Students entering w/low scores: more degrees when part of major’s majority group

 Despite efforts to encourage broader participation, women earn about 25 percent of undergraduate engineering degrees and 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees—and men remain a small minority among nursing and education degree earners. Shedding new light on these discrepancies, a study—published in Nature Human Behaviour and examining two US Department of Education datasets—finds that these long-standing patterns tend to be most pronounced among students with lower pre-college grades and test scores, although prior academic performance alone does not explain who stays in a major and who leaves.

The researchers found that in male-majority majors such as physics, engineering, computer science, business, and economics, straight cisgender men with lower-than-average high-school grades and test scores were substantially overrepresented compared to straight cisgender women with similar levels of academic performance. That gap narrowed considerably among the highest-achieving students. LGBTQ+ men were also underrepresented in these fields.

In female-majority fields, evidence for a parallel pattern of overrepresentation for straight cisgender women was mixed. However, some models showed that LGBTQ+ women tend to be overrepresented in female-majority fields among students with the highest pre-college achievement—suggesting that LGBTQ+ women may need stronger academic credentials to gain a foothold even in seemingly welcoming fields.

For the study, the researchers used two large and nationally representative datasets collected by the US Department of Education to analyze patterns of high school performance and college major selection and persistence for straight cisgender men and women, and LGBTQ+ men and women. The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 provided demographic information including sex and LGBTQ+ identity as well as academic preparation, interests, and outcomes for 6,340 students from their first year of high school in 2009-2010 through their junior year of college. The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 2016 provided academic and demographic data for 12,950 students who obtained a bachelor’s degree in 2016.

“Across both datasets, we found evidence that when there was a representation gap that varied across the achievement distribution, that gap tended to be more in favor of the major’s historically dominant demographic group among the students with lower pre-college grades and test scores—and less so at other points in the distribution,” says lead author Joseph Cimpian, professor of economics and education policy at NYU Steinhardt and NYU Wagner. “Those gaps tend to narrow considerably among the students with the strongest pre-college performance, highlighting the importance of looking more closely at how these gaps differ by achievement level rather than just overall representation to better understand who is entering these different fields.”

The researchers suggest these more pronounced gaps among students with lower pre-college grades and test scores may be due to social norms and institutional environments that subtly favor a field’s historically dominant demographic group. Because the study is correlational, the authors are careful to note that it cannot establish that these norms directly cause these gaps—only that individual academic and demographic factors on their own do not fully account for the observed patterns.

The study is among the first to use nationally representative data to examine how LGBTQ+ students sort across the full range of college majors, not just STEM. LGBTQ+ students—regardless of sex—were underrepresented in male-majority fields like engineering, computer science, and business. LGBTQ+ males were also underrepresented in nursing and other health fields.

“These patterns suggest a kind of missed opportunity,” Cimpian notes. “If talented students are leaving—or never entering—majors where they would do well and contribute, partly based on factors unrelated to their preparation or even interest in these fields, that’s a loss for the students and for the fields themselves.”

This study is co-authored by Zachary T. McDermott at Abt Global, Jo R. King at Boston University, Nathaniel Woznicki at the NYU Department of Psychology, and Taek H. Kim at the Korean Educational Development Institute.

This research was supported by grants from the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education (R305B140037 and R305B200010).

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Journal

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-026-02510-8

What adults don't see about teen bullying

For two years, Boston University sociologist Sarah Miller went back to high school—but not as a student or a teacher. She was embedded in a rural Northeastern high school for a research project, observing students and gaining an inside look at how teenagers experience bullying in the social media age. 

That immersive research became the foundation for Miller’s first book, The Tolerance Generation: Growing Up Online in the Anti-Bullying Era (University of Chicago Press, 2026). It explores not only how bullying has evolved online, but also why many anti-bullying initiatives fail to address it.

The Brink spoke with Miller, a BU College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of sociology, about her research, what adults often misunderstand about teen bullying, and why social media can also be one of young people’s strongest tools for support.

 

The Brink: What is The Tolerance Generation about?

Miller: The one-liner is that it’s basically a book looking at how teens grapple with bullying in the digital age, but also how they’re grappling with the industry that’s designed to prevent bullying.

I went into this high school thinking I was going to be studying bullying, and what I found was a whole lot of teenagers doing a whole lot of work to show adults they were being nice and tolerant of each other. That made me realize I needed to start looking at anti-bullying initiatives and policies too.

