American adults with the least education have the worst health, a new study finds.
Almost half of U.S. adults ages 25 to 74 reported being in less than very good health, and levels of health differ depending on level of education, according to a report released Wednesday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America.
For example, adults who didn’t graduate from high school were more than 2.5 times as likely to be in less than very good health as college graduates. Those who graduated high school but didn’t go to college were nearly twice as likely to be in less than very good health as college graduates.
The new report added to the commission’s growing body of evidence that factors outside of the medical system play an important role in determining how healthy people are and even how long they will live. [via Yahoo News]
Read the rest of the story.
Filed under: medical , adults, health
President Barack Obama’s $3.55 trillion budget proposal, released on Thursday, eliminates spending for programs that teach U.S. schoolchildren sexual abstinence and shifts funds to programs aimed at reducing teenage pregnancy.
The administration’s $78.4 billion spending plan for the Department of Health and Human Services, which must be reviewed and approved by Congress, includes support for teen pregnancy prevention.
“The program will fund models that stress the importance of abstinence while providing medically accurate and age-appropriate information to youth who have already become sexually active,” the budget proposal said.
The so-called “abstinence only” programs, backed by many social conservatives who oppose the teaching of contraception methods to teenagers in schools, have received about $1.3 billion in federal funds since the late 1990s.
A report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics published in March said the U.S. teen birth rate rose for a second straight year in 2007 after a long decline. [via Reuters]
Read the rest of the story.
Filed under: breaking news, curriculum, funding, students , abstinence, centers for disease control and prevention, department of health and human services, national center for health statistics, president obama, sex education, state department of education
A question about whether Facebook use has any impact in college students’ grades continues to create debate.
A small study presented at an education conference last month showed a link between Facebook use and lower grades — but stressed that the findings don’t prove that one leads to the other. It unleashed a media frenzy across the globe.
Now, a new study, published this week, finds the two variables are “likely unrelated.”
There’s been a bit of bickering about methodology between the two camps, and both raise concerns that the media have sensationalized the initial findings. But they both pretty much conclude the same thing: This topic represents a fruitful area for more academic research. [via USA Today]
Get the details here.
Filed under: statistical reports, students, technology , facebook, social media
White and African-American students can perform dramatically differently in the classroom, depending on how their teachers structure their learning groups, a new study suggests.
Published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Cognition and Instruction, the study is the latest in a growing line of research to explore the role that students’ home cultures and experiences outside of school play in the classroom.
Studies also have long shown that students of all races—but African-American students, in particular—often perform better in cooperative-learning groups. What’s been less clear, said Eric A. Hurley, the lead author of the new study, was whether altering the structure of those groups in ways that dovetail with students’ cultures would lead to different outcomes for different racial groups. [via Education Week]
Read the rest of the story.
Filed under: curriculum, statistical reports, students , race, african-american, eric a. hurley, cognition and instruction, cooperative learning
The bones and muscles of the lower body appear to be more vulnerable to injury in obese children than their lighter peers, a new study suggests.
The study analyzed the weight and injuries of kids who visited a children’s hospital’s emergency department over a three-year period. Sprains, such as to the ankle or leg, were the most common lower body injuries, and sent more than 23,000 children to the emergency department at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center between 2005 and early 2008.
“Because obese patients have an increased body mass and force, they are more likely to twist or roll on a lower extremity and cause injury than the non-obese children. Other injuries that the patients experienced were fractures and lacerations,” study lead author Dr. Wendy Pomerantz, an emergency medicine physician at the hospital, said in a hospital news release.
About one-sixth of the children visiting the hospital’s emergency department for injuries during that time were obese, according to the study, scheduled to be presented Saturday in Baltimore at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies. [via Healthy Day]
Read the rest of the story.
Filed under: at-risk, students , baltimore, cincinnati children's hospital medical center, health, obesity, pediatric academic societies, wendy pomerantz
