The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) will present eight individuals and groups with this year’s Science Education and Outreach Awards, comprised of the Award for Education in Neuroscience, the Science Educator Award, the Next Generation Awards, and the Chapter of the Year Awards. The awards will be presented during SfN’s annual meeting.

Across two studies, researchers from the University of Tasmania in Australia wanted to understand how capitalization skills change with age and whether certain writing patterns make it easier or harder for students to use capitalization correctly.  Specifically, the researchers looked at whether people are more likely to capitalize words with two “clues” for using a capital letter (proper nouns at the start of a sentence) than words with just one clue (e.g., proper nouns in the middle of a sentence, or common nouns (i.e., a type of person, place or thing) at the start of a sentence), and less likely again for words with no capitalization clues at all (common nouns in the middle of a sentence, which should not be capitalized).

In Australia, where this research was conducted, children are taught to capitalize proper nouns in Grade 2, having learned in the previous two grades that personal names and sentence-initial words should be capitalized. The findings suggest that spelling exercises that draw students’ attention to a word’s role in a sentence are especially helpful for encouraging children to use capital letters. Teachers can help students by encouraging them to think about both the meaning and position of words in a sentence, not just how a word is spelled.