The sample’s psychological dimension produced the highest mean scores, followed by the social and biological dimensions. In unadjusted comparisons, television viewing and attendance in the afternoon shift were associated with higher overall scores. Older pupils had higher social and biological scores, but age and school grade overlapped in the sample, so the researchers did not attribute an independent effect to either variable.

Students who practiced sports had lower biological-dimension scores. These were reported associations between measured variables; they do not show that television viewing, class schedules or sports participation changed the children’s nomophobia scores. The results became more limited after accounting for the number of statistical comparisons.

Following false-discovery-rate correction, television viewing remained associated with higher scores in the general comparison, while the afternoon shift retained a significant association in the biological dimension. Multilevel models accounted for students being clustered within 23 educational establishments and found that television viewing remained associated with higher nomophobia scores. That model association was not significant after correction across the model coefficients.

Effective sample sizes for some comparisons were about 136 to 310 students rather than the full sample of 954, an important limitation when interpreting the school-level structure and the smaller analysis-specific samples. The authors placed the findings in the context of education policy and digital citizenship, treating school mobile-phone use as a governance issue rather than testing the effects of a particular regulatory approach. Their contextual comparison examined Ecuador’s regulatory approach alongside those of four Latin American countries with national laws governing mobile phones in schools.

That comparison provides a legal and policy frame for the analysis, but it does not measure governance outcomes or establish whether any of the regulatory approaches is more effective. The research data were collected before Ecuador’s April 2025 ministerial agreement on mobile phones in schools, meaning the study is not an evaluation of that agreement or its implementation. Overall, the research presents nomophobia scores as a multidimensional pattern among the participating pupils and identifies television viewing as the most persistent association in the reported analyses.

Its principal contribution is descriptive: the study shows how responses on psychological, social and biological components differed across a school-age sample while demonstrating how multiple testing and clustering across schools constrained the interpretation of small associations. Nor does it show that school regulation, television viewing, schedules or extracurricular activities can prevent nomophobia. The supported conclusion is narrower: in this group of 954 pupils, psychological scores were highest, several sociodemographic and activity-related differences appeared in unadjusted analyses, and television viewing remained associated with higher scores under the study’s adjusted statistical procedures.

Subject of Research: Patterns of nomophobia scores and associated sociodemographic factors among 954 Ecuadorian schoolchildren aged 10 to 13

Article Title: Nomophobia among Ecuadorian schoolchildren: sociodemographic patterns and implications for digital citizenship and educational governance

Article References: Clavijo-Castillo, R., Reyes-Guaranda, M., & Cabrera-Ortiz, F. (2026). Nomophobia among Ecuadorian schoolchildren: sociodemographic patterns and implications for digital citizenship and educational governance. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1965153. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1965153

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1965153

Keywords: nomophobia, schoolchildren, Ecuador, mobile-phone anxiety, television viewing, school schedules, extracurricular sports, digital citizenship, educational governance, multilevel modeling, Ecuadorian, sociodemographic

Six public schools are assigned to three conditions: two schools will use physically active lessons, two will use physically active breaks and two will serve as controls. First-grade students will be followed from 2022 through 2026. Classroom teachers will deliver the interventions twice each week. Physically active lessons will incorporate movement into school content through teaching methods that involve movement. Physically active breaks will not be tied to academic content and will consist of exercises averaging five minutes, with the stated aim of interrupting sedentary behavior and promoting moderate-to-vigorous movement.

The primary outcomes are cognitive development, measured through computerized tests assessing executive functions, and academic performance, assessed through teachers’ grades and national and state examinations. Secondary outcomes include anthropometry, physical activity level, sedentary behavior, eating habits, sleepiness, quality of life and students’ perception of school. The cluster-randomized design compares interventions delivered across schools rather than evaluating individual students in isolation. The trial was retrospectively registered in the Brazilian Clinical Trials Registry on January 9, 2025, under identifier RBR-10zxwdrh.

The protocol’s stated aim is to provide information about the potential longer-term effects of classroom physical activity strategies, particularly in a setting outside high-income countries. However, the available abstract presents planned methods and expected information rather than completed efficacy results. It does not provide the number of participating students, numerical estimates of intervention effects, or outcome data for any study group. The evidence therefore supports describing the trial’s population, assignments, interventions, follow-up period and measurement plans, but not claiming cognitive, academic, health or educational benefits from physically active lessons or breaks.

Subject of Research: Protocol for a cluster-randomized trial of classroom physical activity interventions in first-grade students in Aracaju, Brazil

Article Title: Effects of physically active lessons and physically active breaks on cognitive development and academic performance of schoolchildren: protocol for a cluster randomized clinical trial

Article References: Gandarela, L., Melo, J. C. N., Oliveira, D. N., Ywgne, J., Tejada, J., & Silva, D. R. (2026). Effects of physically active lessons and physically active breaks on cognitive development and academic performance of schoolchildren: protocol for a cluster randomized clinical trial. BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07638-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07638-0

Keywords: cluster-randomized trial, study protocol, schoolchildren, physically active lessons, active breaks, cognitive development, academic performance, Aracaju, Brazil, public schools, Effects, physically

The Haddon matrix, developed by epidemiologist William Haddon in the 1960s and 1970s, reframes injury prevention by crossing three phases of an injury event, namely pre-crash, crash, and post-crash, with factors relating to the host, the agent or vehicle, and the physical and social environment. Rather than treating a child struck by a car as a single unfortunate event, the matrix forces analysts to ask what could be done before the collision to prevent it, during the collision to reduce its severity, and afterward to limit the harm. In road safety terms, this means examining everything from driver behavior and vehicle speed to sidewalk design, crossing infrastructure, and the supervision culture around a school gate.

