s K-2 students catapulted from an F to a B in literacy, according to their state report card.

Since then, the students have received an A in their state report card for two years in a row. The Ohio Board of Education also presented the school with its All A Award. 

Learning expands from literacy to social studies, science, math 

In Literacy Collaborative, students spend a 2 ½-hour block daily in literacy learning, including interactive read aloud, reading workshop, writing workshop, guided reading and word study.

“Our kids have always loved reading books,” Rentsch said, “but now, the way they talk about authors, you would think they know them personally. (It’s) because they’ve done author studies … and they’ve read every one of their books and had book talks. Those conversations have gone to a deeper level with our students.” 

The Southeast teachers also integrate social studies and science reading within the literacy block, so students make connections. The collaborative has even impacted the school’s math program, which is now taught in small groups using activities and shared exploration. This approach helps students gain understanding and build meaning.

“It’s a similar model to what we do in Literacy Collaborative,” Rentsch said, “because we’ve seen how powerful it is.”

The Newark City School District has worked with Literacy Collaborative since 1995, not long after Pinnell and colleagues trained the first coach in 1993. Since that time, the district has maintained its own coach trainer. Denise Rowe took on that role in 2015.

In addition to the college’s twice-yearly training for Newark’s coaches, Rowe provides ongoing professional development for the two Newark coaches at each of their seven elementary schools.

Rowe feels her work with the coaches brings ongoing benefits, including “instructional rounds” in which she models a lesson, then teachers practice it. “It’s being able to support teachers with cutting-edge research, fresh knowledge and how to implement it in their classrooms,” she said.

Thanks to the collaborative, the district’s third-grade reading scores have doubled their growth rate in the last three years compared to similar districts. They continue to trend upward to meet state expectations. 

Rentsch said Pinnell visited their district in April 2019, showing that she truly cares about the schools using the literacy framework that she spent so many years developing and perfecting through research. 

Rowe said that since joining the Newark district early in her career, everything she’s known has been based on Pinnell’s work. “What a blessing (it is) to have her impacting so many teachers and coaches and professionals and students,” Rowe said. “Her work is just so far reaching.” 

Ten team projects were awarded funding for the first round of Ohio State’s Seed Fund for Racial Justice. The program seeks to develop research approaches and creative ideas to help contribute to the elimination of racism and solve its underlying causes and consequences on campuses, in the community and across the United States.

The seed grant program was developed at the request of the Office of the President through a collaboration of leaders from the colleges of Education and Human Ecology and Social Work and the offices of Diversity and Inclusion, Outreach and Engagement, Academic Affairs and Research.

Grant recipient Ranthony A.C. Edmonds, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mathematics, will research the history of Black mathematicians at Ohio State to explore access to STEM for minoritized groups.

“I started looking into the history of people who have come before me to see what had been going on,” she said. “I started learning about the first Black math PhD from Ohio State. His name was William McWorter, and he had a prolific research career. He actually ended up becoming an assistant professor at Ohio State.”

Edmonds said her early research found that nearly 200 mathematicians who identify as Black have earned degrees in mathematics at Ohio State. She said many have become productive researchers, authors, high school teachers, department chairs and university presidents – yet those achievements remain hidden. 

The research will reveal this history. Narratives and histories collected will be used to provide historic and cultural understanding and STEM resources for teachers and their students. In addition, this work will be used to improve mentoring practices in the mathematical sciences in institutions across the country. Edmonds is the lead researcher on the project, partnering with Ohio History Connection/National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center and the National Math Alliance. The former will consult, help implement community and educational programming, and support adding the digital archive of Black mathematicians into its current digital repository, Ohio Memory.

“There’s a lot of research that could come from this. As a mathematician, I’m really interested in the math that these people were involved in,” Edmonds said. “Some of these early mathematicians found it difficult to find their place academically. So being able to highlight this work is really cool.”

Education is also at the heart of the project Noelle Arnold is leading. Arnold, associate dean for equity, diversity and global engagement in the College of Education and Human Ecology, will help develop anti-bias and anti-racism education and operational excellence content to improve professional development for educational leaders from kindergarten through high school.

“Most school districts across the U.S. have school improvement plans. Rather than making anti-racism or equity a side project, we’re actually integrating it into the core systems that school districts already have,” she said.

The overarching goal of this project is to support partner school districts in building their organizational capacity to address institutional racism.

Each project is required to have multidisciplinary investigators and a community partner to ensure solutions have real-world applicability. Arnold worked with researchers from the Fisher College of Business and partnered with Columbus City Schools, Hilliard City Schools and the Fairfield County Educational Service Center.

She said the goal of the research is to develop a sustainable program that can help teachers and administrators track and improve their anti-bias and anti-racism work.

“We think the process begins with helping districts to create a plan and then providing ongoing support over a couple of years through coaching, modeling, refining and assessing what kind of impact that plan actually has for the district,” she said.

Both Arnold and Edmonds said the funding for racial justice research helps serve the founding mission of Ohio State as a land-grant university.

“I think it’s very important. We are actually doing what we say in our mission and vision, that we are engaged with the community,” Arnold said. “I appreciate that Ohio State is elevating research focused around engagement and community efforts.”