Teens weren’t not engaging in bullying—they had learned how to do it in ways that weren’t registering to adults. If I wanted to understand teens’ experiences with bullying, I also had to understand their experiences with anti-bullying and social media. So, I observed students in classrooms, extracurricular activities, and social spaces, while also following many of them online. That gave me a unique ability to see what adults often don’t get to see.

How did you conduct your research?

I’m an ethnographer, which means I spend a lot of time in social spaces until I kind of fade into the background. I spent two years in this high school, going everywhere students went. I observed classrooms, hallways, library spaces, parking lots, sporting events, and extracurricular activities during school, after school, on evenings and weekends.

I also interviewed 100 students—about one-fifth of the student body—and observed the social media activities of 75 of them. I interviewed 27 school officials, including teachers, administrators, nurses, and guidance counselors, and analyzed anti-bullying policies, bullying reports, PTA meeting minutes, and materials from bullying prevention programs. There were a lot of different data sources. Looking at teens’ lives online and in person simultaneously is like being on the receiving end of a fire hose. There’s just so much coming at you all at once.

How has social media changed bullying—and how teens respond to it?

Adults are often looking for bullying that’s direct, targeted, and visible. That’s how most prevention policies define bullying. What I found was that by high school, teens had learned not to bully in those obvious ways. Instead, it became much more subtle. It was conversations happening online without tagging someone, subtweets, ghosting, spreading rumors, or inside jokes that everyone understood except the adults. When I asked teens about bullying, this was the kind of harm they described. Adults were looking for direct, targeted behavior, while teens were experiencing something much more subtle, systematic, and much harder to detect.

The students most likely to experience bullying were LGBTQ+ students, gender nonconforming students, students with disabilities, racially minoritized students, and students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. But what happened to them often wasn’t something adults recognized as bullying.

At the same time, teens understood that these conflicts were about inequality. They used social media to share information with one another about gender, sexuality, and race when adults refused to teach about those topics. They shared resources, stood up for one another, and created support systems that schools weren’t providing. As we see more restrictions on what educators can teach about diversity, social media is becoming one of the primary ways young people learn these things. That’s why it’s so vital. It’s important to protect youth access to it instead of simply blaming it for youth conflict.

Can you share an example of social media helping students support one another?

One student posted a homophobic tweet late one evening. Overnight, it spread across multiple platforms, and by the next morning, most students knew about it. 

Hundreds of students responded by saying some version of, “You can’t say that.” They changed profile pictures to rainbow flags, posted messages supporting LGBTQ+ classmates, and shared educational resources. One student with two mothers explained different ways LGBTQ+ families exist. Another shared materials from a science lesson about sexual diversity in nature to educate classmates. Many students coordinated to wear rainbow colors at school the next day to show support.

There were many queer students who weren’t out publicly, and afterward, several told me they felt safer coming out because they realized how many classmates supported them. Watching what students called a “Twitter war,” I saw more useful information about sexual diversity shared between teens than I had ever seen in that school. It provided support and education that adults weren’t providing.

Why do many anti-bullying initiatives fail?

We have really consistent national data over the past 15 years showing that bullying rates haven’t significantly declined, despite anti-bullying laws in all 50 states and widespread anti-bullying programming.

The problem isn’t just social media. It’s that these initiatives don’t address inequality—what bullying is actually about. The programs I observed were very good at telling students to be active bystanders, but they weren’t talking about the slut-shaming, racist, transphobic, or homophobic content that was often present in bullying practices, or the ways marginalized students were actually being targeted. Bullying online and in person aren’t separate issues—they’re part of the same continuum. You have to address what people are having conflict over, not just the medium they’re using.

What advice would you give educators about social media and bullying?

It’s not about preventing one student from targeting another. It’s about addressing what bullying is about. That means giving students consistent, supportive information about gender, race, sexuality, class, disability, and other forms of inequality from an early age.

When I asked 100 teenagers what schools should do differently, the overwhelming response was, “Actually talk about it with us.” Students also told me their administrators often put the most socially popular students in charge of anti-bullying initiatives, which just replicates existing inequalities.

Adults also need to understand why some students don’t feel safe asking for help. If you’re being harassed because of your identity and don’t see adults who try to understand your experience, or acknowledge that your identity exists in their classrooms, you’re much less likely to come forward. The book is called The Tolerance Generation because tolerance isn’t the absence of hostility—it just makes hostility quiet.

If readers could take one thing away from your book, what do you hope that is?

If it helps one kid in a school feel safer—but not just safer, feel loved, wanted, cared for—then it’s done its job. 

