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Screen Time Expert Calls Mea Culpa, Revises Recommendations Post Pandemic
New York Times
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7/30/20
“Before the pandemic, I was a parenting expert… I told worried parents about the nine signs of tech overuse, like ditching sleep for screens. I advised them to write a “family media contract” and trust, but verify, their tweens’ doings online… Now, like Socrates, I know better. I know that I know nothing… I have never, ever, spent this much time with my children, or anyone’s children, as I have over the past four months during shelter-in-place orders. Nor have I contemplated working full time, while my husband also works full time, without sufficient child care… I want to take this moment to apologize to anyone who faced similar constraints before the pandemic and felt judged or shamed by my, or anyone’s, implication that they weren’t good parents because they weren’t successfully enforcing a “healthy balance” with screens, either for themselves or their children… But on reflection, some of the ideas and principles I used to intone so confidently have actually shown their mettle in new ways in this new world. I offer them to you now, humbly. I speak softly and do not carry a mic.”
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“Learning Engineering” — What Is It? Should We Pay Attention?
EdSurge
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6/9/20
“It’s not clear how much more efficient teaching can be, and how much faster people can achieve mastery of skills and knowledge. But as Herbert Simon challenged more than 50 years ago, more educators could at least be open to learning from the data and evidence that is theirs for the taking just about every time they interact.”
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Deep, Neuroscience-Based Look At Meaning-Making As The Heart Of Effective Pedagogy
ASCD
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5/1/20
“The way individuals make meaning is cognitive and emotional at once—like a good story. And deep, meaningful thinking actually taps into basic survival processes, in essence making the thinker feel more alive, like their work is personal, and like what they think and do matters. No wonder adolescents can become so inspired and motivated when their work feels connected to big, life-relevant ideas!”
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Excellent, Short Reflection On How Cognitive Science Can Help Teachers
SchoolsWeek
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1/20/20
“Cognitive science does not provide a recipe for what teachers should do, but rather should inform their repertoire of approaches. And of course, it forms only one part of teachers’ extensive knowledge and expertise.”
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Sleep Helps Learning. Even More: Consistent Sleep Helps Learning
Science News for Students
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1/3/20
“Sleep length, quality and consistency together accounted for 24.4 percent of the difference among the students’ test grades. And these factors appeared especially important for boys. Grossman’s team is not sure why. But boys who didn’t get enough sleep or regular sleep were likely to do worse on an exam than were girls who had similar sleep patterns.”
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What Is Human Thinking Were A New Technology? How Would We Use It?
Behavioral Scientist
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9/30/19
“Recognition of the powerful pattern matching ability of humans is growing. As a result, humans are increasingly being deployed to make decisions that affect the well-being of other humans. We are starting to see the use of human decision makers in courts, in university admissions offices, in loan application departments, and in recruitment. Soon humans will be the primary gateway to many core services.”
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Your Mindset About Stress Matters, And Can Change Your Health
NPR
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8/2/19
“Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here, the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress. Your heart might be pounding. You might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure… Participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance - well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident. But the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed.”
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The Neuroscience Of How Collaboration Leads To Creativity (Via Music)
Nautilus
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7/25/19
“The more tightly the social parts of our brain are connected, the more possible it is that performance will be more moving, more expressive… Brains are social, people are social, and when they’re connected, that has the best effect for creativity.”
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Five Learning My Debunked.. Including: Using Examples?
Middle Web
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6/30/19
“Using examples in our teaching does not help students generalize or make lessons more interesting. In fact, the research shows that when we offer examples students tend to focus on the more trivial aspects of the example – the authors call these the “seductive details” – rather than the important content we had in mind. Similarly, when we offer entertaining examples to get students excited about a topic, it can have a diminishing effect as attention is pulled from the actual learning target.”
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Solvitur Ambulando: It Is Solved By Walking.
Quartz
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5/25/19
“Walking is a way to be more present, ease anxiety, spark creativity, increase productivity, and detox from digital overload (that is, if you don’t walk with your face in your phone).”