The following projects also received funding:

• Professor Joy McCorriston in the Department of Anthropology leads an interdisciplinary team drawn from Ohio State, Atlanta University Center Consortium (which includes four historically Black colleges and universities) and Academic Search to develop an ethical, logistical and fiscally sound model for a partnered campus.
• In partnership with First Nations Development Institute, a team lead by Stephen Gavazzi, professor in the College of Education and Human Ecology, seeks to address the forced exile of Native Americans during the establishment of the State of Ohio and the dispossession of tribal lands by the U.S. government to fund the establishment of Ohio State.
• Big Walnut High School joins Wexner Center for the Arts Executive Director Johanna Burton and a team that will build upon pilot efforts in anti-racism and diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion to spark conversations and integrate anti-racist efforts into school curricula.
• College of Nursing Assistant Professor Kathy Wright plans to collaborate with community partners on development of a virtually delivered stress- and emotion-management program supporting Black and African American middle-aged women with high blood pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• OSU Extension Educator Whitney Gherman and Michelle Kaiser, associate professor in the College of Social Work, will recruit high school students of color enrolled in African American Studies at Marion Harding High School to establish Marion Dreamkeepers. The group will investigate institutional, systemic racism and provide solutions to lasting, sustainable racial justice reform.
• Jill Clark, associate professor in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, leads a transdisciplinary team of researchers from Ohio State and leaders from the City of Columbus’ Department of Neighborhoods seeking to address the qualities of inclusive, equitable and anti-racist local public participation environments.
• A project led by Professor Jeffrey Cohen, Department of Anthropology, conducted in collaboration with the Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio will explore the mechanisms of structural vulnerability caused by the digital divide and detail community efforts to address the physical and social challenges created by COVID-19.
• Kara Malone, assistant professor-clinical in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and community partner Restoring Our Own Through Transformation (ROOTT) will work to understand how structural bias, social inequities and racism undermine health and create challenges to achieving health equity, especially for Black women, infants and families in Franklin County.

The Office of Research has more information on the seed funding program’s awards on its website. A second round of funding will be announced in 2021.

In a study that asked prospective donors to consider whether and how much to give to a local food bank to help fight hunger during the coronavirus pandemic, researchers found that donors were more likely to give when heartfelt messages were written in typefaces that looked like handwriting, and when messages that talked about the power of an organization were written in typeface that looked more business-like.

In other words, make the font match the message to get more donations, the researchers said.

“Our research suggests that simply changing the typeface of appeals messages could make those appeals stronger and encourage people to make donations,” said Huiling Huang, a consumer sciences doctoral student at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study, which was published last month in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.  

When the message was a warm one, with a tone that played up the emotions of what the fundraising organization could do, donors were more likely to give when the message was written in font that looked like handwriting.

When the message was focused on the competency of the organization, on its efficiency and on its power, donors were more likely to give when the message was written in a font that was clearly generated by a computer — much like the font you’re reading now.

Previous research in this area has found that donation requests that utilize warmth-focused messages emphasize friendliness, care and love — characteristics that convey good intentions and a desire to help others. Donation requests that focus on an organization’s capabilities, efficiency and effectiveness, on the other hand, convey that organization’s ability to achieve a goal. Both are effective fundraising techniques, but this new study indicates that those appeals can be even more effective if paired with the appropriate typeface.

Huang said previous analyses have shown that most donation appeals are printed in a business-like font. Depending on the message, she said, those organizations might be leaving donations on the table.

For this study, researchers asked study participants to imagine that they were picking up takeout from a local restaurant, ]and that, in the drive-through line, there was a flyer stating that the restaurant had partnered with a local food bank to collect donations to offset the pressures the food bank faced because of the pandemic.

Researchers offered the “prospective donors” two sets of requests for donations. One set’s message focused on the strength and competence of the organization. The other’s message focused on warmth and the organization’s ability to positively affect lives. Each was written in two different typefaces: One that looked similar to a person’s handwriting, and one that was clearly computer-generated.

Then, the researchers asked the study participants how likely they were to make a donation. They also asked questions about how deeply the participants trusted and would be loyal to the hypothetical restaurant, based only on the donation appeal.

They found that study participants were more likely to give, by a factor of about one-sixth, when the message matched the typeface — warm messages with handwritten font, competence-based messages with computer-generated font.

Study participants also reported feeling more trust toward the restaurant asking for donations when the typeface matched the tone of the appeal. The researchers measured trust because many businesses have turned to raising money or awareness for social causes — what researchers call “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)” marketing — to build loyalty in their brands.

Studies have shown that consumer trust in a business is related to loyalty.

“We focused on a restaurant for this study, but I think our findings can be applied to a broader context way beyond restaurants and hospitality,” said Stephanie Liu, senior author on the paper and an assistant professor of hospitality management at Ohio State.

“A lot of companies are using social responsibility messaging to enhance customer loyalty, and brands who solicit any types of donation can benefit from these findings. By matching the message to the font, they can build trust, which leads to loyalty.”

The study, published in the most recent issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports, found that gender has no bearing on whether people will feel apprehensive or anxious without their phones. But people who feel that way tend to be more anxious and obsessive-compulsive in their day-to-day lives than other people, the study suggests.

“It is that fear, that panicky feeling, of ‘oh, no, I left my phone at home,’” said Ana-Paula Correia, one of the authors of the study, associate professor in the department of educational studies at The Ohio State University and director of Ohio State’s Center on Education and Training for Employment.

This study was based on Correia’s previous work, which created a questionnaire to evaluate individuals’ reliance on their smartphones and explored the term “nomophobia” -- the fear of being away from one’s smartphone. (Nomophobia is not recognized as a diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association.)

For this study, researchers gave that questionnaire and another that evaluated psychopathological symptoms such as anxiety, obsession-compulsion and feelings of inadequacy to 495 adults aged 18 to 24 in Portugal. Those adults reported using their phones for between four and seven hours a day, primarily for social networking applications.

The researchers found that the more participants used their smartphone each day, the more stress they reported feeling without their phone. A little more than half of the study participants were female; the study didn’t find a link between gender and feelings of nomophobia.

The researchers also found that the higher participants scored on obsession-compulsion, the more they feared being without their phone. Obsession-compulsion was measured by asking participants to rate how much they felt they had to “check and double-check what you do” and similar questions.

There is a difference between normal smartphone use that benefits a person’s life – say, video chatting with friends when you can’t be together in person or using it for work – and smartphone use that interferes with a person’s life. That kind of behavior, Correia said, is more likely to cause anxiety when we are away from our phones.

And, the study’s results suggest that people experiencing tension might see their phones as a stress-management tool.

“This concept is about more than just the phone,” Correia said. “People use it for other tasks, including social media, connecting, knowing what’s going on with their social media influencers. So being away from the phone or the phone having a low battery can sort of sever that connection and leave some people with feelings of agitation.”

