Why do some young people manage to do well in school despite difficult home situations, poverty, migration, or other forms of vulnerability? In recent years, when discussing this question, you quickly end up talking about resilience. And it is true that some young people seem better able to cope with setbacks. They persevere, remain motivated,… Read More Resilience is not something purely individual: how some young people can overcome their difficult situation.

Last Friday, I was in Warsaw with a large group of researchers to bring together different findings on the global decline in learning outcomes. Many different explanations were discussed. I added a new one myself, which I hope to tell you more about soon. In the meantime, I would like to share the already published… Read More 10-year-olds are more often tired at school (and that is bad news)

Investing in early childhood education through various programs happens in many places, but thanks to James Heckman, we know that sustaining — maintaining — such investments is important, because otherwise their effects can fade. That already explains part of the title of this post, which almost sounds like the beginning of a riddle. It is… Read More A parent program seemed to stop working after a few years. Until the schools closed.

It is the basis for discussions about overdiagnosis. Every now and then, you even read possible explanations that seem more like conspiracy theories. Yet it is a fact: many more children and young people are diagnosed with ADHD or autism today than, say, ten or twenty years ago. In Denmark, for example, the number of… Read More Why are there more diagnoses of ADHD and autism now?

On Friday, my wife sent me this study. James Bruce Tomblin and colleagues followed a group of people for about thirty years. They observed them from kindergarten until their mid-thirties. The researchers wanted to know whether differences in oral language ability at a young age could predict the socioeconomic position people would reach much later… Read More Can childhood language ability predict where we end up 30 years later?