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Drawing Helps Students Process And Retain Learning
Edutopia
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3/14/19
"The benefits of drawing were not dependent on the students’ level of artistic talent, suggesting that this strategy may work for all students, not just ones who are able to draw well. Across a total of eight experiments, the researchers confirmed drawing to be a “reliable, replicable means of boosting performance”—it provided a significant boost to students’ ability to remember what they were learning.”
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“I Moved A Drone With My Mind. Soon Your Students Will Too.”
Brookings
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3/8/19
"Take a deep breath and try again,” said the young man, encouraging me in true Yoda fashion. “UP, UP, UP,” I thought, fixing my mind on the drove. And, amazingly, up it went. Hovering here and there and lurching around a bit, but most certainly skyward. After 30 seconds of amazing drone control, I’d had enough. I stopped repeating “up” but the drone kept flying. “Close your eyes” said the young man. I did and the drone immediately fell to the table. Afterward, one thing struck me. The future belongs not just to those who can write algorithms but to those who can control their thoughts.”
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More On The Science Of Learning To Read
KQED
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1/2/19
"In 2015, before the new training began, more than half of the kindergartners in the district tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure. At the end of the 2018 school year, after the science-based training, 84 percent of kindergartners met or exceeded the benchmark score. At three schools, it was 100 percent.”
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A Synthesis Of Research From The Learning Sciences
Digital Promise
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12/13/18
“Digital Promise and the Institute for Applied Neuroscience have teamed up to synthesize findings from the growing field of learning sciences research into 10 key insights about how people learn, along with suggestions for how to apply this information to classroom practice.”
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Understanding Motivation: Down To The Neurochemical Detail
Harvard Center for the Developing Child
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12/1/18
“This Working Paper from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child explains the science behind motivation–the “wanting” system and the “liking” system–as well as how those systems develop, and how that development can be disrupted. It also dives into the implications of the science for parents, caregivers, and teachers, as well as policy and public systems.”
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A Detailed, Thorough, Reliable Primer On Cognitive Science Research
Transcend Education
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11/1/18
“The fields of neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science have unearthed important insights and established agreed-upon models that help explain how learning happens and inform the design of impactful learning environments. Our Designing for Learning resources aim to share these insights and models in a way that supports whole-school design.”
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Willingham Debunks Learning Styles. (Again.) But This Is Real:
New York Times
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10/4/18
"Instead of trying to transform a task to match your style, transform your thinking to match the task. The best strategy for a task is the best strategy, irrespective of what you believe your learning style is.”
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Why We Should All Be Drawing
Quartz
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9/15/18
“We have misfiled the significance of drawing because we see it as a professional skill instead of a personal capacity… This essential confusion has stunted our understanding of drawing and kept it from being seen as a tool for learning above all else… Drawing shouldn’t be about performance, but about process. It’s not just for the “artists,” or even the weekend hobbyists. Think of it as a way of observing the world and learning, something that can be done anytime, like taking notes, jotting down a thought, or sending a text.”
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How Our Expectations For Students Influence Their Success [video]
YouTube/NPR
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9/11/18
“The expectations that the experimenters had in their head actually translated into a whole set of tiny behavior changes… You may be standing farther away from someone you have lower expectations for. You may not be making as much eye contact, and it's not something you can put your finger on.”
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A Really Good Summary Of The Research Regarding Note-Taking
Cult of Pedagogy
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9/9/18
"So I’ve combed through about three decades’ worth of research, and I’m going to tell you what it says about best practices in note-taking. Although this is not an exhaustive summary, it hits on some of the most frequently debated questions on the subject.”
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“Science Of Adolescent Learning”
Alliance for Excellent Education
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8/1/18
“The report recommends ways education practitioners and policymakers can support adolescent learning for all students, including historically underserved populations.”
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Best Article Yet On The Science Of Sleep
National Geographic
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8/1/18
“Our brains aren’t less active when we sleep, as was long thought, just differently active… In sleep labs, when people have been introduced to certain new tasks, mental or physical, their spindle frequency increases that night. The more spindles they have, it seems, the better they perform the task the next day.”