I watched the same institution make some students feel completely supported while making others feel totally alone. Adults often couldn’t see that difference. Teachers and administrators have so much on their plates—and I don’t blame them—but so many young people are falling through the cracks. I also hope adults recognize how brilliant and resourceful teenagers are. I watched them support each other, educate each other, and navigate incredibly difficult situations, both in person and online, because they had to. I want adults to value that—but I also want adults to recognize that teens shouldn’t have to carry that burden alone.

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Principal support helps teachers, but isn’t enough to stop turnover from classroom violence

 

Researchers find that while administrative backing lowers teacher stress, high levels of student violence weaken its protective impact

An ongoing national teacher shortage has created a sense of urgency to better understand why educators choose to stay in their positions — and why they leave.

Does support from administrative leadership help keep teachers in their jobs by making them feel safer and less stressed? And when teachers experience violence from students in their classrooms, does it weaken the impact of that protective relationship?

To find out, researchers analyzed 2020–21 national survey data on school violence from 5,550 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers. Conducted in collaboration with the American Psychological Association (APA)’s Task Force on Violence Against Teachers and School Personnel, the study was published recently in Educational Researcher.

Andrew Perry, a senior lecturer in educational studies at The Ohio State University, led the project alongside a research team that included co-author Eric Anderman, a professor of educational psychology and vice provost for regional campuses. They focused specifically on teachers’ intentions to transfer or quit, noting that about one-third of educators who express a desire to leave actually follow through within the year.

The researchers’ definition of support centers on transparency and communication — such as teachers feeling safe and comfortable talking to principals about matters of discipline — and a general belief that school administrators will back up teachers when a disciplinary incident occurs.

They found that while supportive leadership is widely recognized as protective against teacher burnout, student-directed violence is a critical tipping point. In a sample where 44% of educators reported experiencing student victimization and up to 80% faced verbal or threatening aggression, high levels of violence systematically weakened the protective benefits of principal support.

These results did not surprise Perry. “Our hypotheses were largely supported by the study. What we expected to find, we found,” he said. “Support is beneficial and necessary, but not sufficient. You have to have it, but in the face of victimization, support alone is not enough.”

Prior research shows that teachers who are on the front lines in our schools are most susceptible to non-physical violence from students — including verbal threats, obscene remarks and slurs. It’s “a demoralizing, sobering day-to-day reality,” Perry said. “If a teacher feels they are in an environment where this stuff is ignored, and they have nobody to turn to, it becomes toxic to their well-being, and they want to get away.”

Notably, elementary school teachers reported being victimized more often than their peers. Perry suspects this is due to elementary students having a lower capacity for self-regulation, making them more likely to lash out through hitting, biting, throwing objects or screaming.

“Teachers sign up for the job, but dealing with young children presenting these behaviors is challenging. School principals being present and showing support is a necessary component, but systematic strategies are required alongside it,” he said.

In a 2024 School Psychology paper co-authored by Perry, researchers evaluated strategies schools use to prevent violence and found that zero-tolerance policies and school hardening practices, like upgrading physical security and surveillance systems, do not work. “The most effective strategies are restorative, prevention-based approaches that build a climate of mutual respect, safety and integrity,” he said.

Beyond institutional policies, Perry emphasized that addressing teacher retention requires a fundamental shift in how schools and communities handle classroom safety.

“Violence against teachers is real, pervasive and impactful. When teachers are victimized, they want to leave. Teacher attrition leads to cascading consequences: schools lose experienced veteran teachers and replacing them is expensive and leads to inexperienced instruction,” Perry said.

Administrators can influence teachers’ perceptions of school safety, anxiety and stress, and retention intentions, the researchers noted, but administrator support needs to be combined with positive and clear discipline policies, and effective violence prevention initiatives that include all stakeholders and systemic improvements in school culture and climate.

“Teachers are human beings who need support not only from principals, but from parents and the public as well,” Perry said.

Autism diagnoses rising fastest among girls and women

 A new Saint Louis University study of nearly a decade of health records finds that the recent rise in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses is being driven largely by girls and women, who are being identified at significantly higher rates than in years past, often years later than boys and men.

