PAPER 1: Cultivating healthy minds in ourselves and in the next generation

Carefully examine each of the main ideas in Healthy Children, Healthy Minds and the description/examination of each. For each of the three BIG ideas (e.g., Keeping the brain and mind healthy; Challenges to brain and mind health; and Strategies for building a healthy brain and mind) find a peer-reviewed research study/journal article (use the PSU databases from the PSU library online) that supports or negates points made in the section. Consider the following and please apply SPECIFIC principles discussed. Please make sure it is a RESEARCH STUDY with methods and results. Your paper maybe organized as follows:

Part I: A paragraph overview of what you considered to be the most important points of each chapter (at least 6 pages—at least one complete and detailed paragraph of key ideas from each chapter).

Consider the following for your paragraph responses/reflections/summaries:

1. How much do I consider this idea (these major ideas) in my own personal daily life?

2. How much do I/can I consider this idea (these major ideas) in my professional daily life?

3. To be able to fully infuse/integrate these ideas into my personal/professional life, what would I

need to change/do?

4. What are the implications of these ideas for education (think about education broadly if you are not in a school or classroom)

5. INCLUDE DETAILED EVIDENCE TO BACK YOUR CLAIMS. Dig deep—do not just write what someone could learn from reading the chapter titles. If the points are so obvious that one could have understood them from reading the chapter title or first page, I will return the paper

ungraded and ask that it be reworked. PART II will require you to dig even deeper on topics that

are of particular interest to you.

Part II: Three peer-reviewed journal research articles that build upon a point or points in each of the three sections and a summary AND CRITIQUE of the article’s methods and specific results and main takeaways (about 3 pages—one page for each). What did the author(s) do? What did they find? How generalizable are their claims from their research?

To find articles go to my.plymouth.edu then click on the “library tab” at the top of the page=>

Then click on “databases” and from the dropdown menu choose ERIC and possibly the Psych Articles or other Psychology databases. Social science with full text can be useful too. Use a variety of different searches.

For example, one such article that provides a good example of the kind of article that might represent a peer-reviewed article on exercise and the brain is: Differences in Brain Activity during a Verbal Associative Memory Encoding Task in High- and Low-fit Adolescents by Megan M. Herting and Bonnie J. Nagel published in the April 2013 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 25:4, pp. 595–612. Granted these articles can get quite technical so glean what you can from them. You may want to limit to ERIC and other Educational databases and sample a few psychology ones.

You should also limit to “peer reviewed” articles and perhaps limit when they were published so you choose articles written in the last 5 years (this field changes quickly).