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Here Are Some Learning-Science Proven Practices You’re Already Using
EdSurge
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7/24/18
“Approaches that encourage students to use what they know, revisit it over time, mix it up and learn about their own learning are core elements in many current edtech tools… A century of scientific research demonstrates that these features don’t simply increase engagement—they also improve learning, higher order thinking and transfer of knowledge.”
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Daniel Willingham Affirms, Updates The Argument Against Learning Styles
AFT
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6/11/18
“Research has confirmed the basic summary I offered in 2005; using learning-styles theories in the classroom does not bring an advantage to students. But there is one new twist. Researchers have long known that people claim to have learning preferences… THere’s increasing evidence that people act on those beliefs; if given a chance, the visualizer will think in pictures rather than words. But doing so confers no cognitive advantage.”
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"Emotions Are The Rudder That Steers Thinking”
ASCD
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6/1/18
“Cognition happens because of emotion. There's really no such thing as a thought that doesn't have an emotion attached to it or that doesn't have an emotion that follows it. When we take in the world around us, we have an emotional reaction to that appraisal. That emotional reaction changes the way we think in the next moment and cumulatively, over time.”
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Another Good Summary Of The Evidence Against Learning Styles
Lifehacker
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4/12/18
"Instead of teaching to learning styles, create lessons by asking, “How can I best help students grasp the meaning of the material?” That means if you want kids to understand what a French accent sounds like, you’d have them listen to a recording. If you’re trying to have them understand maps, you’d give them an actual map and have the practice getting from Point A to B.”
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AI Won’t Ever Learn Like People: A Deep Dive Into Early Childhood
Guardian
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4/3/18
“These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life.”
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On the Psychological Impact Of Active Shooter Drills
Atlantic
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2/28/18
"A sense of safety and security in childhood is integrally tied to mental and physical health later in life—as well as emotional wellbeing, and the formation of the coping mechanisms that allow a person to deal with later adversity in ways that do not involve killing. It is this sense that can be undermined sometimes even by the best of intentions.”
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A Fantastic Conversation About How Language (And Thought) Works
New York Review of Books
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12/27/17
"When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them.”
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Having ‘Intense Interests’ Fuels Cognitive Growth (In Elementary School)
CNN
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12/12/17
"A 2008 study found that sustained intense interests, particularly in a conceptual domain like dinosaurs, can help children develop increased knowledge and persistence, a better attention span, and deeper information-processing skills.”
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Why Teaching Content Is Essential (Via The Mechanics Of Reading)
New York Times
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11/25/17
"Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge. That suggests three significant changes in schooling… Third, the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design.”
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Is Numeracy Biological Or Cultural?
Aeon
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10/26/17
"What seems innate and shared between humans and other animals is not this sense that the differences between 2 and 3 and between 152 and 153 are equivalent (a notion central to the concept of number) but, rather, a distinction based on relative difference, which relates to the ratio of the two quantities. It seems we never lose that instinctive basis of comparison.”
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On Social Psychology, Replicability, And Its Toll On People
New York Times
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10/18/17
"After 2012, questions of methodology started dominating every social-psychology conference, as did the topic of replications. Across disciplines, a basic scientific principle is that multiple teams should independently verify a result before it is accepted as true. But for the majority of social-psychology results, even the most influential ones, this hadn’t happened… in the years after that Society of Personality and Social Psychology conference, a sense of urgency propelled a generation of researchers, most of them under 40, to re-examine the work of other, more established researchers. And politeness was no longer a priority.”
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A Deep Dive Into Sleep Science. Go To Bed, Everyone.
Guardian
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9/24/17
"To take just one example, adults aged 45 years or older who sleep less than six hours a night are 200% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven or eight hours a night.”
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Distinguishing Process Goals (i.e. Habits) And Outcome Goals
Farnam Street
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6/7/17
"We want to learn a new language. We could decide we want to be fluent in 6 months (goal), or we could commit to 30-minutes of practice each day (habit). We want to read more books. We could set the goal to read 50 books by the end of the year, or we could decide to always carry one (habit). We want to spend more time with family. We could plan to spend 7 hours a week with family (goal), or we could choose to eat dinner with them each night (habit).”