In the new study, the research team began with a baseline survey of the school community. A total of 497 schoolchildren and 484 parents with pre-intervention data were included, and the children had an average age of 9.58 years, with a standard deviation of 1.79 years. The survey captured how safe the children felt walking near the school, how they behaved when crossing streets, and how confident parents were in letting their children walk to school alone. These subjective measures were paired with an on-the-spot investigation by an expert panel, which walked the school zone itself and mapped potential road safety factors onto the cells of the Haddon matrix.

This combination of community perception data and expert environmental audit is what distinguishes the study from many school safety programs that rely on education alone. By systematically filling in the matrix, the panel could see where risks clustered. A child’s decision to cross mid-block, for example, is not simply a matter of poor judgment; it interacts with the absence of marked crossings, the timing of vehicle flows at drop-off hours, and the social environment in which other children and parents behave. The matrix turns such scattered observations into a structured inventory of modifiable risks, each assigned to a phase and a factor category where an intervention could plausibly act.

Guided by the analysis, the team implemented three coordinated interventions. The first was an expansion of road safety education for the children, targeting the host factors in the matrix by improving knowledge and self-protective behavior. The second involved physical improvements to road infrastructure around the school zone, addressing the environmental column of the matrix by altering the conditions under which vehicles and pedestrians interact. The third was the enforcement of a Family-Police-School traffic assistant mode, a supervision scheme in which families, police officers, and school staff jointly manage traffic and pedestrian movement at peak times, adding a layer of social environmental control during the highest-risk pre-crash window.

The results, measured by comparing safety perceptions and reported behaviors before and after the interventions, were striking. The proportion of schoolchildren who always felt safe when walking near the school rose by 7.87 percent. More dramatically, the share of children who reported never crossing the street at any stretch of the road, meaning they used designated crossings rather than jaywalking, increased by 23.79 percent. Among parents, the proportion who agreed it was always safe for their children to walk to school alone climbed by 11.25 percent. Most participants said they were satisfied with the intervention and believed it was worth promoting more widely.

The expert panel’s re-assessment of the school zone also found that the road safety environment had improved compared with pre-intervention conditions, corroborating the survey data with an independent technical evaluation. Notably, no road traffic injuries were reported at the school during the entire one-year study period, either before or after the interventions. The authors are careful about what this means: with no baseline injuries to compare against, the study cannot demonstrate that the program prevented crashes, and the outcome measures are largely self-reported perceptions rather than objective collision counts. Still, the consistency across child reports, parent reports, and expert evaluation lends weight to the conclusion that the Haddon matrix approach produced a genuinely safer environment.

The study’s framing within injury epidemiology matters for how the findings might travel. Road traffic injuries are not random misfortunes but the product of identifiable and modifiable factors in energy transfer between vehicles and vulnerable road users. The Haddon matrix has long underpinned interventions such as seat belts, airbags, and speed humps, each of which acts at a different phase of the event. Applying it at the scale of a single school zone demonstrates that the same logic can drive local, low-cost environmental change: repaint a crossing, retime a signal, station trained adults at the curb, and teach children where the risks concentrate. The approach is also transparent, allowing other schools to replicate the audit rather than copy interventions blindly.

There are limitations that the authors themselves acknowledge. The evaluation relied mainly on perceived safety and self-reported behaviors, which can be influenced by awareness of the program and the desire to give socially desirable answers. Children’s reports of never crossing mid-block, however encouraging, are not the same as observed crossing behavior, and the absence of recorded injuries over one year may simply reflect the rarity of such events at any single school. The authors call for future research to focus more on objective measurement, such as observed behavior, vehicle speed data, and longer follow-up periods, to establish whether the gains persist and translate into reduced crash risk over time.

Even with those caveats, the study offers a practical template for a problem that touches nearly every community. School zones concentrate the most vulnerable road users at predictable times and places, which makes them unusually tractable targets for environmental intervention. The Guangzhou experience suggests that a structured framework, a modest expert panel, and cooperation among families, police, and schools can shift both the physical environment and the culture of safety around a school gate. The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Science and Technology Plan Project of Guangzhou, and Safe Kids Worldwide-China, and was carried out with the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention and local district partners. If replicated with objective outcome measures across larger and more varied settings, the Haddon matrix could become a standard tool for turning school streets from hazard zones into models of engineered safety.

