Human Services News

From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

An innovative curriculum for pre-schoolers may improve academic performance, reduce diagnoses of attention deficient hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and close the achievement gap between children from poor families and those from wealthier homes, according to research led by a Vancouver neuroscientist who is an expert in the development of cognitive function.

University of British Columbia Psychiatry Prof. Adele Diamond, who is Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, led the first evaluation of a curriculum called Tools of the Mind (Tools), that focuses on executive functions (EFs) that depend on the prefrontal cortex area of the brain.

The skills are rarely taught, but can be, even to preschoolers.

Children from lower-income families may enter school with disproportionately poor EF skills and fall progressively farther behind in school each year -- facts which Diamond says are related and correctible.

Researchers compared Tools with a curriculum called balanced literacy (dBL) that covered the same academic content as Tools but without a focus on EF.

The Faculty of Medicine at UBC provides innovative programs in the health and life sciences, teaching students at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels, and generates more than $200 million in research funding each year.

The Brain Research Centre at Vancouver Hospital, a partnership between Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and UBC's Faculty of Medicine, has more than 200 investigators with broad, multi-disciplinary research expertise to advance knowledge of the brain and to explore new discoveries and technologies that have the potential to reduce the suffering and cost associated with disease and injuries of the brain.

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