Latest international research

A study of 250,000 15-year-old students in 41 developed countries suggests that students perform best in mathematics and science in a climate characterised by high expectations, positive discipline and strong teacher-student relations.

The study by the OECD also found the best performance to be among students who are ready to invest effort and who show interest and lower levels of anxiety with mathematics.

Also, students whose parents have better-paid jobs, are better educated and have more "cultural" possessions in their homes perform on average significantly better in all countries than those without such advantages.

Malta is not a member of the OECD.

Fish good for foetus

Research done by the University of North Carolina suggests that children whose mothers eat fish regularly during pregnancy develop better language and communication skills.

In the US, mothers-to-be are warned against eating more than 12 ounces of fish a week because of the effect of mercury poisoning on their unborn child. But the researchers found that in the UK, where mercury levels in seafood are relatively low, the benefits of eating fish in moderation outweighed the risk of contamination.

The largest effect of a fish diet seemed to be in children's understanding of words. In tests carried out at 15 months, children whose mothers ate fish at least once a week scored seven per cent higher than those whose mothers never ate fish.

No fear from inclusion

Schools which admit many pupils with special educational needs do not have lower attainment as a result, according to research carried out in the UK.

A study done for the Department for Education and Skills by the universities of Manchester and Newcastle found that attainment was largely independent of levels of inclusivity and that other factors such as socio-economic status, gender, ethnicity and mother tongue seemed much more significant.

The implications, the researchers said, were that schools need not feel anxious about becoming more inclusive but should monitor the effects with care.

Cigarette smoke bad for child's brain

A study of nearly 4,400 children by the US Children's Environmental Health Centre team shows that children exposed to passive smoking are likely to do worse at school than other students.

Exposure to even low levels of tobacco smoke in the home was linked to lower test results for reading and maths. The greater the exposure, the worse the decline was found to be.

The researchers said the finding has huge implications for our society because millions of children are exposed to environmental tobacco smoke.

Immersion outperforms bilingual education

A large study by the Arizona Department of Education has indicated that structured English immersion for English language learners is much better for students academically than bilingual education.

The study looked at the scores of 70,000 Arizona students on an achievement test. The research indicated that students in structured English immersion programmes were ahead of students in bilingual education classes, with the achievement gap ranging from a couple of months in the early grades to more than a year ahead from sixth grade onward.

Benefits of nursery school

University of London researchers have concluded that children who have good nursery or other pre-school education do better at primary school than those kept at home.

Their study tracked the progress of more than 3,000 children from the ages of three till seven. They found clear evidence that those who were kept at home performed worse in reading, writing and maths than those who were not.

They concluded that pre-school experience enhanced all-round development and that the earlier children started, the better in terms of their intellectual development. Full-time attendance led to no better gains than part-time. But the quality of provision was important.

Class size does not matter

Research in England has found no evidence that children in smaller primary classes do better in maths or English.

A team at London University's Institute of Education studied thousands of pupils in their fourth, fifth and sixth years of schooling and found no evidence that the size of class had any impact on progress.