Subject of Research: Application of the Haddon matrix to identify and improve environmental road safety factors around a primary school zone

Article Title: Using the Haddon matrix to improve environmental road safety factors around a school zone

Article References: Lin, W.-Q., Liao, Y.-X., Liu, H., Ruan, H.-H., Sun, S.-Y., Liu, X.-Y., Fang, Y.-Y., Tang, J., Cui, M.-Y., & Shen, J.-C. (2026). Using the Haddon matrix to improve environmental road safety factors around a school zone. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29875-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29875-9

Keywords: Haddon matrix, road traffic injuries, schoolchildren, school zone, road safety, injury prevention, public health, pedestrian safety, Guangzhou, safety perceptions, intervention study, BMC Public Health

The researchers, led by Souhail Hermassi of Qatar University together with colleagues from the University of Bern in Switzerland and Nord University in Norway, recruited 126 children with a mean age of 12.2 years from a single urban school in Doha. Participants were divided into two equal groups of 63 based on self-reported moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), measured with the International Physical Activity Questionnaire Short Form (IPAQ-SF). Children reporting at least 300 minutes of MVPA per week were classified as physically active, while those below that threshold were classified as non-active. The cutoff was chosen as a pragmatic threshold used in previous questionnaire-based pediatric research, and the authors caution that it should not be read as equivalent to meeting international guidelines, which recommend about 60 minutes of MVPA per day.

The most striking result concerned mathematics. Active boys scored an average of 90.2 percent on their official mathematics assessments, compared with 76.3 percent for non-active boys. Active girls scored 89.5 percent on average, against 77.1 percent for non-active girls. The statistical effect size for this difference was large, with Cohen’s d reaching 1.7, and the group effect was highly significant (F = 96.8, p < 0.001). Notably, no significant sex effects or group-by-sex interactions emerged for mathematics scores, meaning that the academic advantage associated with being active appeared similar for boys and girls. Mathematics was chosen as the academic outcome because it relies heavily on executive cognitive functions such as attention, working memory, and problem-solving, and because it is widely used as an achievement indicator in this research area.

Physical fitness told a consistent story. The children completed three tests: a Stork balance test measuring static postural control, a medicine ball throw assessing upper-body muscular power with a 3-kilogram ball, and a handgrip strength test using a digital dynamometer. Active children outperformed non-active children across all three measures, with significant group effects (F ≥ 3.98, p ≤ 0.048, d ≥ 0.36). Sex effects were significant for the medicine ball throw and handgrip strength, with boys generally outperforming girls, but there were no significant group-by-sex interactions. In post hoc comparisons, active boys threw the medicine ball farther than all other groups and held the Stork balance longer than non-active boys and girls, although non-active boys showed greater handgrip strength than active girls.

Anthropometric and maturation measures added nuance. Active children had significantly lower body mass than their non-active peers (boys: 47.2 versus 53.8 kilograms; girls: 50.6 versus 53.8 kilograms), with a small-to-moderate effect size. Arm span was nearly significantly shorter in active boys. However, height, body mass index, sitting height, and estimated biological maturity, calculated using Moore’s equations for predicting the age at peak height velocity, did not differ meaningfully between groups. The authors suggest that the narrow age range and the cross-sectional design may explain why growth parameters showed few differences.

The activity data revealed clear sex-specific patterns. Active boys reported the highest vigorous activity of any subgroup, averaging 1,209 MET-minutes per week, and the lowest sedentary time, at 2.6 hours per day, significantly less than all other groups. Active girls also spent less time sedentary than non-active girls (3.7 versus 5.3 hours per day). Moderate-intensity activity and walking, by contrast, did not differ significantly between groups, suggesting that the differences in overall energy expenditure and fitness were driven primarily by vigorous-intensity movement rather than routine lower-intensity activity. The authors argue that this pattern underscores the potential value of structured, high-intensity activities within school and extracurricular programs.

Correlational analysis sharpened the picture further. Sedentary time showed a moderate negative correlation with mathematics scores (r = −0.48, p < 0.001), meaning that children who sat longer tended to score lower. Total weekly physical activity volume, expressed in MET-minutes per week, showed only a trivial positive correlation with mathematics achievement (r = 0.18, p = 0.049). The authors interpret this asymmetry as indicating that overall activity volume alone is unlikely to explain academic performance, whereas reducing prolonged sitting may be more meaningfully associated with better mathematics outcomes.

The study’s authors are careful to frame these findings as associations rather than causal relationships. Because the design is cross-sectional, it cannot establish whether physical activity drives better mathematics achievement, whether academically successful children are simply more likely to be active, or whether unmeasured factors influence both. Biological maturation was estimated but not included as a statistical covariate, and confounders such as nutrition, sleep, socioeconomic status, parental education, prior academic achievement, and classroom factors were not measured. Self-reported activity data are also subject to recall and social desirability bias, and the Arabic version of the IPAQ has limited validation evidence for children in this age range. The single-school sample further limits generalizability, and the study was not powered to detect small interaction effects.

The researchers also emphasize conceptual distinctions that are often blurred in public discussion. Physical activity is a modifiable behavior, physical fitness is a physiological attribute that may result from habitual activity, and academic achievement is a multidetermined educational outcome. Physical fitness has been proposed in the literature as a potential correlate linking activity to academic outcomes, but the study did not perform a mediation analysis, so any mediating role remains hypothetical. Similarly, references to neurocognitive mechanisms such as improved executive function or cerebral blood flow draw on prior literature rather than on measurements made in this study, which did not directly assess cognitive function.

