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How winning friends may influence adolescent behaviors

9/20/18

Researchers tend to believe that either people select their friends based on shared behaviors, or that they make friends who then shape their behaviors. A team of Penn State researchers say both friend selection and friend influence may be at work for students. They add that gender can also play a role in how friends influence each other. The findings may lead to better prevention and intervention programs for risky behaviors such as smoking and deliquency.

MattP

Dynamic assessment can help language learners have more success

9/18/18

Altering or individualizing assessment procedures can propel second-language learners toward more successful mastery of that language, ongoing research by Matt Poehner, associate professor of education at Penn State, and his interdisciplinary team suggests.

Seed grants to support opioid research announced

9/13/18

Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute, in collaboration with the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, has awarded over $200,000 in funding to support 10 new interdisciplinary teams of Penn State researchers whose work is aimed at combating the opioid epidemic.

Parents Giving Children Piggyback Rides

Center for Healthy Children recommends evidence-based programs

9/11/18

Federal legislation will radically change how foster care dollars can be used, and Penn State’s Child Maltreatment Solutions Network and Center for Healthy Children is leading the charge to ensure services intended to prevent foster care placement, and better serve foster youth, are backed by sound research.

Ribbon Cutting at the GreenBuild Duplex

Penn State students help create affordable, sustainable housing in State College

9/10/18

Owning a home is often considered part of living the American Dream. But as housing costs have risen, that part of the dream has become more and more unattainable. Instead of just talking about the problem, Penn State architecture and engineering students and faculty decided to become part of the solution and have received a USGBC (U.S. Green Building Council) Central PA Chapter Leadership award for their efforts.

$6.3 million grant will fund video library of moms and babies at play

9/10/18

A team of researchers led by Penn State and New York University faculty will collaborate to build a digital library of videos of mothers going about their daily activities with their children. A $6.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health will fund the project, called Playing & Learning Across a Year (PLAY).

Ping Li

Psychologist to speak on how the brain learns languages, Sept. 11

8/30/18

How are cyber-enabled and computational methods helping researchers better understand how humans learn languages? Ping Li, Penn State professor of psychology, linguistics, and information sciences and technology, and associate director of the Institute for CyberScience, will share his perspective to kick off the ICS CyberScience Seminar series for 2018-19 on Sept. 11. The event is free and open to the public.

Anthony Robinson viral map research

Researcher asks 'what causes maps to go viral' on the web

8/27/18

As the 2016 presidential election was heating up, the statistical news website FiveThirtyEight released a projection map asking what if only women voted. The map, sent out in a tweet by FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, quickly went viral on social media and was viewed millions of times. That viral cartography event, and what quickly followed, is the subject of research conducted by Anthony Robinson, assistant professor of geography at Penn State.

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