The JAMA Network study, led by Erick Messias, M.D., Ph.D., chair and professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at Saint Louis University School of Medicine and a SLUCare physician at SSM Health, analyzed electronic health records for 171,134 patients across a large Midwestern healthcare system from 2016 to 2024. It is among the first to track sex-specific autism diagnosis trends across childhood, adolescence and adulthood within the same health system, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key takeaways include:

• These findings suggest that the reported increases in first autism spectrum disorder diagnoses post COVID-19 pandemic are due to increased recognition of females with autism spectrum disorder rather than a uniform population level increase.
• While new autism diagnoses among males held steady or declined from 2016 to 2024, new diagnoses among females rose sharply after 2020.
• The pattern held across every age group studied: children, adolescents and adults.
• Girls and women received an autism diagnosis an average of 3.4 years later than boys and men (age 15.7 vs. 12.3).
• Diagnoses of Asperger disorder, a category eliminated from diagnostic manuals in 2013, continued to fade from medical records as clinicians shifted to the broader autism spectrum disorder classification.

Curiosity, frustration and antipathy: How kids play with AI toys

 

Claims of “smart” toys go back decades. See Chatty Cathy and Furby. But generative artificial intelligence is increasing the capabilities of interactive toys. The company Curio, for instance, markets itself as a “magical workshop where toys come to life.” Its plush toys like Gabbo or one modeled on the Italian brainrot character Ballerina Cappuccina have onboard AI models that let them talk to kids, remember their conversations and personalize responses. But we know little about how such toys affect kids and even how kids play with them. 

Last summer, University of Washington researchers gathered eight kids on campus to explore such questions. The 6-11 year olds played with three Curio toys and reflected on the experience with KidsTeam UW, a group of researchers who work with kids to collaboratively design technologies. 

The kids initially were curious, asking introductory questions, such as “What is your name?” and exploring how the toys work. Do they react when a kid tickles their toes? They do not, which proved a disappointment. Some features delighted the kids, like when a toy said its favorite number was seven. But the toys frequently couldn’t respond well to more complex questions. It “didn’t listen to me like 26 million times,” one participant said. So they turned to antagonizing the toys, calling them “ugly” and “evil” and joking about throwing them in the ocean. 

The team presented its research June 25 at the Interaction Design and Children conference in Brighton, United Kingdom. 

“The juxtaposition of this plushie toy that also had signs of intelligence was both interesting and disturbing for the kids,” said co-lead author Aayushi Dangol, who completed this research as a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering and is currently a researcher at Foundry10. “If parents are considering buying these toys for children, they need to be aware that while the toys can be fun and relational and dynamic, they also come with possible harms. They’ll give wrong answers, or flatter the kids excessively, or could manipulate the kids into attachment.” 

The eight kids came in for two sessions to play with the toys and then complete a “comicboarding” activity, where they filled in comic panels imagining what might happen next if they kept playing with the toys. 

The study builds on KidsTeam’s long-running vein of research looking at how kids respond to tech — exploring what makes a technology “creepy” and how smart kids actually think AI is. 

“For as long as children have played with toys, they’ve imparted their imagination to the toy to make it move and talk,” said co-author Jason Yip, a UW associate professor in the Information School and director of KidsTeam UW. “Now the script has been flipped and the toy has this imitation of imagination. We've never lived through that before, and we don't know what questions children will ask or how long they’ll even want to play with these toys. So it’s really important to give them opportunities to discuss these technologies we’re handing down to them.”

One in five students used AI for emotional needs

 Young people leaning on AI chatbots for emotional support or personal advice are significantly more likely to struggle with serious emotional problems, feel isolated, and doubt that they truly matter to others, a new uOttawa study warns.

A new study examined responses from 39,761 students in grades 4 through 12 across four Ontario school boards. These students filled out surveys between May 2025 and March 2026 as part of the Ontario Health and Peer Relations Study.

Out of everyone surveyed, 8,408 students (about 21%) said they had turned to an AI chatbot for help with their feelings or for advice about relationships, whether with friends, family, or others. The tendency to seek emotional support from AI was higher among older students, as well as among racialized and gender-diverse youth compared to their white or male peers.

Kamilla Bonnesen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Behaviour Lab at the University of Ottawa, explains, “Of almost 40,000 students, those who leaned on AI for emotional support were much more likely to be struggling with clinical-level emotional issues, more loneliness, and a lower sense of mattering.”

Bonnesen also points out: “This doesn’t mean that AI is causing these struggles. Instead, using AI in this way might be a sign that a young person needs more human connection and support.”

Emotional use stands apart from schoolwork

The study found that students who used AI a lot for schoolwork were also more likely to use it for emotional reasons. Among students who sought emotional support from AI, 57.7% met the study’s criteria for serious emotional problems, compared with 29.2% of those who didn’t use AI in this way. These students also reported feeling lonelier and less valued by others.

