Average hourly wage in Canada now $34.95: StatCan
Average hourly wages among Canadian employees rose to $34.95 on a year-over-year basis in April, a 4.7 per cent increase, according to a Statistics Canada report released Friday morning.
A team of researchers in Italy and Switzerland found that children can achieve long-term reading improvements by playing as little as two hours of action video games per week.
The study, published on Monday in Nature Human Behaviour, divided 150 Italian schoolchildren aged eight to 12 into two groups: one group to play an action video game the researchers created, and another group to play a video game designed to teach kids how to code.
The action game simulated some traditional aspects of ones designed for teenagers or adults but without the violence, and it required the children to solve puzzles and other challenges in a certain time frame.
While the game itself was not designed to teach children how to read, it contained tasks that tested skills needed for strong learning, such as working memory and cognitive flexibility, the researchers noted.
“Reading calls upon several other essential mechanisms that we don’t necessarily think about, such as knowing how to move our eyes on the page or how to use our working memory to link words together in a coherent sentence,”Daphne Bavelier, a psychology professor at the University of Geneva, said in a news release.
The game is in Italian and isnow being adapted for English, German and French, where the researchers hope to return similar results.
The researchers had the children play their games for two hours per week while supervised at school for a period of six weeks and found that shortly after the research period, the children who played the action game showed significant improvements in their reading speed, reading accuracy and attention to detail.
The children who played the coding game did not show the same improvements.
“We found a seven-fold improvement in attentional control in the children who played the action video game compared to the control group,” said Angela Pasqualotto, first author of the study and a PhD student at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Trento in Italy.
“What is particularly interesting about this study is that we carried out three further assessment tests at six months, 12 months and 18 months after training. On each occasion, the trained children performed better than the control group, which proves that these improvements were sustained.”
The study also found the grades of the children who played the action game actually improved over time, which suggests an improved learning ability.
“The effects are thus long-term, in line with the action video game strengthening the ability to learn how to learn,” said Bavelier.
Average hourly wages among Canadian employees rose to $34.95 on a year-over-year basis in April, a 4.7 per cent increase, according to a Statistics Canada report released Friday morning.
A 4.2-magnitude earthquake was recorded west of Vancouver Island early Friday morning.
Andy Kim's 'Rock Me Gently' is marking a major milestone, as it celebrates its 50th anniversary.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
The threat of zebra mussels has prompted the federal government to temporarily ban watercraft from a Manitoba lake popular with tourists.
Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.
Oprah Winfrey said on Thursday evening that she has long played a role in promoting unhealthy and unrealistic diets.
A southwestern Ontario woman has received an $8,400 bill from a hospital in Windsor, Ont., after she refused to put her mother in a nursing home she hated -- and she says she has no intention of paying it.
Toronto police say a man who allegedly attempted to access Drake’s Bridle Path property was taken to hospital on Thursday after an altercation with security guards.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
A Listowel, Ont. man, drafted by the Hamilton Tigercats last week, is also getting looks from the NFL, despite only playing 27 games of football in his life.
A small Ajax dessert shop that recently received a glowing review from celebrity food critic Keith Lee is being forced to move after a zoning complaint was made following the social media influencer’s visit last month.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
The Regina Police Service says it is the first in Saskatchewan and possibly Canada to implement new technology in its detention facility that will offer real-time monitoring of detainees’ vital health metrics.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.