Ohio State University Professor Emerita Gay Su Pinnell, MA ’68, PhD ’75, has committed $7.5 million from her charitable fund with The Columbus Foundation to the College of Education and Human Ecology — the largest philanthropic contribution made by an individual or foundation in the college’s history.

The gift will support an endowed professorship in reading, the first endowed clinical professorship at Ohio State, also for reading, and funds for literacy education.

In recognition of her Ohio State legacy, the Pinnell Professorship in Reading will honor her years of scholarship and practice that helped children who struggle to read. Through Pinnell’s tireless efforts, Reading Recovery, the intervention she helped bring to North America with colleagues 35 years ago, has provided high-quality reading instruction to over 2.3 million first-graders in the lowest 20 percent of their classes in reading.

Pinnell ensured that Ohio State holds the license to Reading Recovery and conducts the intervention in concert with 12 other university training centers in North America. Based on research evidence of effectiveness, the federal government’s What Works Clearinghouse ranks Reading Recovery the highest among 24 other reading curricula and literacy instructional strategies for students from kindergarten through third grade.

Pinnell focused her career on research to ensure the effectiveness of the intervention. A large study by independent researchers completed in 2015 showed that low-progress first-graders taught by Reading Recovery teachers were learning to read 120 percent to 166 percent faster than typical rates of learning for first-graders.

“These faculty positions and literacy funds will honor the scholarship and teaching of Dr. Pinnell in perpetuity,” said Bruce A. McPheron, executive vice president and provost. “Throughout her remarkable career, she has worked to foster greater understanding about how teachers can best position young readers for lifelong success.”

Pinnell was inducted into the college’s Hall of Fame in 2015 in recognition of her many contributions. Her gift is also the largest to the college since last year’s launch of Time and Change: The Ohio State Campaign, which has three core areas of focus: student success, discovery and healthy, vibrant communities.

“Dr. Pinnell has become a nationally known champion of young, struggling readers by increasing the college’s scholarly reputation and practice through programs based on rigorous research,” said College of Education and Human Ecology Dean Don Pope-Davis. “We greatly appreciate that Dr. Pinnell has chosen to invest in the education of children through this transformative gift.”

Pinnell has named the Mary Fried Endowed Clinical Professorship in honor of her colleague and friend who joined Ohio State in 1984 to take part in the original Reading Recovery pilot study. Fried has remained with Ohio State ever since, becoming well known nationwide as she provides professional development for teachers in Reading Recovery and the Literacy Collaborative.

"I consider teaching children to harness language through Reading Recovery and Literacy Collaborative vitally important,” Pinnell said. “I named the clinical professorship for my colleague and friend Mary because she exemplifies the consummate literacy educator. The ongoing professional development that she and the other educators provide opens the eyes of teachers and their coaches to the power and effect of their teaching.”

The Fried Clinical Professor will serve as a bridge between Reading Recovery and the Literacy Collaborative, which will be supported by the Literacy Collaborative Endowed Training Fund. The training fund will provide leadership and expert support to the collaborative, a comprehensive school reform project for grades K-8. Since 1986, the collaborative has partnered with school districts nationwide to train teams of teachers, administrators and coaches focused on improving children’s literacy skills.

Pinnell’s body of work includes her ongoing collaboration with Professor Irene Fountas, Lesley University, in creating The Fountas & Pinnell Classroom Guided Reading Collection, a literacy program published by Heinemann, a division of Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt. This program helps children around the world advance their ability to process increasingly challenging books with fluency and comprehension.

Developed by Bernadette Melnyk, university chief wellness officer and dean of the College of Nursing and the Buckeye Wellness team, the sessions are designed to equip children with easily digestible but important knowledge and skills to sustain well-being during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The webinars are free and open to the public at go.osu.edu/adolescentstaywell. 

Melnyk says it’s important to teach resiliency, coping strategies and healthy behavior habits as early as possible.

“We want to provide early teens with evidence-based cognitive-behavioral, coping and resiliency skills as well as to help them develop healthy lifestyle habits, including physical activity, healthy eating and needed sleep,” Melnyk said. “Mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, are on the rise in our adolescents in addition to overweight/obesity. The earlier we can teach children these skills, the better chance we have at preventing these problems.”

Because peer-to-peer counseling works well with young adolescents, students from the colleges of Nursing and Education and Human Ecology will facilitate the webinars and answer questions. Taylor Schwein, a fourth-year honors student majoring in nursing at Ohio State, is one of the instructors.

“I hope that the teens and families watching this webinar know that it is okay to feel anxious, stressed or depressed during these very trying times in our world,” Schwein said. “All of those feelings are very normal and no one is alone in feeling that way. It’s so important to recognize those feelings and continue to work on your mental health when things get hard.”

Each week, the webinar will cover a new topic.

• Week one – Stress Buster: Using Cognitive-Behavioral Skills to Allay Anxiety and Depression
• Week two – Staying Physically Active While Home: Tips and Tricks
• Week three – Be Here Now: Mindfulness Works!
• Week four – Sleep Soundly During the COVID-19 Pandemic: You Can Do It!
• Week five – Eating Healthy and Balanced in Stressful Times: Why it Matters
• Week six – Resiliency, Gratitude and Positivity: A Timely Trio in the Midst of the COVID-19 Storm

Each webinar will be conducted via Zoom. Polling will be used to measure stress and anxiety each week to look for trends. Each session is 30 minutes, with approximately 25 minutes spent on presentations with a few minutes for Q&A at the end. 

The webinar is based on a series of resources developed by Melnyk and other university wellness leaders for the Ohio State community titled “Staying calm and well in the midst of the COVID-19 storm. Evidence-based Tactics that Work!” That series, presented in April, had 4,500 registrants with an average live attendance of 1,300. More than 85% of participants found the series moderately or very helpful, and over 95% reported that they’ve put the skills taught in the series into practice. Recordings of the eight-week online webinars are posted here.

Melnyk also encourages parents to watch the webinars with their children so they can reinforce the concepts and skills being taught at home.