Students completed anonymous, school-based surveys that covered their AI use, emotional health, loneliness, and sense of mattering. The researchers used advanced statistical models to account for the fact that students were grouped within schools and to handle any missing answers. Even after accounting for things like demographics, loneliness, mattering, and academic use of AI, using AI for emotional support was still linked to a 26% higher prevalence of clinical-level emotional difficulties.

Bonnesen co-conceptualized the study with Tracy Vaillancourt, Canada Research Chair in Youth Mental Health and Violence Prevention and Full Professor in the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education. Bonnesen also led the statistical analysis and wrote up the results, including the handling of missing data and interpreting what they found.

An invitation to reconnect

“As chatbots become part of young people’s daily lives, parents, educators and mental health professionals shouldn’t just ask if youth are using AI, but why,” says Professor Vaillancourt.

“When a student is turning to AI for emotional reasons, it’s a good opportunity to start an open, nonjudgmental conversation,” Vaillancourt adds. “It is a chance to reconnect a struggling student with meaningful human support.”

Since the study was cross-sectional, it shows associations but can’t prove whether distress drives youth to AI, or whether using AI might make distress worse. Still, the results suggest that turning to AI for emotional support is a sign worth paying attention to, even if it doesn’t prove cause and effect.

The study, titled “Affective Generative Artificial Intelligence Use and Youth Mental Health,” was published in JAMA Pediatrics. Authorship: Kamilla Bonnesen, PhD; Amanda Krygsman, PhD; Sarah Hobson, MA; Daphne Korczak, MD, MSc; Tracy Vaillancourt, PhD.

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Journal

JAMA Pediatrics

DOI

10.1001/jamapediatrics.2026.3904

Social media could help parents take actions to prevent teen vaping

  Parents are an important line of defense against teen vaping, yet many lack the knowledge and tools needed to recognize vaping products, understand their risks and prevent their children from using them. A new University of Oklahoma study will examine whether targeted social media messages can give parents the information they need to help prevent their children from vaping nicotine and cannabis.

The research, funded by a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, will be led by Katelyn Romm, Ph.D., and Erin Vogel, Ph.D., members of the TSET Health Promotion Research Center (HPRC) at OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center and assistant professors of pediatrics in the OU College of Medicine. The study will enroll 1,000 parent-adolescent pairs and will begin with surveys to assess what parents know about vaping.

“Data suggest that less than half of parents are aware of whether their kids have vaped and what kinds of substances their kids may be vaping,” Romm said. “Many parents don’t realize vapes contain nicotine or that they can contain cannabis. We know that parents can serve as a key prevention tool when it comes to cigarettes and alcohol, but it’s harder to detect when kids are vaping. Vapes are designed to look like highlighters, lip gloss and other items, and vaping devices continue to evolve.”

Once parental knowledge is assessed, researchers will examine whether parents with greater knowledge about vaping are more likely to use prevention strategies such as setting rules, monitoring their children’s behavior and talking with them about vaping. The research team will also examine whether those parenting behaviors are associated with lower rates of vaping among adolescents.

The researchers will then test whether targeted social media messages can increase parents’ knowledge and help them take action. About 300 parents who initially demonstrate lower levels of vaping knowledge will participate in a five-week online experiment in which they view Facebook messages about vaping devices, health risks, teen vaping and youth-targeted marketing. To create the messages, the research team is partnering with the national organization Parents Against Vaping.

Researchers will test whether exposure to those messages increases parents’ knowledge and use of prevention strategies and whether those changes are associated with lower levels of vaping among their children.

“Nearly 90% of parents report using social media, primarily Facebook, including for parenting advice and support,” Romm said. “That’s why we wanted to leverage social media to expose parents to messages that might help them identify vaping products and understand the harms associated with them. We want to boost parents’ confidence and effectiveness in being able to have conversations with their kids.”

If the messages are effective, the researchers hope to work with public health organizations to develop larger-scale social media campaigns that could influence parents across the country. Because social media campaigns can reach large audiences at relatively low cost, the approach could provide a practical way to support parents in preventing youth vaping.

Although nicotine vaping among youth has declined from its peak in 2019-2020, adolescents who continue to vape are reporting more frequent use.

“Young people who vape are reporting more days of use, and over a third who vape nicotine also report vaping cannabis or THC, which comes with additional health risks,” Romm said.

Vaping is associated with a number of health risks, including lung problems from substances that are not safe to inhale. Other risks include increased blood pressure and heart rate, susceptibility to addiction and an increased likelihood of using other tobacco products like cigarettes.

“The adolescent years are an important time to prevent nicotine and cannabis use from becoming established,” Romm said. “We want to give parents the information and tools they need to recognize vaping and help prevent its use with their children.”