Despite these caveats, the findings carry practical weight. They align with a broad body of evidence, including meta-analyses showing small positive effects of physical activity interventions on academic performance and of resistance training on cognition in youth. The authors suggest that schools may consider providing regular opportunities for moderate-to-vigorous activity, incorporating active learning strategies, and reducing prolonged sedentary time, while ensuring that physical education programs are gender-sensitive so that girls have equitable opportunities to develop strength and power. At the policy level, collaboration between education and health authorities could support evidence-based school activity initiatives. The authors stress, however, that the present findings should not be interpreted as proof that increasing physical activity will directly improve academic achievement; establishing causality will require well-designed longitudinal and intervention studies, ideally with objective activity measurement, larger and more diverse samples, and statistical control for maturation and other confounders.

Subject of Research: Associations between physical activity, physical fitness, sedentary behavior, and mathematics achievement in school-aged children

Article Title: Associations between physical activity, physical fitness, sedentary behavior, and mathematics achievement in school-aged children: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Hermassi, S., Alshaer, A., Alneama, A., Ketelhut, S., & van den Tillaar, R. (2026). Associations between physical activity, physical fitness, sedentary behavior, and mathematics achievement in school-aged children: a cross-sectional study. Frontiers in Cognition, 5, Article 1903208. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcogn.2026.1903208

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcogn.2026.1903208

Keywords: physical activity, physical fitness, sedentary behavior, mathematics achievement, schoolchildren, MVPA, Qatar, cross-sectional study, executive function, pediatric health, IPAQ-SF, sex differences

The research team, led by María del Carmen Carcelén-Fraile of the University of Atlántico Medio and Agustín Aibar-Almazán of the University of Jaén, recruited children aged 10 to 12 from two primary schools in Andalusia, Spain. The final analytical sample comprised 176 boys and 210 girls with a mean age of 11.15 years, drawn from grades three through six. Because children of the same chronological age can differ dramatically in biological maturation, this age window is a fascinating one: it captures the transition from late childhood into early adolescence, when strength, power, and body composition begin to diverge between the sexes. Yet in this sample, none of those expected differences had yet materialized.

The researchers assessed five distinct capacities using internationally standardized field tests. Handgrip strength was measured with a digital dynamometer, with the mean of the best attempts from each hand serving as an indicator of overall muscular fitness. Lower-body explosive strength was captured by the standing long jump, a classic test of horizontal power drawn from the ALPHA-Fitness battery. Trunk muscular endurance was quantified by the number of correctly executed sit-ups completed in 30 seconds, following the EUROFIT protocol. Flexibility was assessed with the sit-and-reach test, which primarily reflects hamstring and posterior-chain extensibility. Finally, change-of-direction performance was measured with the 4 x 10-meter shuttle run, in which children sprint back and forth between two lines 10 meters apart, exchanging sponges at each turn, with the fastest of two trials recorded in seconds.

The correlation results were emphatic. Lower-body explosive strength showed the strongest relationship with shuttle-run time, with a correlation coefficient of minus 0.775, meaning children who jumped farther tended to complete the shuttle run dramatically faster. Handgrip strength followed at minus 0.706, flexibility at minus 0.534, and trunk muscular endurance at minus 0.532, all statistically significant. Because lower times indicate better performance, the negative signs all point in the same direction: fitter children turned more quickly. Notably, neither age nor body mass index correlated significantly with shuttle-run performance, suggesting that within this narrow age band, raw fitness capacity outweighed chronological age or body size.

Correlations alone, however, can be misleading when fitness components overlap heavily, as they do in children. The team therefore turned to hierarchical multiple linear regression, first entering age, sex, and body mass index as covariates, and then adding the four fitness measures simultaneously. The covariates alone explained a negligible 1.2 percent of the variance in shuttle-run time. Adding the fitness components raised the explained variance by 61.4 percentage points, bringing the final model to 62.6 percent, an unusually large share for a field-based study of motor performance.

Within that adjusted model, the hierarchy of importance became clear. Lower-body explosive strength retained by far the strongest independent association, with a standardized coefficient of minus 0.566. Handgrip strength followed at minus 0.180 and flexibility at minus 0.111, both still statistically significant but far weaker. Trunk muscular endurance, despite its respectable bivariate correlation, dropped to essentially zero once the other components were accounted for. This pattern illustrates a crucial statistical lesson: because muscular endurance is strongly correlated with both grip strength and leg power, its apparent link with agility was likely just borrowed variance from its stronger cousins.

The handgrip result deserves particular attention. Grip strength plays no direct biomechanical role in propelling or braking the body during a shuttle run, so its association with agility cannot reflect a direct mechanical effect. Instead, the authors suggest it functions as a broader marker of neuromuscular development and general muscular fitness. Importantly, handgrip strength and standing long jump performance were correlated at 0.823, meaning the two measures share most of their statistical variance. The researchers caution that their regression coefficients should therefore be read as adjusted associations conditional on the other predictors, not as fully independent contributions, and they note that collinearity diagnostics in the moderation model showed elevated variance inflation factors for these two measures.