The last thing parents should do is stress themselves about making their child complete all of these school assignments, said a child development researcher at The Ohio State University.

“You signed up to be a parent, not a teacher,” said Jessica Logan, assistant professor of educational studies.

“All parents are in the same boat. Your kid is not going to fall behind if they don’t do these assignments every day.”

Logan said she has seen a lot of parents coming up with detailed schedules for their kids, including time for home schooling. While schedules can be helpful, she recommends not taking them too seriously.

In fact, Logan said she decided to skip making a schedule after she started working on one for her two children (8 and 12 years old).

“While I was working on it, they both got really into working on a puzzle together. They were talking and there was all this creative expression and play,” she said.

“And I thought, if I had a schedule right now, I would be shutting this off and moving them to the next activity.”

She based her decision to be flexible about her children’s time partly on her previous experience working in two different preschool settings. One was highly structured, with a set curriculum and planned activities. The other was a drop-in setting, where there was no structure.

Both had positives and negatives, she said. But she remembers how the structured preschool left her feeling restricted.

“I felt like I couldn’t let the children breathe and follow their interests and ideas because it was time for the next thing.”

But parents need to be realistic, she emphasized. Kids aren’t always going to be doing enriching activities, and parents don’t need to insist they do.

Many parents are focused on working from home right now – they should not feel guilty doing that while their kids find ways to amuse themselves, even if it is watching TV or playing video games for hours sometimes.

“Remember this isn’t a long-term solution, it is a temporary one that is designed to get you all through this alive and healthy,” Logan said.

“There will be some days when you can encourage them to read, do homework or exercise. But you shouldn’t feel like you must do that every day, because they won’t have the capacity to do that every day.”

Of course, some kids, especially younger ones, will do better with some scheduling, particularly involving sleeping and eating, she said. But parents should allow some flexibility as needs change.

Logan said parents should also be aware of how their children are reacting to the confusing and sometimes frightening news around them.

“The world is a scary place right now and they know it. They can tell,” she said.

Logan was a preschool teacher during the 9/11 terrorist attacks and she recalls how the tragedy was reflected in children’s play in the weeks afterward. She remembers observing kids building towers with blocks and knocking them down with pretend planes.

“Some days kids are going to feel stressed and angry. They know something is up – they’re home from school,” she said.

“They need to feel supported and loved when they are feeling afraid.”

The love and support parents provide will be much more important than any schoolwork they complete, she said.

“The kids will be fine. They will have plenty of time to learn reading and arithmetic. Parents don’t need to stress about that.”

In addition, the children scored lower on a test of cognitive development. These developmental delays were evident even when the researchers took into account factors such as the education and income of mothers, which are also linked to their children’s language and cognitive skills.

The findings provide additional evidence of the need for pediatricians and other health care providers to counsel parents of young children to restrict their use of toxic household chemicals, said Hui Jiang, lead author of the study and senior research associate at The Ohio State University.

“We found that a significant percentage of mothers with young children may commonly expose their children to toxic household chemicals, possibly because they are unaware that such materials may be harmful,” said Jiang, who is with Ohio State’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy.

The study was published online recently in the journal Clinical Pediatrics.

The researchers used data on 190 families from the Kids in Columbus Study, a Crane Center research project that followed children born into low-income families in Columbus for five years after birth.

When they first started the study, mothers were asked about their use of household chemicals such as floor and toilet cleaners and solvents during pregnancy. They were asked again when their child was 14 to 23 months old. Mothers also reported whether they had mold in the home, their use of pesticides, and neighborhood pollution sources.

Children’s language development was measured when they were between 14 and 23 months old and again when they were 20 to 25 months old. The researchers used a standardized test that examines children’s understanding and expression of language – for example, recognition of objects and people, following directions, and naming objects and pictures.

Findings showed that neighborhood pollution, mold in the house and pesticide use were not significantly linked to child outcomes.

But the more household chemicals mothers reported using regularly after childbirth, the lower the child language and cognitive outcomes at 2 years of age.

There was no link between chemical use during pregnancy and child outcomes, possibly because mothers reported using significantly fewer chemicals during pregnancy.

Exposure to toxic chemicals was reported by about 20 percent of mothers during pregnancy, but that increased to 30 percent when their children were between 1 and 2 years old. Mothers also reported using more household chemicals after childbirth.

“A lot of mothers seem to know to limit exposure to toxic chemicals during pregnancy, but once their child is born, they may think it is no longer a problem,” Jiang said.

But research has shown these early years of a child’s life are key in many ways, said Laura Justice, co-author of the study and professor of educational psychology at Ohio State.

“When kids reach about 2 years old, that is a peak time for brain development,” said Justice, who is executive director of The Crane Center.

“If the use of toxic chemicals is interfering with that development, that could lead to problems with language and cognitive growth.”

While many mothers may use household cleaners and other toxic chemicals when their children are young, low-income mothers may face particular challenges, Jiang said.

For example, they often live in smaller apartments where it may be more difficult to keep children away from chemicals, particularly while they are cleaning.

Jiang noted that this study simply analyzed the relationship between mothers’ use of toxic chemicals and later child development and as such can’t prove that chemical use caused the developmental delays.

“Future studies are need to more carefully examine the mechanisms through which household toxicants may disrupt early language development,” she said.

The findings do show that pediatricians need to emphasize that pregnancy is not the only time for mothers to be concerned about chemical use, Justice said.

“Parents need to understand the delicacy of brain development in the first several years of life and their children’s susceptibility to chemical exposure,” she said.

Other co-authors were Kelly Purtell and Randi Bates, both of Ohio State.

U.S. News & World Report ranked the university’s online bachelor’s programs No. 1 for 2020 — up two spots over the previous year.

Additionally, Ohio State’s online Master of Science in Nursing program is ranked No. 4 nationally and No. 2 among public universities, with three of the program’s specialties also placing among the top four.

