Iodized salt benefits children school readiness: preliminary results from a cluster randomized trial in Ethiopia (635.2)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Iodine deficiency is thought to contribute to delayed mental development. The effectiveness of iodized salt programs in reducing this delay has not been studied in children 6 years and under. Using a randomized cluster design, 1835 children 54 to 60 mo old were sampled from 60 villages in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. The iodized salt and control groups were comparable on all baseline variables, including maternal schooling (89.6% had none) and child dietary diversity (mean: 2.2 out of 7 food categories). Once national production of iodized salt began, the project facilitated early delivery to intervention village marketplaces; iodized salt arrived to control village marketplaces approximately 6 months later. The same children (92% of the original sample) were re‐assessed at 69 to 78 mo of age. Intervention group children had a significantly higher score on the 25‐item school readiness test (mean: 8.3 vs 7.8, respectively, p<0.05). No significant differences were found on the two Wechsler tests of reasoning, analyzing raw or standardized scores (0‐19); standardized mean values were very low: Matrix Reasoning (4.0) and Similarities (5.5). In conclusion, along with the exposure to iodized salt, the school readiness skills of 5‐ and 6‐year‐old children benefited possibly because they had exposure to older siblings' literacy and math skills but not to cognitive and verbal reasoning. Grant Funding Source : Supported by Micronutrient Initiative, Canada
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".