It’s time for the weekly roundup again; first – when you think about preschool, you may think it’s all about quality. And while that’s certainly true, we learned that quantity of time spent in pre-K education is just as important. Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the UC Berkeley says this is especially the case for kids from low-income families.
“If kids were growing up in poor households, a lot of these parents were working swing shifts, grave yard shifts, or they can’t afford high quality children’s books. So it is probably a resource problem. But when young kids are growing up in these more impoverished settings, then a quality pre-school can pack a much bigger punch."
The same study found that middle-class kids showed no change in their academic performance if they stayed in preschool a whole day vs. half a day. And over at UC San Francisco, we learned more about the study linking maternal smoking with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common form of childhood cancer. Adam de Smith says that moms who smoke during pregnancy and after birth are putting their children at risk of the disease.
“In the mothers who are exposed to tobacco smoke, there was a higher rate of deletion in the fetal cells that was likely caused by a particular mechanism. It is an innate mechanism in our immune system, which functions to create antibodies to particularly create diversity in our antibodies. And we think when this mechanism goes wrong, or goes into overdrive and has abnormal effects, it can increase the risk of causing deletions in genes around across the genome.”
You can hear these and much more stories about University of California research by following Science Today on iTunes. That’s it for now, thanks for listening! I’m Larissa Branin.
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Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/preschool_time
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/maternal_smoking
