学进去

Previous studies have found that the number of years spent in school relates to cognition (认知) later in life, but few studies have examined the influence of educational quality.

“Our study establishes a link between high-quality education and better later-life cognition and suggests that increased investment in schools could be a powerful strategy to improve cognitive health among older adults in the United States,” said Jennifer Manly, senior author of the study.

The study, led by Manly and Dominika Šeblová, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia, used data from Project Talent, a 1960 survey of high school students across the United States, and follow-up data collected in the Project Talent Aging Study. The researchers examined the relationships between six indicators (指标) of school quality and several measures of cognitive performance in participants nearly 60 years after they left high school. Since high-quality schools may be especially beneficial for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, the researchers also examined whether associations differed by geography, gender, race and ethnicity.

The researchers found that attending a school with a higher number of teachers with graduate training was the most consistent predictor of better later-life cognition, especially in language fluency (for example, coming up with words within a category). Attending a school with a high number of graduate-level teachers was about equal to the difference in cognition between a 70-year-old and someone who is one to three years older. Other indicators of school quality were related to some, but not all, measures of cognitive performance.

According to Manly and Šeblová, there may be many reasons explaining why attending schools with well-trained teachers may affect later-life cognition. “Instruction provided by more experienced and knowledgeable teachers might be more intellectually inspiring and provide additional neural or cognitive benefits,” said Šeblová, “and attending higher-quality schools may also influence life track, leading to university education and greater earnings, which are in turn linked to better cognition in later life.”