“We are pleased to be among the nation’s top online programs,” Executive Vice President and Provost Bruce A. McPheron said. “Our faculty and staff are committed to the success of all Ohio State students — whether they are on campus or online. This recognition reflects the university’s focus on advancing teaching and learning for all students.”

Ohio State’s online bachelor’s programs and online master’s program in nursing have been ranked among the nation’s top 10 for six consecutive years. The ranking for online bachelor’s programs includes Ohio State’s RN to Bachelor of Science in Nursing, Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences and Bachelor of Science, Dental Hygiene.

Online graduate programs in the College of Engineering and the College of Education and Human Ecology rose in the rankings in 2020. Engineering programs ranked No. 19, and education programs ranked No. 20 — up six and 18 spots, respectively.

Ohio State’s online graduate engineering programs include the Master of Science in Welding Engineering and Master of Global Engineering Leadership. Graduate education offerings include the Master of Learning Technologies, Master of Arts in Art Education, and Master of Science in Agricultural Communication, Education and Leadership.

"Our online programs provide students the opportunity to experience Ohio State’s academic excellence from anywhere — a modern expression of our land-grant mission,” Vice President and Chief Information Officer Mike Hofherr said.

Ohio State Online degree and certificate programs are taught by the same faculty who teach on campus. Each faculty member works with an instructional designer to reshape the instructor’s on-campus teaching for a technology-rich modality, Hofherr explained.

U.S. News & World Report ranks online programs at regionally accredited institutions with a focus on quality instruction and affordability. Rankings indicators include engagement, services and technologies, faculty credentials and training, and expert opinion.

“We are grateful that U.S. News & World Report continues to spotlight our world-class faculty, staff and curricula as among the very best in the country at preparing students to transform the future of health and improve lives,” said Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk, dean of the College of Nursing and the university’s chief wellness officer. “Our wonderful online students receive the same innovative and high-quality education as students on campus so that they can dream, discover and deliver a healthier world through evidence-based care.”

The most recently ranked programs join several others across the university recognized for academic excellence, including 15 Ohio State graduate programs ranked in the top 10 by U.S. News & World Report. The publication’s “America’s Best Colleges” report ranked Ohio State in the top 20 among public universities nationwide. The university was also recognized in the Best Undergraduate Teaching and Most Innovative Schools categories.

The study provides hope that future generations can overcome division and embrace differences, said Matthew Mayhew, study co-principal investigator and professor of higher education and student affairs at The Ohio State University.

Mayhew and colleagues surveyed students at 122 public and private colleges and universities. The study report, Friendships Matter: The Role of Peer Relationships in Interfaith Learning and Development, reflects attitudes of 7,194 students who responded at the start and the end of their freshman academic year in 2015-16. A variety of races and religions were represented.

Students answered questions about how their close friendships across religious traditions, political ideologies or guiding philosophies — called “interworldview” friendships by the researchers — influenced their outlook of others with different interworldviews.

Mayhew said the implications are powerful.

“We have research that, for years, has shown the first most important effect of college is whether you had a good learning experience with faculty,” he said. “But the second most powerful indicator of all college student learning and persistence, all graduation rates and economic gains, has always been positive relationships with peers. So for the first time, we have some explanatory power for the effect that we’ve been talking about for so long.”

When students arrive at college, most are open to making friends, especially if they don’t have social support coming in. This can be especially true if they’re leaving home for the first time.

More than 70 percent of student respondents said they placed importance on their colleges’ ability to provide opportunities to “get to know” people from different religious and nonreligious perspectives.

“Often, students come from backgrounds and neighborhoods where they didn't see much difference,” said Mayhew, also the Flesher Professor of Educational Administration. “So, on their dorm floor they might for the first time see someone who wears religious garments or other suggestions that they practice a different faith.”

Primed to make friends, they start talking.

“College offers a unique opportunity for people with different beliefs to get to know each other,” he said. “When else in life are you living closely with people new to you, eating meals together, going to class together, studying together?”

By the end of their first year, 64 percent of students who had no interworldview friendships when they began college made at least one friend in the first year, and 20 percent of this group reported making five or more such friends by the end of the year.

“This is striking,” Mayhew said, “because we don’t often see such pronounced results over just nine months of school. It shows how powerful the results are.”

In addition, students of all faiths reported more interworldview friendships with people who were different politically, of a different sexual orientation, agnostic, Muslim, spiritual but not religious, atheist and Jewish. And they were appreciative of those views, even if they didn’t share them.

What’s more, the researchers discovered an overall effect in which students in interworldview friendships also generally developed positive attitudes toward others of all worldviews.

For example, making a close atheist friend encourages students, on the whole, to become more appreciative of Buddhists, evangelical Christians, Hindus, Jews, Latter-day Saints and Muslims at the same time.

“College is our chance to really promote appreciation for all religions by helping students become friends, or by helping them develop the skills to work with each other and really care about each other,” Mayhew said “We want people to understand that those with very different ways of thinking about the world can sit together and be friends.”

The study also suggests that, when tested, these friendships showed resilience. Nearly two-thirds of the students maintained friendships despite incompatible worldview differences.

Specifically, 37 percent of students said they had had a significant disagreement with a friend about religion and remained friends.

And perhaps reflective of the 2016 presidential election and the salience of politics at that time, an even greater number of students — 52 percent — reported having a significant disagreement with a friend about politics and remaining friends.

Mayhew emphasized that college is the place where students are encouraged to explore different ideas. “Part of that exploration is what to do when you disagree with someone,” he said.

“In class, when folks speak up with different perspectives, the context invites disagreement. That’s part of learning, to explore different ideas, and part of the exploration is what to do when you disagree. So you learn that skill and keep the friendship. And, we hope, you keep those skills after you graduate.”

The study asked students to describe how they perceived themselves religiously and spiritually.

Results showed that nearly one-third of students changed their religious and spiritual self-perceptions in their first year on campus.

So not only did friendships that transcended worldview differences have the power to shape pluralist inclinations and appreciative attitudes, but they also changed how students saw themselves.

