Learning-by-Teaching Approach Improves Dengue Knowledge in Children and Parents.

There is narrow evidence on which strategies are most effective for disseminating information on dengue prevention. This is particularly relevant because social habits have a great prevention capacity for dengue. We investigated how effective are children as health educators, and how much they learn as they teach. We recruited 142 children and 97 parents in Argentina's tropical area for two cluster randomized parallel trials. In Study 1, we compared the dynamics of dengue knowledge of 10-year-old children who-after receiving a dengue talk-1) listened to an unrelated topic; 2) read a booklet with information about dengue, 3) taught their parents about dengue, or 4) taught their parents about dengue, using the booklet. In Study 2, we assessed whether the parents' dengue knowledge changed after interacting with their children, in comparison with parents learning about dengue from an expert or about an unrelated topic. Children that taught their parents what they learned, using a booklet, showed 2.53 more correct responses (95% CI [0.20, 4.85]; P = 0.027) than children who listened to an unrelated topic. This style of teaching also serves to effectively propagate knowledge: parents learned from their children the same as from an expert; and significantly more than parents who learned about an unrelated topic. Parents learned from their children even if they were taught with booklets (1.49, 95% CI [0.01, 2.96]; P = 0.048) or without (1.94, 95% CI [0.44, 3.44]; P = 0.006). Specifically, after being taught by their children, parents showed on average 1.49 (if they were taught with a booklet) and 1.94 (without booklet) more correct responses than parents that learned about an unrelated topic. The simple action of prompting children to teach consolidated their own knowledge and broadcasted it effectively to their parents. This strategy is a potential low to no-cost method for sharing information about dengue prevention.

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.

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.

Abordajes neurocognitivos en el estudio de la pobreza infantil: consideraciones conceptuales y metodológicas / Neurocognitive Approaches in the Study of Child Poverty: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations

Several studies carried out since the second half of the XXth century have demonstrated that poverty significantly influences child cognitive and emotional development. In the last decades, several intervention programs have been implemented to optimize the development of children living in poverty. Some of them had positive effects, and also allowed the identification of effectiveness principles. However, such approaches have not yet been integrated conceptually and methodologically with the intervention efforts proposed by Cognitive Neuroscience. Based on examples of interventions implemented by Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, the present study analyzes some of the main aspects to be considered in such integration. Our work further evaluates several potential contributions from Cognitive Neuroscience to the design and implementation of intervention programs for children living in poverty (AU)

Diferentes estudios realizados desde mediados del siglo XX han demostrado que la condición de pobreza compromete en forma significativa el desarrollo cognitivo y emocional infan- til. Con el objetivo de favorecerlo, durante las últimas décadas se han diseñado distintos programas de intervención en todo el mundo, algunos de los cuales han logrado obtener efectos positivos y han permitido además identificar criterios de eficacia. Sin embargo, tales criterios aún no han sido integrados conceptual y metodológicamente con los abordajes que se han propuesto durante la última década desde el campo de la Neurociencia Cognitiva. En base a ejemplos de intervenciones implementadas desde perspectivas de la Psicología del Desarrollo y de la Neurociencia Cognitiva, en el presente estudio se plantean algunos de los aspectos que deberían ser considerados en tal integración. En forma complementaria, se incluyen consideraciones sobre los potenciales cognitiva al diseño de los programas de intervención en pobreza (AU)