Perhaps the most surprising finding was what did not appear: sex differences. Boys and girls showed no statistically significant differences in any fitness measure or in shuttle-run time, and all between-sex effect sizes were small with confidence intervals crossing zero. When the team formally tested whether sex moderated the fitness-agility relationships by adding interaction terms to the regression, the results were null, explaining only an additional 0.3 percent of variance. This stands in contrast to studies of older adolescents, where sex differences in strength and power widen considerably after pubertal development, and to some prior work in primary schoolchildren that reported boys outperforming girls in jumping and shuttle tasks. The authors suggest the developmental stage of their sample, around age 11, may simply precede the point at which sex-related differences reliably emerge, though they acknowledge that biological maturation was not directly measured, a key limitation.

The flexibility finding also carries nuance. The sit-and-reach test captures hamstring and posterior-chain extensibility but not the multiplanar, joint-specific mobility involved in cutting and pivoting, so the association should not be read as proof that stretching routines will make children faster at changing direction. Previous research in elite youth soccer players has found no significant link between sit-and-reach scores and change-of-direction time, highlighting that the relationship may depend on age, population, and task demands. Similarly, the study’s cross-sectional design means causality cannot be established: stronger children may simply be more agile, or more active children may be both stronger and more agile. The 4 x 10-meter shuttle run also measures pre-planned change of direction, not reactive agility involving decision-making.

Still, the practical message is compelling. Most intervention research on agility has focused on trained adolescent athletes, particularly male soccer players, where plyometric and strength training reliably improve change-of-direction speed. This study extends the evidence to ordinary schoolchildren, showing that the same principle, leg power above all, appears to govern multidirectional movement long before specialized training begins. For physical education teachers and public health planners, the implication is that developing lower-body explosive strength through jumping, hopping, and games may offer the greatest return for children’s motor competence, while the absence of sex differences at this age suggests that boys and girls can be trained and assessed on equal footing during the primary school years. Longitudinal studies incorporating measures of biological maturation will be needed to confirm whether boosting leg power in childhood actually drives improvements in agility over time.

Subject of Research: Associations between muscular strength, flexibility, sex, and change-of-direction performance in primary schoolchildren

Article Title: Physical fitness factors associated with change-of-direction performance in primary schoolchildren: the role of muscular strength, flexibility, and sex

Article References: Carcelén-Fraile, M. D. C., Aibar-Almazán, A., Peris-Reig, L., & Vigil-Torres, N. (2026). Physical fitness factors associated with change-of-direction performance in primary schoolchildren: the role of muscular strength, flexibility, and sex. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, Article 1972450. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1972450

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1972450

Keywords: change of direction, physical fitness, children, explosive strength, handgrip strength, flexibility, muscular endurance, shuttle run, sex differences, motor performance, pediatric exercise science, schoolchildren

The investigation was led by Daniel Arriscado-Alsina of the Universidad de La Laguna and Raúl Jiménez-Boraita of the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja. Their team recruited 949 students aged 9 to 15 years from 60 schools across the islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria. The breadth of the sampling frame matters: by drawing participants from dozens of schools rather than a handful of classrooms, the researchers reduced the risk that their findings reflect the quirks of one particular educational environment. The study protocol was approved by the Research Ethics and Animal Welfare Committee of the University of La Laguna, and written informed consent was obtained from the parents or legal guardians of every participating student.

Sleep problems were measured with the Sleep Self-Report questionnaire, a validated instrument completed by the children themselves rather than their parents. This design choice is technically significant. Self-reported sleep captures the child’s own experience of difficulties such as trouble falling asleep, waking during the night, or feeling unrefreshed in the morning, which may diverge from parental observation. Each participant’s score placed them somewhere along a continuum of sleep difficulties, and the researchers divided the sample into tertiles, or three groups of roughly equal size ranging from the fewest to the most reported problems, to test whether outcomes shifted systematically across those groups.

The measurement battery extended far beyond sleep. Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and sedentary time were assessed through questionnaires, as were health-related quality of life and the children’s own perception of their academic performance. Body composition was evaluated using anthropometric techniques, including the body mass index-for-age z-score, a standard pediatric metric that expresses a child’s BMI relative to population norms for their age and sex, and waist circumference, a direct marker of central adiposity. Physical fitness was tested in the field using handgrip strength measured with a dynamometer, the standing long jump as an index of lower-body explosive power, and a cardiorespiratory fitness test. Academic functioning was captured both through official grades and through the students’ self-assessment of how well they were doing at school.

Because students clustered within schools, the analysts used statistical methods that account for such grouping, examining differences across the sleep-problem tertiles with cluster-adjusted analyses. They then built separate generalized estimating equation models for each indicator, a technique well suited to repeated or correlated observations within groups. Each model was adjusted for sex, age treated as a continuous variable, family affluence, and area of residence, with school included as the clustering variable. The handgrip strength model received an additional layer of statistical control for body weight and height, since stronger children tend to be larger, and raw grip strength can therefore confound comparisons across body sizes.

The pattern of results was strikingly coherent. Higher sleep-problem scores were inversely associated with moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, health-related quality of life, standing long jump performance, cardiorespiratory fitness, academic grades, and perceived academic performance. In other words, as reported sleep difficulties rose, every one of these indicators fell. The inverse associations extended across domains that are usually studied in isolation: a child’s nighttime struggles showed up in the gymnasium, in the classroom, and in their own sense of wellbeing. Conversely, sleep problems were positively associated with sedentary time, the BMI-for-age z-score, and waist circumference, meaning children with more sleep difficulties tended to sit more and carry more central body fat.

