Early Intervention Can Improve Low-Income Children’s Cognitive Skills and Academic Achievement

National Head Start program conceptualized while psychologists were beginning to study preventive intervention for young children living in poverty.
Findings
As a group, children who live in poverty tend to perform worse in school than do children from more privileged backgrounds. For the first half of the 20th century, researchers attributed this difference to inherent cognitive deficits. At the time, the prevailing belief was that the course of child development was dictated by biology and maturation. By the early 1960s, this position gave way to the notion popularized by psychologists such as J. McVicker Hunt and Benjamin Bloom that intelligence could rather easily be shaped by the environment. There was very little research at the time to support these speculations but a few psychologists had begun to study whether environmental manipulation could prevent poor cognitive outcomes. Results of studies by psychologists Susan Gray and Rupert Klaus (1965), Martin Deutsch (1965) and Bettye Caldwell and former U.S. Surgeon General Julius Richmond (1968) supported the notion that early attention to physical and psychological development could improve cognitive ability.
Significance

These preliminary results caught the attention of Sargent Shriver, President Lyndon Johnson’s chief strategist in implementing an arsenal of antipoverty programs as part of the War on Poverty. His idea for a school readiness program for children of the poor focused on breaking the cycle of poverty. Shriver reasoned that if poor children could begin school on an equal footing with wealthier classmates, they would have a better of chance of succeeding in school and avoiding poverty in adulthood. He appointed a planning committee of 13 professionals in physical and mental health, early education, social work, and developmental psychology. Their work helped shape what is now known as the federal Head Start program.

The three developmental psychologists in the group were Urie Bronfenbrenner, Mamie Clark, and Edward Zigler. Bronfenbrenner convinced the other members that intervention would be most effective if it involved not just the child but the family and community that comprise the child-rearing environment. Parent involvement in school operations and administration were unheard of at the time, but it became a cornerstone of Head Start and proved to be a major contributor to its success. Zigler had been trained as a scientist and was distressed that the new program was not going to be field-tested before its nationwide launch. Arguing that it was not wise to base such a massive, innovative program on good ideas and concepts but little empirical evidence, he insisted that research and evaluation be part of Head Start. When he later became the federal official responsible for administering the program, Zigler (often referred to as the “father of Head Start”) worked to cast Head Start as a national laboratory for the design of effective early childhood services.

Although it is difficult to summarize the hundreds of empirical studies of Head Start outcomes, Head Start does seem to produce a variety of benefits for most children who participate. Although some studies have suggested that the intellectual advantages gained from participation in Head Start gradually disappear as children progress through elementary school, some of these same studies have shown more lasting benefits in the areas of school achievement and adjustment.
Practical Application

Head Start began as a great experiment that over the years has yielded prolific results. Some 20 million children and families have participated in Head Start since the summer of 1965; current enrollment approaches one million annually, including those in the new Early Head Start that serves families with children from birth to age 3. Psychological research on early intervention has proliferated, creating an expansive literature and sound knowledge base. Many research ideas designed and tested in the Head Start laboratory have been adapted in a variety of service delivery programs. These include family support services, home visiting, a credentialing process for early childhood workers, and education for parenthood. Head Start’s efforts in preschool education spotlighted the value of school readiness and helped spur today’s movement toward universal preschool.

Family-Like Environment Better for Troubled Children and Teens

The Teaching-Family Model changes bad behavior through straight talk and loving relationships.
Findings

In the late 1960′s, psychologists Elaine Phillips, Elery Phillips, Dean Fixsen, and Montrose Wolf developed an empirically tested treatment program to help troubled children and juvenile offenders who had been assigned to residential group homes. These researchers combined the successful components of their studies into the Teaching-Family Model, which offers a structured treatment regimen in a family-like environment. The model is built around a married couple (teaching-parents) that lives with children in a group home and teaches them essential interpersonal and living skills. Not only have teaching parents’ behaviors and techniques been assessed for their effectiveness, but they have also been empirically tested for whether children like them. Teaching-parents also work with the children’s parents, teachers, employers, and peers to ensure support for the children’s positive changes. Although more research is needed, preliminary results suggest that, compared to children in other residential treatment programs, children in Teaching-Family Model centers have fewer contacts with police and courts, lower dropout rates, and improved school grades and attendance.