“We know that peer culture and friendships play a significant role in facilitating change,” Mayhew said, “and college age is a prime time in young people’s development to be offered interesting opportunities for introspection.

“In this distinctive space, students can explore who they are, and society willingly suspends judgment,” he said, also posing this question: If college students explore new ideas, including new views of others and who they are, why not have them explore how to make friends with people who think differently about the world?

So many wars have been waged because of religious differences, he said.

“Many colleges and universities are recruiting large cohorts of international students to come to America,” he said. “If we have their undivided attention for four years, why not invoke some practices that teach them, along with local students, how to productively exchange across religious differences?

“Any skill you adopt to talk between religious differences is probably one you could extrapolate, using it to talk across gender differences, race differences and more. What’s good about this study is it really does prove that friendships matter.”

Because colleges and universities are not set up to engineer friendships, the study authors offer several recommendations:

• Create the conditions – Form a hospitable campus for students of various worldviews. Create spaces where students of different beliefs and backgrounds can interact. If your university is religion based, seeks ways for students to engage with others in the community.
• Set the expectation – Create campus-wide initiatives or traditions that encourage students to reflect upon their friendships and understand the benefits of friendships across difference.
• Model the practice – Consider developing initiatives that encourage contact and foster meaningful interactions across worldviews.

This study began about 15 years ago when Mayhew and study co-principal investigator Alyssa Rockenbach were graduate students. Tired of presenting about college students’ spirituality and religion to empty conference rooms, they forged a plan to study the subject more extensively.

At a later conference, they met Eboo Patel, founder and president of the Interfaith Youth Core, who invited them to gather data from students to make the case for a larger study. About three years later, he introduced them to several funding sources.

As a result, this study, The Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey, was funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Fetzer Institute.

Some of the anti-cancer benefits of tomatoes, specifically those from a compound called lycopene, could disappear when they’re eaten with iron-rich foods, according to a new study from The Ohio State University.

Researchers analyzed the blood and digestive fluid of a small group of medical students after they consumed either a tomato extract-based shake with iron or one without iron. Lycopene levels in digestive fluid and in the blood were significantly lower when the study subjects drank the liquid meal mixed with an iron supplement, meaning there was less for the body to use in potentially beneficial ways.

“When people had iron with their meal, we saw almost a twofold drop in lycopene uptake over time,” said the study’s lead author, Rachel Kopec, an assistant professor of human nutrition at Ohio State.

“This could have potential implications every time a person is consuming something rich in lycopene and iron – say a Bolognese sauce, or an iron-fortified cereal with a side of tomato juice. You’re probably only getting half as much lycopene from this as you would without the iron.”

Iron is essential in the diet, performing such critical functions as allowing our bodies to produce energy and get rid of waste. But it’s also a nutrient that is known to monkey with other cellular-level processes.

“We know that if you mix iron with certain compounds it will destroy them, but we didn’t know if it would impair potentially beneficial carotenoids, like lycopene, found in fruits and vegetables,” Kopec said.

Carotenoids are plant pigments with antioxidant properties responsible for many bright red, yellow and orange pigments found in the produce aisle. These include lycopene, which is found in abundance in tomatoes and also colors watermelon and pink grapefruit. Scientists have identified several potential anti-cancer benefits of lycopene, including in prostate, lung and skin cancers.

The small study, which included seven French medical students who had repeated blood draws and digestive samples taken from tubes placed in their stomachs and small intestines, took this research out of the test tube and into the human body, allowing for a better examination of human metabolism in action, Kopec said.

It’s unclear precisely what is happening that is changing the uptake of lycopene, but it could be that the meal with iron oxidizes the lycopene, creating different products of metabolism than those followed in the study.

“It’s also possible that iron interrupts the nice emulsified mix of tomato and fats that is critical for cells to absorb the lycopene. It could turn it into a substance like separated salad dressing – oil on top and vinegar on the bottom – that won’t ever mix properly,” Kopec said.

Researchers continue to work to better understand lycopene’s role in fighting cancer, and the importance of its interplay with other compounds and nutrients.

“Nutrition can play an important role in disease prevention, but it’s important for us to gather the details about precisely how what we eat is contributing to our health so that we can give people reliable, science-based recommendations,” Kopec said.

The researchers explored the effects of teaching sex-ed with a focus on making sure students master the material rather than just pass the tests and score well on assignments. They found big differences that could have life-altering repercussions, said study author Eric Anderman of The Ohio State University.

Students whose teachers worked to make sure they truly took in the material in health class, even if, for example, that meant retaking tests and repeating previously covered lessons, were more likely to grasp those lessons later, and to say they would take measures such as using condoms. The study appears online in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

“When teachers are focusing on mastery, they emphasize the importance of the lessons to the student’s life and, if necessary, go over topics again and again to make sure that students understand, as opposed to a ‘This is important because it’s going to be on the test Friday’ approach,” said Anderman, a professor of educational psychology at Ohio State.

“Mastery really, really matters in health education – if you teach things in such a way that kids remember it later, you could help prevent the spread of disease and unwanted pregnancies,” he said.

“What they learn in health class is going to affect them for the rest of their lives and having this information could save lives.”

Anderman is interested in understanding what motivates adolescents to learn, and much of his work has focused on the concept of a mastery-focused approach to teaching and learning. While students in a mastery classroom might be taught the same material as those in a more traditional classroom, there are important variations that can make a difference in the long term, he said.

In the current study, Anderman and his colleagues examined the use of the 14-lesson “Reducing the Risk” curriculum, a sexual education plan promoted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study included 636 high school students, mostly ninth-graders, from seven Midwest high schools. Researchers compared the students’ perceptions of their teachers’ classroom approach to outcomes a year later that included the students’ knowledge about HIV and pregnancy prevention, and their behavioral intentions regarding safe sex (how likely it was that they would use a condom every time they had intercourse).

Those students who said their teachers focused on mastering the material were more likely to have grasped sex-ed lessons and more likely to employ those lessons, particularly having greater intentions to use condoms. There was no such positive relationship between an education that emphasized getting good grades and either real-life knowledge or intentions to use condoms.