One result broke from the pattern. Handgrip strength, a measure of isometric upper-body strength, showed no significant association with sleep problems once the model was adjusted for body weight and height. This null finding is informative rather than disappointing. It suggests that the apparent relationship between sleep difficulties and grip strength may be largely explained by differences in body size, whereas the associations with explosive lower-body power and cardiovascular endurance appear to persist independently of the adjustments applied. The distinction hints that different components of physical fitness may relate to sleep through different physiological pathways, a question the authors flag for future work.

The researchers also applied a false-discovery-rate correction, a statistical safeguard used when many associations are tested at once. Because a large battery of indicators multiplies the chances that at least some associations will appear significant by chance alone, this correction recalibrates the threshold for significance across the entire set of tests. The fact that all significant associations survived this stricter procedure strengthens confidence that the reported links are not statistical artifacts, even though the study’s cross-sectional design still limits the strength of the conclusions that can be drawn.

Indeed, the authors are explicit about the limits of their evidence. Because the data were collected at a single point in time, the indicator-specific models do not establish independence, temporal ordering, or causality. The relationships could run in either direction, or both. A child who sleeps poorly may feel too fatigued to exercise, and reduced physical activity is itself known to disrupt sleep, creating a potential feedback loop. Similarly, poor sleep can impair attention and memory, dragging down grades, while academic stress and screen-heavy evenings can in turn delay bedtime. Rising adiposity and poor sleep are also thought to reinforce one another through metabolic and hormonal pathways, including alterations in appetite regulation and circadian rhythm. Disentangling these reciprocal dynamics requires longitudinal designs that follow the same children over months and years, and the study’s authors call for exactly that.

Even with those caveats, the findings carry practical weight for schools, families, and public health planners. Sleep problems in childhood and early adolescence are common, modifiable, and increasingly recognized as relevant to school health, yet lifestyle, fitness, wellbeing, body composition, and academic functioning are not always assessed together in school-based research. By measuring all of these domains in one coordinated effort, the Canary Islands study demonstrates that sleep sits at the intersection of nearly every indicator educators and clinicians care about. If future longitudinal work confirms that sleep difficulties drive downstream harm, or that improving sleep lifts activity, fitness, and learning, then sleep could become one of the most efficient levers available for improving children’s health on multiple fronts at once. For now, the message is a sobering correlation: the children struggling most with sleep are, on average, the same children struggling most with movement, weight, wellbeing, and school.

Subject of Research: Associations between sleep problems and lifestyle, body composition, fitness, wellbeing, and academic outcomes in schoolchildren

Article Title: Associations of sleep problems with lifestyle, health-related quality of life, body composition, physical fitness, and academic performance in schoolchildren

Article References: Arriscado-Alsina, D., & Jiménez-Boraita, R. (2026). Associations of sleep problems with lifestyle, health-related quality of life, body composition, physical fitness, and academic performance in schoolchildren. Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44167-026-00116-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44167-026-00116-z

Keywords: sleep problems, schoolchildren, physical activity, sedentary behavior, physical fitness, health-related quality of life, body composition, obesity, academic performance, cardiorespiratory fitness, cross-sectional study, adolescent health

The design of the test rests on a developmental vocabulary list rather than the frequency-based word lists that dominate second-language testing. This choice matters because Chinese literacy acquisition does not unfold the way alphabetic literacy does. Chinese children must learn thousands of distinct characters, each composed of strokes and radicals, and words are typically written with combinations of those characters. A word list built specifically around what children are expected to learn at each stage of compulsory education gives the test a developmental logic: the words sampled for a Grade 1 subtest are those a first grader should plausibly be mastering, while the words in the Grade 9 subtest reflect the far larger lexicon expected of a student about to enter senior secondary school.

Structurally, the C-VLT consists of four subtests, each matched to a different band of grade levels. This staged architecture allows teachers and researchers to place a student’s receptive vocabulary knowledge, meaning the words a child can recognize and understand when encountered in print, along a developmental continuum. Receptive knowledge is deliberately the target here. Distinguishing what learners can recognize from what they can actively produce has long been a central theme in vocabulary research, and the authors designed the C-VLT to interpret scores specifically as indicators of recognition-based receptive knowledge and stage-based vocabulary mastery, not as measures of writing or speaking ability.

The empirical scale of the validation study is one of its most striking features. Using probability proportional to size sampling, a survey method that gives larger schools a proportionally greater chance of selection so the sample mirrors the population, the team recruited 16 schools across four counties, spanning both urban and rural settings. In total, 10,460 students sat the test. Samples of this magnitude are rare in vocabulary assessment research, where validation studies often rely on a few hundred participants, and they give the psychometric findings unusual stability.

