How to make your kids smarter: 10 steps backed by science

Compared with children in the control groups, children in the music groups exhibited greater increases in full-scale IQ. The effect was relatively small, but it generalized across IQ subtests, index scores, and a standardized measure of academic achievement. [Barking]

A growing body of research finds musical training gives students learning advantages in the classroom. Now a Northwestern University study finds musical training can benefit Grandma, too, by offsetting some of the deleterious effects of aging. [Barking]

Indeed, in a 2007 study of humans, German researchers found that people learn vocabulary words 20 percent faster following exercise than they did before exercise, and that the rate of learning correlated directly with levels of BDNF. [Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain]

In his study, Small put a group of volunteers on a three-month exercise regimen and then took pictures of their brains... What he saw was that the capillary volume in the memory area of the hippocampus increased by 30 percent, a truly remarkable change. [Spark]

[W]hen shared book reading is enriched with explicit attention to the development of children's reading skills and strategies, then shared book reading is an effective vehicle for promoting the early literacy ability even of disadvantaged children. [Barking]

"A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development," Sadeh explained. [NurtureShock]

Teens who received A's averaged about 15 more minutes sleep than the B students, who in turn averaged fifteen more minutes than the C's, and so on. Wahlstrom's data was an almost perfect replication of results from an earlier study of over 3,000 Rhode Island high schoolers by Brown's Carskadon. Certainly, these are averages, but the consistency of the two studies stands out. Every 15 minutes counts. [NurtureShock]

Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success... Students who exerted high levels of willpower were more likely to earn higher grades in their classes and gain admission into more selective schools. They had fewer absences and spent less time watching television and more hours on homework. "Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable," the researchers wrote. "Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not... Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent." [The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business]

[C]onscientiousness was the trait that best predicted workplace success. What intrigues Roberts about conscientiousness is that it predicts so many outcomes that go far beyond the workplace. People high in conscientiousness get better grades in school and college; they commit fewer crimes; and they stay married longer. They live longer — and not just because they smoke and drink less. They have fewer strokes, lower blood pressure, and a lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease. [How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character]

The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets' ratings on a noncognitive, nonphysical trait known as "grit" — defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals." [Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us]

The products didn't work at all. They had no positive effect on the vocabularies of the target audience, infants 17-24 months. Some did actual harm. For every hour per day the children spent watching certain baby DVD's and videos, the infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. [Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five]

Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it's much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. There's a rule of two thirds. If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it's better to spend 30 percent of your time reading it, and the other 70 percent of your time testing yourself on that knowledge. [The Talent Code]

Everybody knows you should eat breakfast the day of a big test. High-carb, high-fiber, slow-digesting foods like oatmeal are best, research shows. But what you eat a week in advance matters, too. When 16 college students were tested on attention and thinking speed, then fed a five-day high-fat, low-carb diet heavy on meat, eggs, cheese and cream and tested again, their performance declined. [Barking]

Caffeine and glucose can have beneficial effects on cognitive performance... Since these areas have been related to the sustained attention and working memory processes, results would suggest that combined caffeine and glucose could increase the efficiency of the attentional system. [Barking]

[H]appiness is a tremendous advantage in a world that emphasizes performance. On average, happy people are more successful than unhappy people at both work and love. They get better performance reviews, have more prestigious jobs, and earn higher salaries. They are more likely to get married, and once married, they are more satisfied with their marriage. [Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents]

On things like measures of intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the biological children are fairly similar to their parents. For the adopted kids, however, the results are downright strange. Their scores have nothing whatsoever in common with their adoptive parents: these children are no more similar in their personality or intellectual skills to the people who raised them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them for sixteen years than they are to any two adults taken at random off the street. [The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference]

One study of Dartmouth College students by economist Bruce Sacerdote illustrates how powerful this influence is. He found that when students with low grade-point averages simply began rooming with higher-scoring students, their grade-point averages increased. These students, according to the researchers, "appeared to infect each other with good and bad study habits — such that a roommate with a high grade-point average would drag upward the G.P.A. of his lower-scoring roommate." [The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work]

Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968) did the same study in a classroom, telling elementary school teachers that they had certain students in their class who were "academic spurters." In fact, these students were selected at random. Absolutely nothing else was done by the researchers to single out these children. Yet by the end of the school year, 30 percent of the the children arbitrarily named as spurters had gained an average of 22 IQ points, and almost all had gained at least 10 IQ points. [The Heart of Social Psychology: A Backstage View of a Passionate Science]