Couples are selected to be teaching-parents based on their ability to provide individualized and affirming care. Teaching-parents then undergo an intensive year-long training process. In order to maintain their certification, teaching-parents and Teaching-Family Model organizations are evaluated every year, and must meet the rigorous standards set by the Teaching-Family Association.
Significance
The Teaching-Family Model is one of the few evidence-based residential treatment programs for troubled children. In the past, many treatment programs viewed delinquency as an illness, and therefore placed children in institutions for medical treatment. The Teaching-Family Model, in contrast, views children’s behavior problems as stemming from their lack of essential interpersonal relationships and skills. Accordingly, the Teaching-Family Model provides children with these relationships and teaches them these skills, using empirically validated methods. With its novel view of problem behavior and its carefully tested and disseminated treatment program, the Teaching-Family Model has helped to transform the treatment of behavioral problems from impersonal interventions at large institutions to caring relationships in home and community settings. The Teaching-Family Model has also demonstrated how well-researched treatment programs can be implemented on a large scale. Most importantly, the Teaching-Family Model has given hope that young people with even the most difficult problems or behaviors can improve the quality of their lives and make contributions to society.
Practical Application
In recent years, the Teaching-Family Model has been expanded to include foster care facilities, home treatment settings, and even schools. The Teaching-Family Model has also been adapted to accommodate the needs of physically, emotionally, and sexually abused children; emotionally disturbed and autistic children and adults; medically fragile children; and adults with disabilities. Successful centers that have been active for over 30 years include the Bringing it All Back Home Study Center in North Carolina, the Houston Achievement Place in Texas, and the Girls and Boys Town in Nebraska. Other Teaching-Family Model organizations are in Alberta (Canada), Arkansas, Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Believing You Can Get Smarter Makes You Smarter

Thinking about intelligence as changeable and malleable, rather than stable and fixed, results in greater academic achievement, especially for people whose groups bear the burden of negative stereotypes about their intelligence.
Findings

Can people get smarter? Are some racial or social groups smarter than others? Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, many people believe that intelligence is fixed, and, moreover, that some racial and social groups are inherently smarter than others. Merely evoking these stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the academic perfomance of members of these groups. Social psychologist Claude Steele and his collaborators (2002) have called this phenomenon “stereotype threat.”

Yet social psychologists Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) have developed a possible antidote to stereotype threat. They taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed – a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ’s malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group. Even more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence than did White students, showing that this intervention may successfully counteract stereotype threat.
Significance

This research showed a relatively easy way to narrow the Black-White academic achievement gap. Realizing that one’s intelligence may be improved may actually improve one’s intelligence, especially for those whose groups are targets of stereotypes alleging limited intelligence (e.g., Blacks, Latinos, and women in math domains.)
Practical Application

Blackwell, Dweck, and Trzesniewski (2002) recently replicated and applied this research with seventh-grade students in New York City. During the first eight weeks of the spring term, these students learned about the malleability of intelligence by reading and discussing a science-based article that described how intelligence develops. A control group of seventh-grade students did not learn about intelligence’s changeability, and instead learned about memory and mnemonic strategies. As compared to the control group, students who learned about intelligence’s malleability had higher academic motivation, better academic behavior, and better grades in mathematics. Indeed, students who were members of vulnerable groups (e.g., those who previously thought that intelligence cannot change, those who had low prior mathematics achievement, and female students) had higher mathematics grades following the intelligence-is-malleable intervention, while the grades of similar students in the control group declined. In fact, girls who received the intervention matched and even slightly exceeded the boys in math grades, whereas girls in the control group performed well below the boys.

These findings are especially important because the actual instruction time for the intervention totaled just three hours. Therefore, this is a very cost-effective method for improving students’ academic motivation and achievement.
Cited Research

Aronson, J., Fried, C. B., & Good, C. (2001). Reducing the effects of stereotype threat on African American college students by shaping theories of intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1-13.

Steele, C. M., Spencer, S. J., & Aronson, J. (2002), Contending with group image: The psychology of stereotype and social identity threat. In Mark P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 34, pp. 379-440. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, Inc.
Additional Sources

Blackwell, L., Dweck, C., & Trzesniewski, K. (2002). Achievement across the adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Manuscript in preparation.