The analysis combined two complementary statistical traditions. Classical test theory, the older framework, evaluates tests through indices such as reliability coefficients and item difficulty proportions computed directly on observed scores. Item response theory, the more modern approach, models the probability that a test-taker of a given ability answers a given item correctly, producing estimates of each item’s difficulty and discrimination along a common ability scale. When the researchers applied both frameworks to the C-VLT data, the results pointed in the same direction: the items showed reasonable difficulty and discrimination, and all four subtests demonstrated high reliability in the classical sense.

A particularly important finding concerns fairness. The team tested every item for differential item functioning, a statistical procedure that checks whether an item behaves differently for test-takers of equal ability who belong to different groups, for example students in different regions or school types. An item with differential item functioning is biased: it advantages one group over another for reasons unrelated to the construct being measured. In the C-VLT, no items showed such effects, which the authors interpret as evidence of high item quality and satisfactory test fairness across the diverse sample of schools.

Measurement precision was evaluated through item response theory information curves and their associated standard errors. In item response theory, the information function describes how accurately a test measures ability at different points on the ability scale, and the standard error of measurement is inversely related to that information. For the C-VLT, the information curves and standard errors indicated good measurement precision for most students, meaning the test distinguishes ability differences reliably across the broad middle of the distribution rather than only at its extremes. That property is essential for a test intended to be used diagnostically with ordinary classrooms rather than only with exceptional or struggling readers.

Validity evidence came from three converging sources. Evidence based on test content showed that the items genuinely sampled the vocabulary children are expected to learn at each educational stage, drawing on the developmental word list that anchors the instrument. Evidence based on internal structure confirmed that the relationships among items and subtests matched the intended design. Most compellingly, the test showed theoretically expected relations to educational stage and word frequency: item difficulty generally increased as word frequency decreased and as educational stage increased. In other words, rarer words were harder, and words targeted at later grades were harder than words targeted at earlier grades, exactly the pattern a valid developmental vocabulary measure should display.

The significance of this work extends beyond Chinese classrooms. Vocabulary size is one of the strongest known predictors of reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and academic achievement, and meta-analytic work on reading in Chinese has confirmed that vocabulary plays a central role alongside decoding in that writing system as well. Yet until now, researchers studying native Chinese-speaking children have lacked a levels-based instrument comparable to the Vocabulary Levels Test tradition in English, which partitions vocabulary knowledge into frequency or stage bands and estimates mastery within each band. Existing Chinese tools, such as quick character-based proficiency checks or tests built for second-language learners of Chinese, were not designed to capture the stage-by-stage growth of a child’s first-language lexicon.

The C-VLT fills that gap with unusual transparency. The test data, materials, and all source code have been deposited in an openly accessible repository on the Open Science Framework, allowing other researchers to scrutinize the psychometric analyses, adapt the instrument, or build new versions. The study was approved by the institutional review board of the Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality at Beijing Normal University, and all participants gave oral informed consent. Funded through China’s STI 2030 Major Projects program and university research grants, the project demonstrates how large-scale sampling, dual psychometric frameworks, and open materials can be combined to produce an assessment whose scores are not only reliable but genuinely interpretable as a map of how vocabulary knowledge grows, year by year, across the nine years of compulsory schooling.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of a Chinese Vocabulary Levels Test for assessing receptive vocabulary knowledge in primary and secondary school learners

Article Title: C-VLT: A reliable Chinese Vocabulary Levels Test for primary and secondary school learners

Article References: Zeng, B., Jiang, Y., & Wen, H. (2026). C-VLT: A reliable Chinese Vocabulary Levels Test for primary and secondary school learners. Behavior Research Methods, 58(11), Article 312. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-026-03166-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3758/s13428-026-03166-y

Keywords: vocabulary assessment, Chinese language, psychometrics, item response theory, classical test theory, receptive vocabulary, test validity, language education, literacy development, differential item functioning, Behavior Research Methods, schoolchildren

The research team, led by Tongjit Thanchomnang of Mahasarakham University together with colleagues at Burapha University and the University of Lincoln, screened 960 schoolchildren attending five public schools in urban and rural areas of Chonburi Province between May and July 2024. The overall prevalence of pediculosis, the medical term for head louse infestation, came out at 20.42 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 17.91 to 23.11 percent. That figure masks a striking geographic pattern: infestation was markedly more common in rural schools than in urban ones. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Burapha University, and written informed consent was obtained from parents or legal guardians before any child took part, with age-appropriate assent from the children themselves.

Beyond the headline prevalence number, the team used logistic regression to identify which characteristics of the children were statistically associated with carrying lice. Four factors stood out: sex, school level, hair length, and a reported history of pediculicide use, meaning the use of chemical lice treatments. The association with reported pediculicide use is perhaps the most intriguing of the four, because it hints at a self-reinforcing cycle in which children who have been treated remain infested, either because the treatment failed or because reinfection occurred quickly, prompting yet more rounds of chemical exposure. The authors are careful to frame these as epidemiological associations rather than proof of causation, but the pattern is consistent with what happens in populations where the parasites are no longer reliably killed by the standard drugs.

To understand what was happening at the molecular level, the researchers collected lice from infested children and first confirmed their identity. Every sample examined was morphologically identified as Pediculus humanus capitis, the head louse, and analysis of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 gene, known as cox1, placed the insects in mitochondrial clades A or C. These clades describe the deep maternal lineages of head lice and are used by researchers worldwide to track louse populations. Clade A is the most widespread lineage globally, while clade C has a more patchy distribution, and finding both in the same school settings gives a snapshot of the genetic diversity circulating among Thai schoolchildren.