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The Science Of How Space Affects Thinking, Creativity
Medium
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6/2/17
"Our mental space stands in direct proportion to our perception of physical space.”
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Why Memorizing (And Not Googling) Is Necessary: Speed, Context
New York Times
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5/19/17
"Kids who look up the quadratic equation may end up like the child who looked up “meticulous”; they have a definition, but they don’t have the background knowledge to use it correctly. Students should learn not only the formula but also why it works and how it connects to other math content. That’s how contextual knowledge develops in the brain, and that’s why vocabulary instruction seldom consists of simple memorization of definitions — students are asked to use the words in a variety of sentences. The same should be true of more advanced concepts and for the same reason.”
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Deliberate Practice: Anders Ericsson, Critics, Champions, & Examples
Quartz
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3/2/17
"Deliberate practice involves the pursuit of personal improvement via well-defined, specific goals and targeted areas of expertise. It requires a teacher or coach who has demonstrated an ability to help others improve the desired area of expertise—say chess, ballet, or music—and who can give continuous feedback. It also requires constantly practicing outside of one’s comfort zone.”
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Look, We All Really Need To Sleep More
Time
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2/16/17
"Sleep deprivation is so strongly linked to disease and premature death. One recent study even showed that sleep deprivation in mice can cause death faster than starvation can.”
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Maybe Knowledge Is More Important Than Skill After All (Via Reading)
ASCD
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2/1/17
"Recent research shows that reading comprehension, deep thinking, and even creativity all rely heavily on prior knowledge. Although you can find a thousand articles claiming that knowledge is essentially irrelevant nowadays—that mere facts are not worth teaching in the age of Google, when anyone can look up anything at any time—in fact, cognitive scientists now mostly believe that this apparently tidy logic is wrong”
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Meditation On Reclaiming One’s Attention From Mobile Technology
BackChannel
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1/13/17
"There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between a day that begins with a little exercise, a book, meditation, a good meal, a thoughtful walk, and the start of a day that begins with a smartphone in bed.”
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A Summary Of The Research On Sleep, School Start Time, And Success
Kappan
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1/1/17
"As we started our yearlong study, the evidence began piling up. Our research team found amazing changes were happening. Students were now awake the first hour of class, the principal reported fewer disciplinary incidents in the halls and lunchroom, and students reported less depression and feelings of greater efficacy. Over 92% of the parents said their kids were “easier to live with.””
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Willingham Reviews Anders Ericsson’s Book On Practice And Expertise
Education Next
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12/1/16
"In Ericsson’s formulation, deliberate practice has several components: evaluating what needs improvement, selecting one small aspect of the skill to work on, developing a strategy, and then evaluating the results of the revised performance… The mere distinction between experience and deliberate practice can help guide educators in imparting certain skills. For example, many schools want students to work well with others, so they assign group projects. But working in a group is simply experience. If you want students to become better group members, they need to practice being a group member. They must be explicitly taught how to work in groups, and that’s something few schools do.”
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What Do People With Strong Willpower and Self-Control Do?
Vox
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11/24/16
"The students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. It was the students who experienced fewer temptations overall who were more successful when the researchers checked back in at the end of the semester. What’s more, the people who exercised more effortful self-control also reported feeling more depleted. So not only were they not meeting their goals, they were also exhausted from trying.”
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Maybe We’ve Gotten Willpower Wrong; Maybe It Doesn’t Deplete
Harvard Business Review
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11/23/16
"Dweck concluded that signs of ego depletion were observed only in test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource. Those participants who did not see willpower as finite did not show signs of ego depletion… Michael Inzlicht… principal investigator at the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience, believes willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don’t “run out” of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows based on what’s happening to us and how we feel. Viewing willpower through this lens has profound implications.”
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Why Teens Learn Faster Than Adults
Pacific Standard
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10/4/16
“Teens… mastered the butterfly game a bit faster than adults—that is, their predictions improved faster than young adults’—apparently because they were less quick to solidify their beliefs about the butterfly’s habits. Participants also had better memories for a series of images they saw after correct choices as opposed to incorrect choices, and that effect was stronger in teens than young adults.”