Dweck, C., & Leggett, E. (1988). A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality. Psychological Review, 95, 256-273.

Digital Signage For Restaurants – Endless Possibilities

Let’s first consider the low-hanging fruit that makes dynamic menu boards so effective for restaurants. According to Nielsen’s third-quarter (2013) Digital Place-Based Video Report, ad recall for POS-type digital signage is typically in the 60% range, which is more than twice the average recall of static signs-menus or otherwise.This is the reason you can so easily recall the rich color of a creamed latte topped with cinnamon spice at your local coffee shop. Or, depending on where you dine, maybe you can easily recall dynamic advertising for the most awesome, juiciest pub burger that can fit in the mouth of man. I saw such an ad not long ago and it just keeps playing in my memory like a favorite song.Such recall makes it a natural choice for promoting those more seasonable and profitable food items at the right time and place. According to a Networld Media Group report, Digital Menu Boards and ROI, the average sales lift of any digitally promoted item on menu boards averages around 3-5%, which means that payoff for such a system most often occurs in one year or less.The restaurant market definitely benefits from digital signage, although the possibilities only start with ROI and grow from there. Improving the customer experience is also about a return on objectives (ROO). Case in point: Medicine Eat Station in San Francisco. This upscale downtown tofu shop is using digital signage for ambience. The integrated sign system creates the atmospherics of “living in harmony with nature” that is accentuated by 4 vertically rotated 42″ plasma panels built into the wall of the eating gallery. To accomplish this, high-definition video footage of the Rocky Mountain landscape is used for real-time imagery. The programming lasts for about an hour before it repeats. At first glance, it appears to be a still image. But wait, this is real-time imagery, meaning that the clouds slowly cross the screen. A 4,000-year-old Bristle Cone Pine occasionally wavers in the Rocky wind. Light and shadows change constantly, as if you are really there.This is a great example of ROO, but unfortunately digital signage used as a canvas for art really hasn’t caught on yet. It is by no accident that Medicine Eat Station built this to look like one giant window. It is very cool to experience, meaning that it adds to the purpose of customer satisfaction, just like ambient music, lighting, colors, etc.Money managers are already pounding their fists, shouting, “Where’s the ROI!” Of course, it’s possible to occasionally slip in an advertisement on the example above, but this might be detrimental to the return on objectives and may compromise the result. Digital signage is not just about sales lift; it’s also about creating a return on objectives. ROO creates a value that cannot be counted in terms of dollars and cents directly. However, ROO leveraged wisely does produce ROI.Many more POS digital signage opportunities are possible for food and beverage venues. Imagine if you will these scenarios:

A sports bar with digital screens showing “this week’s sports highlights” via pictures, video replays, etc., is a natural place to present promotions to a viewing audience already buying food and beverage. This kind of content adds to customer satisfaction and experience and is available through readily available prepackaged syndication.

Engage patrons with an on-screen sports trivia experience (or any other trivia for that matter) that encourages participation by offering a coupon for the right answer. This can be done by using a QR code to facilitate the “answer” to the on-screen question.

In a QSR setting people are often interested in news, sports, and weather. These interests can be satisfied with existing TV programming and mixed with on-screen ticker announcements, such as today’s special, menu promotions, seasonal sales, etc.

How about a trendy restaurant that displays works from local artist. The LCD monitors hang on the wall with picture frames wrapping them. Maybe patrons vote on the best art. Owners could join forces with local art schools, art societies, and public support groups. Ultimately, this could tie-in to customer satisfaction and experience. Who is not uplifted by good art, and for that matter, good food?

In downtown districts, many restaurants depend on people walking buy. Instead of using posters turning yellow on windows, why not project clear and crisp digital images directly on the window! The technology exists but hardly anyone uses it. The projector cost is about the same as a large LCD screen, although projector bulb replacement would add to maintenance costs. If that’s a major concern, then laser projectors are an alternative with much longer maintenance cycles. These images could be today’s menu special, happy hour enticements, a new menu item that you can almost taste, a soothing cup of fresh ground coffee on a chilly morning, or just good old branding that reinforces quality services, etc.