“Our findings demonstrate that teachers’ instructional practices emphasizing effort, truly understanding class material as opposed to simply memorizing facts and improving over time, were critical to students’ motivation and learning,” said the study’s lead author, Sungjun Won of the University of Victoria, formerly a graduate student in education at Ohio State.

“School administrators and health teachers should work together to foster learning environments where students perceive that their teachers really value their understanding, development and mastery – as opposed to just getting good test scores or grades.”

The researchers took into account other factors that could influence student responses, including prior sexual experience, gender and GPA.

A focus on mastery doesn’t abandon the idea of turning in assignments and taking tests for grades, Anderman said. But rather than allowing a student to score poorly and move on to new material, a mastery-focused teacher would provide opportunities such as reviewing past lessons and letting students re-take tests to reinforce the importance of the material.

“In a mastery-focused classroom a teacher would be saying things like, ‘Last week we talked about refusal behaviors. Let’s spend five minutes reviewing that,’” Anderman said.

He said that when a teacher offers opportunities for revisiting assignments or quizzes, the message is ‘You haven’t mastered it; you have to understand this.’

“You also want to stay away from comparing kids. You want to emphasize that the lessons are important for everyone to learn. You want kids to think, ‘I got an 80 this time, I didn’t know a couple of things, what can I do better?’”

Some entire schools have adopted the approach, but it is relatively uncommon in American education, in part due to other pressures including standardized tests and school report cards, Anderman said.

The National Institute of Nursing Research supported this study.

Rick Zimmerman of Louisiana State University also worked on the research.

The researchers documented these different experiences using a novel technique in the classroom: They had children wear a video camera on their head for two hours on one day to see what the class was like from the child’s perspective.

In this study, published recently in PLOS ONE, the researchers were interested in the linguistic environment – how were children exposed to language in the class?

“We found that the duration and frequency of kids’ interactions with teachers and peers was very different among kids,” said Leydi Johana Chaparro-Moreno, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in educational psychology at The Ohio State University.

“Overall, children interacted more with the teacher than their peers, but for some kids their peers were an additional source of hearing language.”

This was something that researchers could not easily learn from traditional studies, she said.

Most previous studies observed how teachers behaved in the class, such as how they talked to kids.

“What was missing was the perspective of the kids. Especially in preschool classrooms, each child may not be listening to the teacher at the same time or interacting in the same way,” Chaparro-Moreno said.

The study involved 13 children, ages 3 and 4, who attended an urban nonprofit childcare center full-day preschool located in an urban community.

The children, whose parents agreed to let them join the study, wore the wireless head-mounted camera on a randomly assigned day during a four-day period. They wore it for one hour in the morning, during which they participated in different kinds of activities: some involving the whole class, and some where the kids were free to choose what to do in various centers around the classroom.

Four children wore a camera each day, as did the master teacher.

Afterward, the researchers analyzed the videos to see how many times each child interacted with the teacher or a peer, how long each interaction lasted, and a variety of aspects of the interaction.

Overall, about 60 percent of the interactions caught on video were with the teacher. And the total duration of interactions with teachers was almost three times longer than the interactions with peers.

But there was wide variation. Six of the 13 children interacted with their peers almost as many times as they interacted with their teachers. In addition, four children interacted for longer periods of time with their peers, relative to the average interaction length among all the children.

When someone was talking directly to a child wearing a camera in class, 81 percent of the time it was the teacher.

Kids also heard nearly all sophisticated language from their teachers – 92 percent of all complex sentences came from teachers.

But again, there was a lot of variability, Chaparro-Moreno said.

For example, for every type of word and complex sentence that one child heard per minute from teachers, another child heard five types of words and four complex sentences.

“Teachers may adapt how they interact with kids to meet the students’ learning needs,” she said.

“It is also possible that children’s language ability and personality may play a role in how they interact with the teacher and their peers.”

This study is part of a larger five-year, $4.5 million project called Early Learning Ohio funded by the federal Institute of Education Sciences, said Laura Justice, co-author of the PLOS ONE paper and principal investigator for the project.

The project, which involves students from preschool to grade 3, is “trying to identify those aspects of the classroom experience that are most important to academic development and social development,” said Justice, who is also director of Ohio State’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy.

The data from the camera study will be used in future studies to model the social network in the classroom and examine how kids resolve conflicts with each other.

Researchers participating in the project are experimenting with other technologies, such as location sensors to see how kids move around classrooms and interact with their peers.

“Our goal is to map the dimensions of the classroom experience, including relationships with teachers and peers, how much kids enjoy school and whether they are victimized by other children,” Justice said.

Other authors of the PLOS ONE study, all from Ohio State, were Jessica Logan, assistant professor of educational studies; Kelly Purtell, assistant professor of human sciences; and Tzu-Jung Lin, associate professor of educational studies.

With this second cycle of grant funding, Ohio State will continue to provide high-quality early childhood education and services to Columbus families in low-income households through 2024.

In 2014, Congress appropriated $500 million to fund Early Head Start Child Care Partnership grants nationwide, including $16.5 million to Ohio State, with a goal of partnering with existing child care centers and family child care home providers to raise the quality of early childhood education in the most vulnerable neighborhoods with the highest rates of poverty.

Housed in the Schoenbaum Family Center, Ohio State’s partnership program, known as OSU-EHS, has gained national attention for its unique model, and was featured in January by the Bipartisan Policy Center as one of the top 12 programs in the nation.

“Our staff is passionate about this work and believe that all children, regardless of their zip code or life circumstances, deserve high-quality early education and supportive services to create a successful start in life,” said OSU-EHS director Sherrie Sutton.

The program serves 160 children in 11 child care centers and eight family child care homes. In addition, families of the children also receive comprehensive support through OSU-EHS’ network of 19 university and community agency partners.

By leveraging experts within the community, OSU-EHS is able to provide comprehensive services to address the holistic needs of families, an important two-generation approach proven to improve outcomes for young children. With 80% of the enrolled families earning $800 or less per month, social workers assist with connecting families to critical resources as well as educational and workforce development opportunities while also providing counseling and crisis intervention services.

