Chronotype at the beginning of secondary school and school timing are both associated with chronotype development during adolescence.

The misalignment between late chronotypes and early school start times affect health, performance and psychological well-being of adolescents. Here we test whether, and how, the baseline chronotype (i.e. chronotype at the beginning of secondary school) and the school timing affect the magnitude and the direction of the developmental change in chronotype during adolescence. We evaluated a sample of Argentinian students (n = 259) who were randomly assigned to attend school in the morning (07:45 a.m.-12:05 p.m.), afternoon (12:40 p.m.-05:00 p.m.) or evening (05:20 p.m.-09:40 p.m.) school timings. Importantly, chronotype and sleep habits were assessed longitudinally in the same group of students along secondary school (at 13-14 y.o. and 17-18 y.o.). Our results show that: (1) although chronotypes partially align with class time, this effect is insufficient to fully account for the differences observed in sleep-related variables between school timings; (2) both school timing and baseline chronotype are independently associated with the direction and the magnitude of change in chronotype, with greater delays related to earlier baseline chronotypes and later school timings. The practical implications of these results are challenging and should be considered in the design of future educational timing policies to improve adolescents' well-being.

Corrigendum: Risks for Child Cognitive Development in Rural Contexts.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02735.].

Risks for Child Cognitive Development in Rural Contexts.

While poverty all over the world is more typical and extreme in rural contexts, interventions to improve cognition in low socioeconomic status (SES) children are for the most part based on studies conducted in urban populations. This paper investigate how poverty and rural or urban settings affect child cognitive performance. Executive functions and non-verbal intelligence performance, as well as individual and environmental information was obtained from 131 5-year-old children. For the same level of SES, children in rural settings performed consistently worse than children in urban settings. These differences could be accounted mostly by the months of past preschool attendance and the father's completed level of education. These results should inform policies and programs for children living in rural poverty worldwide, and specially in Latin America.

Producing or reproducing reasoning? Socratic dialog is very effective, but only for a few.

Successful communication between a teacher and a student is at the core of pedagogy. A well known example of a pedagogical dialog is 'Meno', a socratic lesson of geometry in which a student learns (or 'discovers') how to double the area of a given square 'in essence, a demonstration of Pythagoras' theorem. In previous studies we found that after engaging in the dialog participants can be divided in two kinds: those who can only apply a rule to solve the problem presented in the dialog and those who can go beyond and generalize that knowledge to solve any square problems. Here we study the effectiveness of this socratic dialog in an experimental and a control high-school classrooms, and we explore the boundaries of what is learnt by testing subjects with a set of 9 problems of varying degrees of difficulty. We found that half of the adolescents did not learn anything from the dialog. The other half not only learned to solve the problem, but could abstract something more: the geometric notion that the diagonal can be used to solve diverse area problems. Conceptual knowledge is critical for achievement in geometry, and it is not clear whether geometric concepts emerge spontaneously on the basis of universal experience with space, or reflect intrinsic properties of the human mind. We show that, for half of the learners, an exampled-based Socratic dialog in lecture form can give rise to formal geometric knowledge that can be applied to new, different problems.

Far transfer to language and math of a short software-based gaming intervention.

Executive functions (EF) in children can be trained, but it remains unknown whether training-related benefits elicit far transfer to real-life situations. Here, we investigate whether a set of computerized games might yield near and far transfer on an experimental and an active control group of low-SES otherwise typically developing 6-y-olds in a 3-mo pretest-training-posttest design that was ecologically deployed (at school). The intervention elicits transfer to some (but not all) facets of executive function. These changes cascade to real-world measures of school performance. The intervention equalizes academic outcomes across children who regularly attend school and those who do not because of social and familiar circumstances.