Now let’s turn to the nightclub scene where people are hopping and bopping on the dance floor. Bizarre curved screens are splashed like clouds above them with computer-controlled graphics flashing to the beat. During breaks, projectors are switched over to digital signage where various branding and POS offers are made.
I hope you thought of at least one example to add to this list. Please comment and share your example of ROO. When it comes to creativity and return of objectives for restaurant digital signage, the possibilities are endless.

How to Become a Mechanical Engineer?

Mechanical engineering is considered as one of the oldest fields of engineering. Fondly called the ‘mother’ branch of engineering, the scope of mechanical engineering has increased beyond its traditional boundaries. Now mechanical engineers are paying more attention towards different areas of research like nanotechnology, environmental conservation, bio-medical, etc. Due to the ever increasing scope of this particular job profile, there is a high demand of engineers who can play an important role in the product development and also get into the financial aspect of products. In a nutshell, this branch of engineering offers a wide range of mechanical engineering job options to students who want to build a promising and stimulating career.Qualifications required to build a career in this field of engineering
Clearing 10+2 with Physics, Chemistry and Maths (PCM) as main subjects is the first step which you need to take in order to build a career as the engineer. In order to become eligible for the graduate program, you should at least score 60% marks. In India, there are various reputed colleges which are imparting engineering education. However, these colleges conduct entrance examinations and the admission is given only after clearing the exam. Some of the common entrance examinations are-1= The Joint Entrance Examination for IITs (IITJEE) for admission to various IITs
2= All-India Engineering Entrance Exam (AIEEE) for admission to various National Institutes of Technology or regional engineering collegesApart from the above engineering examinations, many private colleges conduct their own entrance exams and provide admissions on the basis of exam results only. There are diploma courses also, which you can pursue after completing your class 10th with 50%. You can also go for the associate membership qualification from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. After completing your degree program in engineering, you can also go for the post-graduate program like ME/MTech program. If you want to do a PhD course then you should appear for the Graduate Aptitude Test for Engineers (GATE), which is conducted by IITs.Below is the list of top colleges which are offering engineering education in India-
1= All IITs
2= Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS-Pilani)
3= All NITs
4= Jadavpur University (Faculty of Engineering & Technology)
5= Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology
6= PSG College of Technology
7= PEC University of Technology
8= Bengal Engineering and Science University
9= Malaviya National Institute of Technology
10= Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology
11= Thapar University
12= College of Engineering Pune
13= Manipal Institute of Technology, Karnataka
14= R.V.College of Engineering
15= Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Mumbai, Maharashtra
16= University College of Engineering (Osmania University), Hyderabad, Andhra
17= Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering – Tamil Nadu
18= Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, Gujarat
19= Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh
20= Nirma University – Institute of Technology, Ahmedabad, Gujarat
21= Visvesvaraya College of Engineering – Karnataka
22= Shri Ramdeobaba College of Engineering and Management, NagpurWhere to search mechanical engineering jobs?
As mechanical engineering is the broadest field of engineering, therefore, the job prospects for skilled engineers are also abundant. Engineers are required for designing, testing, manufacturing and installing a wide range of machines that are then used across different industries. Due to the intricate nature of this job, it is possible to find mechanical engineering jobs both in private and government sector undertakings.There are various industries where you can find ample of jobs. It includes space research, air conditioning, bio-medical, aeronautical industry. Similarly, in the government sector, there is a high demand of engineers. They work as consultants & technical experts and help in the smooth functioning of different government-run projects. Even employment opportunities can be explored in the education sector also, where after earning the post-graduate degree in engineering, engineers can work as lecturers.Some of the top companies offering mechanical engineering jobs are-
1= Siemens
2= Reliance Industries
3= Tata Motors
4= Larsen and Toubro
5= GE Global Research
6= ITC
7= HUL
8= Britannia
9= Shell
10= Ford
11= ONGC
12= Kirloskar
13= Maruti
14= Jindal Steel
15= VolkswagenHow much can you earn as a mechanical engineer?
On an average, a fresher mechanical engineer can earn between Rs 25,000-35,000/month. Those engineers who are holding high degrees like a post-graduate degree from a reputed college like IIT, can easily earn Rs 30-40 lakh/annum.