The heart of the study, however, lies in its exploratory search for knockdown resistance mutations, commonly abbreviated as kdr. These mutations occur in the gene encoding the voltage-sensitive sodium channel, or VSSC, a protein in the nerve cell membranes of insects that is the primary molecular target of pyrethroid insecticides. Pyrethroids, the synthetic compounds modeled on natural chrysanthemum-derived toxins, work by binding to this channel and holding it open, paralyzing and killing the insect. Permethrin, the pyrethroid most commonly formulated against head lice, depends entirely on this mechanism. When specific amino acid substitutions appear in the sodium channel protein, the insecticide binds less effectively, the insect survives exposure, and the mutation spreads through the population under the relentless selection pressure of repeated treatments.

Two such mutations are the classic markers of pyrethroid resistance in head lice: T917I, in which the amino acid threonine at position 917 of the channel protein is replaced by isoleucine, and L920F, in which leucine at position 920 is replaced by phenylalanine. Using polymerase chain reaction and sequencing on a stratified subsample of the collected lice, the researchers detected these resistance-associated mutations in the Thai lice populations. More significantly, they identified homozygous resistant genotypes, in which an individual louse carries two copies of the resistance-associated allele, one inherited from each parent. These homozygous resistant individuals, the genotype most strongly linked to survival after pyrethroid exposure, were found in lice collected from four of the sampled schools, indicating that the resistance-associated variants are not isolated curiosities but established features of the local louse populations.

Perhaps the most sobering detail is that resistance-associated genotypes were detected among lice collected from children both with and without reported histories of permethrin treatment. This suggests that the resistant insects are circulating through the school community regardless of whether an individual child has been directly exposed to the drug, carried from head to head by the close contact that defines childhood social life. A louse carrying resistance mutations does not need its host to have used permethrin; it simply needs to have descended from a lineage that survived such exposure somewhere in the local population. In this way, individual treatment decisions ripple outward, shaping the genetic composition of parasites that infest the entire community.

The authors are appropriately measured in their interpretation. Molecular detection of kdr mutations, they emphasize, cannot by itself confirm clinical resistance, because genotype is a proxy rather than a direct measurement of treatment failure. Confirming that permethrin genuinely fails in the clinic would require phenotypic validation studies, in which live lice are exposed to controlled doses of the insecticide and their survival is measured. Nevertheless, the molecular findings carry weight in context. Previous studies in the region have reported incomplete treatment outcomes following permethrin use, and the new genetic data provide a plausible mechanism for those observations. The convergence of epidemiological signals, molecular markers, and prior clinical reports paints a coherent picture of a treatment under strain.

What makes this study particularly valuable is its integrated design. Rather than measuring prevalence, risk factors, and molecular resistance in separate investigations, the team combined all three within the same school settings, allowing a direct link to be drawn between the children experiencing infestations and the genetic character of the lice infesting them. This kind of joined-up surveillance is exactly what public health authorities need when deciding how to respond. If resistance mutations are present, simply recommending more frequent permethrin applications may be futile or even counterproductive, intensifying the selection pressure that drives resistance further. Alternative non-pyrethroid therapies exist, and the study’s ethical protocol already reflected this reality: when treatment failure was suspected, alternative non-pyrethroid treatments were recommended in consultation with local healthcare professionals.

The broader implications extend well beyond Chonburi Province. Pyrethroid resistance in head lice has now been documented across multiple continents, and each new geographic confirmation reinforces the case for coordinated management approaches rather than ad hoc, drug-by-drug responses. The researchers call for continued molecular surveillance, phenotypic validation studies, and future evaluation of coordinated management strategies in endemic settings. For the millions of families worldwide who reach for a permethrin shampoo at the first sign of lice, the message is that the era of assuming the first bottle will work is drawing to a close. Head lice remain a common and treatable condition, but treating them effectively in the twenty-first century increasingly requires knowing what the local lice look like, genetically speaking, before choosing the weapon. Studies like this one provide exactly that knowledge, and they suggest that in eastern Thailand, the lice have already adapted to the old playbook.

Subject of Research: Head louse infestation prevalence and knockdown resistance mutations in schoolchildren in eastern Thailand

Article Title: High prevalence of pediculosis, associated factors, and exploratory detection of the knockdown resistance mutations in head lice from school settings in Chonburi Province, eastern Thailand

Article References: Thanchomnang, T., Gordon, C. N., Krittanan, P., Yangthaworn, K., Thetkathuek, A., Clegg, S. R., Mano, C., & Yingklang, M. (2026). High prevalence of pediculosis, associated factors, and exploratory detection of the knockdown resistance mutations in head lice from school settings in Chonburi Province, eastern Thailand. Parasites &amp; Vectors, 19(1), Article 391. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07672-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07672-y

Keywords: head lice, pediculosis, kdr mutations, pyrethroid resistance, permethrin, schoolchildren, Thailand, molecular surveillance, voltage-sensitive sodium channel, cox1, public health, Parasites & Vectors