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A Distillation Of 170+ Cognitive Biases And Rules
Better Humans
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9/1/16
"Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — usually to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting biases) that they introduce.”
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Exercise Is A “Keystone Habit” For Good Living
New York Magazine
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7/22/16
“[Exercise] makes people more resilient not only to physical stress, but also to emotional and cognitive stress. It is for these reasons that scientists have written that “exercise is associated with emotional resilience to acute stress in healthy adults” and that exercise has been called a keystone habit, or an activity that leads to positive changes in other areas of life.”
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The Cultural, Cognitive Benefits Of Silence
Nautilus
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7/7/16
"As it turned out, even though all the sounds had short-term neurological effects, not one of them had a lasting impact. Yet to her great surprise, Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory, involving the senses. This was deeply puzzling: The total absence of input was having a more pronounced effect than any sort of input tested.”
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3 Ways To Turn Bad Stress Into Good Stress
KQED
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2/24/16
"McGonigal defines stress as “what arises in your body, in your brain and in your community when something you care about is at stake.” She acknowledges that stress can make some people feel paralyzed and might lead them to underperform. She calls that reaction a “threat response” to stress, but says if educators can help students to have a “challenge response” to stress, which includes the realization that they have the resources to handle the situation, the stress can actually energize students to do better.”
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Surprise: Maybe Feedback Is Better When It’s Delayed…!
EdSurge
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2/16/16
"Recent studies are breathing new life into delayed feedback. One such study looks at an undergraduate engineering course at University of Texas, El Paso. Students in the course submitted a weekly homework assignment and either received feedback immediately, or a week later. Several weeks later all students completed a similar problem on the exam. The students who received delayed feedback scored higher on the exam than those who received immediate feedback.”
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Stress Is Fear, And Relationships Make It Go Away
Fast Company
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2/8/16
"The point is that relationships among employees can help disperse fear across an organization, rather than forcing individuals to carry those burdens alone. The encouragement and goodwill alone that those connections generate can improve employees' mental, emotional, and even physical health. What's more, the know-how and resources that come from associating with capable people help teams develop collaborative skills for dealing with fear-inducing episodes.”
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Distractions And The Dangers Of Pseudo-Depth
Cal Newport
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12/12/15
"Switching your attention — even if only for a minute or two — can significantly impede your cognitive function for a long time to follow. More bluntly: context switches gunk up your brain. This effect has been validated from many angles in academic psychology and related fields.”
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On Addiction To Digital Distraction
New York Times
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11/29/15
"The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.”
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A Detailed, Referenced Synopsis Of The Cognitive Science of Learning
Deans for Impact
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10/12/15
"The purpose of [this document] is to summarize the existing research from cognitive science related to how students learn, and connect this research to its practical implications for teaching and learning. This document is intended to serve as a resource to teacher-educators, new teachers, and anyone in the education profession who is interested in our best scientific understanding of how learning takes place. This document identifies six key questions about learning that should be relevant to nearly every educator. Deans for Impact believes that, as part of their preparation, every teacher-candidate should grapple with — and be able to answer — the questions in The Science of Learning.”
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Stress, Relationships, And Health: How They Can Feed Each Other
Brain Pickings
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10/7/15
"Thus a person, sitting by herself in a room, may appear to others to be quite alone; but that person, if embedded, will have a world of relationships mapped inside her mind — a map that will lead to those who can be called on for nurture and support in time of need. But others, the Gatsbys among us, might be among a crowd of dozens and yet feel very much alone.”
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APA Provides 20 Research-Backed Principles Of Learning
American Psychological Association
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9/1/15
"The first eight principles relate to cognition and learning and address the question: How do students think and learn? The next four (9–12) discuss the question What motivates students? The following three (13–15) pertain to the social context and emotional dimensions that affect learning and focus on the question: Why are social context, interpersonal relationships, and emotional well-being important to student learning? The next two principles (16–17) relate to how context can affect learning and address the question: How can the classroom best be managed? Finally, the last three principles (18–20) examine the question: How can teachers assess student progress?”