OSU-EHS also provides significant support to the child care and home partners. In addition to enhanced funding, OSU-EHS has purchased classroom furniture and materials, curriculum and playgrounds for each center. With a focus on quality, the program offers professional development alongside practice-based coaches who work with classroom teachers. For the last three years, the home providers were sent to the National Association for Family Child Care Conference, where one attendee said, “I finally feel like I am part of something and am respected as a professional.” As the program enters the next five-year cycle, 84% of the program’s child care centers and home providers are rated in Ohio’s Step Up to Quality rating system at three stars or higher, and 55 of the teachers have advanced their education.

Reflecting on her time in Ohio State’s Early Head Start program, one mother said that she came into the program during a time when her family was facing many challenges, including homelessness.

“I am a single mother with two children, a toddler and a preschool-aged child. (My family) faced many challenges in 2017. I know that there are many other single parents facing similar challenges to those I experienced. Unfortunately, many times we slip between the cracks and don’t receive the assistance we need.

“I felt empowered because I knew that despite all of my struggles, I was able to keep (my children) in a stable learning environment. I had the peace of mind of knowing that they were receiving high-quality child care. I feel truly blessed to have been a recipient of this program and I look forward to continue watching my children flourish under their care.”

In addition to numerous community partners, Ohio State units involved in the collaborative program include the College of Education and Human Ecology, College of Nursing, College of Optometry, Speech, Language and Hearing Clinic and Nisonger Center.

When students return to school in the Columbus City and South-Western City school districts later this month, new Apple technology will be waiting for them along with teachers who have been trained to teach them how to write computer code.

As part of Apple’s Community Education Initiative, it collaborated with Ohio State’s Digital Flagship and the College of Education and Human Ecology for a week-long Teacher Coding Academy.

The learning initiative brought teachers from the Columbus City Schools, South-Western City Schools and Ohio State University Extension to campus to learn coding by developing an app that solves one of three community challenges: documenting firefighter exposure to chemicals that can cause cancer; matching people to services delivered by nonprofits through the Reeb Avenue Center, and helping residents know more about the Linden Farmers Market, which offers fresh food in a “food desert.”

Educators presented their apps at an app showcase to wrap up the coding academy. Community members and educators listened to the presentations.

Three educators from South-Western City Schools developed an app to help document firefighter exposure to chemicals. Teacher Josh Doran says the coding academy taught him a lot about the potential of Apple products in the classroom.

“What I have learned about what Apple products can do for our students and help them out in the future – it’s amazing, just ... having our kids being able to code on the iPad and having a direct program for them to follow,” Doran said.

Math teacher Mark Colvin is excited about what students can learn during app development.

“I like the app development side of this,” he said. “The community involvement, I think, will be huge in the schools. We’ll be able to get community members in and let our students think more outside of themselves and outside of the school, trying to solve bigger problems than what they face in school.”

Marissa Mulligan and Sue Hogan, OSU Extension educators and 4-H youth development experts for Franklin County, designed an app to help Linden area residents learn about the Linden Farmers Market. The colorful app offered information such as whether vendors take cash or credit, what foods vendors offer, and tips on food storage and recipes.

But a new study that involved observing teachers during class story times found that they asked few questions – and those that they did ask were usually too simple.

Only 24 percent of what teachers said outside of reading the text were questions, the results found. And the kids answered those questions correctly 85 percent of the time.

“When kids get 85 percent of the questions right, that means the questions the teacher is asking are too easy,” said Laura Justice, co-author of the study and professor of educational psychology at The Ohio State University.

“We don’t want to ask all difficult questions. But we should be coaxing children along cognitively and linguistically by occasionally offering challenging questions.”

While this study was done with teachers, the same lessons apply for parents. Previous research suggests that most parents don’t ask any questions at all when they’re reading with their children, according to Justice.

The study appears online in the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly and will be published in a future print edition.

Participants in the study were 96 prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers at schools in the Midwest and South and their students, said Justice, who is executive director of The Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy at Ohio State.

The teachers were videotaped in one class while reading the 25-page book Kingdom of Friends to their students. The book is about two friends who argue at playtime but learn how to resolve their problems.

Researchers transcribed all talk during the reading session, including both teachers and children.

The researchers recorded 5,207 questions asked by teachers and 3,469 child responses.

About 52 percent of the questions asked by teachers were yes-no type questions, such as “Does he look happy?” As expected, most of them resulted in one-word answers from children.

The other 48 percent of questions included “what” and “why” questions like “What did he do?” and “Why do you say ‘friends’?”

This also included what the researchers called “how-procedural” questions, like “How did they become friends again?”

“When the teachers asked these more sophisticated how-procedural questions, the children would give more elaborate and complex answers,” Justice said. “Those are the kind of questions we need more of.”

Asking these more sophisticated and difficult questions means that children are more likely to give wrong or inappropriate answers, she said. But that’s OK.

“There should be teachable moments where teachers can help their students learn something new. You have a conversation that is conceptually challenging for the child, because that is going to push their development forward,” Justice said.

Some experts recommend that 60 to 70 percent of shared reading conversations should be easy, but 30 to 40 percent should challenge children to learn new concepts.

The fact that 85 percent of children’s responses in this study were correct suggests that they are not being challenged enough, Justice said.

Story time should include lots of questions, including ones that allow children to stretch their language and thinking abilities, she said.

For example, when parents or teachers are reading a new book they could ask the child, “How do you think this book will end?”

“You can see how a question like that is going to evoke a complex response,” Justice said.

“With some practice and reflection, we can change how we talk with children during shared reading and help them develop stronger language and reading skills.”

Co-authors on the study were Richa Deshmukh and Tricia Zucker of the Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston; Sherine Tambyraja of Ohio State; Jill Pentimonti of the American Institutes for Research; and Ryan Bowles of Michigan State University.

The study was supported by grants from the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education.