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A Cognitive Argument For Focusing On Both Content And Skills
Atlantic
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8/12/15
"If the benefit of schooling comes from the content learned, then it’s important to get a better understanding of what content will be most valuable to students later on in their lives. The answers may seem intuitive, but they’re also subjective and complex. A student may not use plane geometry, solid geometry, or trigonometry, but studying them may improve her ability to mentally visualize spatial relationships among objects, and that may prove useful for decades in a variety of tasks.”
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I Gave A TEDx Talk: Why Pausing Makes Us More Of Who We Are
TEDx / YouTube
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4/20/15
“The momentary pause in Beethoven’s fifth, periods of prolonged sleep, the wait time after a question: these are moments when we gather up the past [stimulus] and create a future [response] that belongs more to our imagination and critical thought and less to our instinct. Moments of pause bring creative insight, analytical acuity, vision.”
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The Importance of Movement to Learning
KQED
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3/26/15
"Scholarly study goes back a long time in history, but in terms of human evolution, many of the academic skills now required for successful functioning in the world are fairly new to the human brain. As neuroscientists investigate how humans learn, they often find that newer skills and aptitudes are mapped onto areas of the brain that also control basic body functions. Increasingly, this work is helping to illuminate neurological connections between the human body, its environment and the process of learning.”
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Attention, Technology, and Fear Of Missing Out
Pacific Standard
-
1/29/15
"Reading a book is like carrying on a prolonged conversation with one individual writer, but the temptation on the other side of the screen is an ongoing conversation with everyone at once, as if all of your friends were hanging out in the same room in which you’re trying to peacefully read the latest dense Great American Novel.”
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Playing Music Causes (Not Correlates With) Cognitive Improvement
NPR
-
11/20/14
“Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices… Several randomized studies of participants, who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at the start, found that those who were exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others.”
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Does ADHD Require A Fix? A New Take on Natural Solutions
New York Times
-
10/31/14
“From the standpoint of teachers, parents and the world at large, the problem with people with A.D.H.D. looks like a lack of focus and attention and impulsive behavior. But if you have the “illness,” the real problem is that, to your brain, the world that you live in essentially feels not very interesting.”
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The Way To Teach Self-Control (Grit) Is Through Emotions
Pacific Standard
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9/15/14
“Cultivate the right emotions, the prosocial ones, in daily life. These emotions— gratitude, compassion, authentic pride, and even guilt—work from the bottom up, without requiring cognitive effort on our part, to shape decisions that favor the long-term.”
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Walking (Especially In Nature) Help Us Think
New Yorker
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9/3/14
"The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion.”
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How Technology in Schools Interacts with our Cognitive Profiles
Brilliant Blog
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8/20/14
"Although we tend to think and talk about “technology” and “media” as undifferentiated monoliths, Greenfield’s work reminds us that each medium has its strengths and weaknesses in conveying information. Each medium, in turn, exercises and develops different faculties in us, its users."
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There’s Good Stress and Bad Stress: Here’s the Difference
Stanford Magazine
-
5/1/14
“...the key to maximizing the benefits of stress while minimizing any negative effects is interspersing "regular hits" of acute stress with periods of low or no stress… he advises harnessing the daily aggravations that life already throws at you. And exercising more, but maybe not for the reason you think.”
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Struggling Is Better For Learning Than Scaffolded Understanding
Brilliant Blog
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2/24/14
“Kapur has identified three conditions that promote a beneficial struggle. First, choose problems to work on that ‘challenge but do not frustrate.’ Second, provide learners with opportunities to explain and elaborate on what they’re doing. Third, give learners the chance to compare and contrast good and bad solutions.”
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“Life Stress Impairs Self-Control In Early Adolescence”
Frontiers In Psychology
-
1/11/13
“In three prospective, longitudinal studies, negative life events reported by the mother (in Study 1) or child (in Studies 2 and 3) predicted rank-order decreases in self-control over time.”
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Why Storytelling Has Such A Powerful Effect On Our Brain
Lifehacker
-
12/5/12
“If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that's it, nothing else happens. When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too. If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up. If it's about motion, our motor cortex gets active.”
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Advice On Deliberate Practice, From A Performance Pianist
Cal Newport
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12/23/11
“Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy. “The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.”