Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Many people can’t express their intelligence in group discussions, concludes a Virginia Tech study.
If we think others in a group are smarter, we may become dumber, temporarily losing both our problem-solving ability and what the researchers call our “expression of IQ.”
Women and people with higher IQs are the most likely to clam up, according to the report.
I wonder if this holds true for students in middle and high school, when kids are conscious of their status within a group.
Intellectually disabled college students and their instructors are set up to fail, writes a professor at a commuter college. Yet nobody wants to talk about what to do when would-be students are unable to do college work.
Schools are rejecting self-esteem boosting, reports the Washington Post. It turns out that pumping up students’ self-esteem through easy, unearned praise doesn’t improve their achievement.
As schools ratchet up academic standards for all students, new buzzwords are “persistence,” “risk-taking” and “resilience” — each implying more sweat and strain than fuzzy, warm feelings.
“We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter,” Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said. “That has backfired.”
. . . children praised for trying hard or taking risks tend to enjoy challenges and find greater success. Children also perform better in the long term when they believe that their intellect is not a birthright but something that grows and develops as they learn new things.
Brain imaging shows “connections between nerve cells in the cortex multiply and grow stronger as people learn and practice new skills.” Montgomery County (Maryland) schools now teach children that they’re developing their brains when they struggle to learn something new. Teachers also try to provide specific feedback on how students can improve instead of a vague “Good job!”
Praise should be used to encourage students to take risks and learn from failure, Dweck said. “Does the teacher say: ‘Who’s having a fantastic struggle? Show me your struggle.’ That is something that should be rewarded.”
People are outsourcing memory to the Internet, concludes a new study, Google Effects on Memory, published in Science.
Harvard students were asked to type 40 pieces of trivia, such as “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain,” into computers. Those told the information would be erased remembered more than those told it would be saved.
“No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can ‘Google’ the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue,” the authors write.
Columbia undergrads remembered where they stored their information better than they were able to recall the information itself.
The Internet has become our primary external storage system, researcher Betsy Sparrow says. “Human memory is adapting to new communications technology.”
Education theorists disagree on whether memory matters, writes Forbes’ columnist Olga Khazan.
Author Don Tapscott advocated the no-memorization agenda back in 2008, saying that rote learning should be phased out of schools because, “teachers are no longer the fountains of knowledge; the Internet is.” Instead, he and others argue that children should be taught to better parse the constant feed of information they’re bombarded with. (He’s somewhat late to the game, however, since the popularity of memorization has been declining in schools since the early 1980s – nearly a decade before most kids would be getting on the Internet at home.)
. . . Of course, for every education reformer there is an equal and opposite education reformer. Recently, there have been some fairly convincing arguments coming from the other side – that kids need more memorization training so that society can become more innately knowledgeable, not less.
William Klemm, a neuroscience professor at Texas A&M University, has written several screeds decrying teaching methods that leave out a critical component of intelligence: memory. “Creativity comes from a mind that knows, and remembers, a lot,” he says, arguing that memorization both improves thinking and arms us with the facts to defend our arguments.
The more you know, the easier it is to seek out new information, evaluate it and do something with it. And remember it.
Boys will be boys, the saying goes. Sugar and spice and everything nice…
Perhaps not, say experts.
With male-dominated fields like construction now stagnant, however, experts argue that the situation may be reversed: American schools don’t do enough to encourage boys to explore careers in traditionally female-dominated fields, such as health care and education.
* * * *
“My perception over the last 40 years is we’ve provided a lot of support and encouragement for girls to try and take on new things,” [Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar who studies male economic and academic achievement at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education,] said, “but I’ve also seen no special effort to encourage boys to take on different subjects.”
“I’ve tried to say to boys, ‘If you want a good job, think about becoming a nurse’ … but nobody ever introduces boys to entering these traditionally female occupations, and someone needs to do that,” Mr. Mortenson said.
I’m concerned that what’s driving this isn’t any real lack of opportunity for boys, but rather just the empirical lack of male nurses. In other words, I suspect that “experts” think the lack of male teachers and nurses is because (and only because) boys are discouraged somehow from taking these jobs. ( They probably are discouraged from teaching by the widespread view of every man as a potential child molester, but that’s another topic.)
But what if they aren’t discouraged, have the opportunity, and simply don’t want to do those jobs?
My suspicion is that experts would find such an explanation unsatisfying. [Read more...]
“A human mind is a wandering mind” — 47 percent of people aren’t thinking about what they’re doing, according to a new study — and “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” John Tierney writes in the New York Times:
Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness, psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.
The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were enjoying it until the iPhone interrupted.
. . . When asked their thoughts, the people in flagrante were models of concentration: only 10 percent of the time did their thoughts stray from their endeavors. But when people were doing anything else, their minds wandered at least 30 percent of the time, and as much as 65 percent of the time (recorded during moments of personal grooming, clearly a less than scintillating enterprise).
People who focused on what they were doing were happier than those thinking about something else, regardless of what they were doing. A wandering mind causes unhappiness, not the other way around, the psychologists concluded. “We see evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering,” (Matthew) Killingsworth said.
What psychologists call “flow” — immersing your mind fully in activity — has long been advocated by nonpsychologists. “Life is not long,” Samuel Johnson said, “and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.” Henry Ford was more blunt: “Idleness warps the mind.” The iPhone results jibe nicely with one of the favorite sayings of William F. Buckley Jr.: “Industry is the enemy of melancholy.”
Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham speculates on students with wandering minds.
The fact that mind wandering seems “natural” does not, of course, make it desirable or acceptable.
Teachers still need to keep kids’ minds on task. As every teacher knows, an effective way to do that is for something in the class to change: if kids have been listening to the teacher, have students discuss something in groups. If they’ve been completing a written assignment, have them watch a video.
Whenever the teacher switches gears, it brings all the wandering minds back to the teacher, ready for a fresh try.
If adults can’t pay attention to their own lives — except during intercourse — imagine how hard it is to get juvenile minds to pay attention in class, Willingham writes.
Shocking news: Electrical brain stimulation improves math skills for up to six months, claims a study published in Current Biology. Researchers, who used a weak electrical current, hope to aid people with moderate to severe numerical disabilities — as many as 20 percent of the population — as well as stroke victims.
“I am certainly not advising people to go around giving themselves electric shocks, but we are extremely excited by the potential of our findings,” said Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford. “Electrical stimulation will most likely not turn you into Albert Einstein, but if we’re successful, it might be able to help some people to cope better with maths.”
Turn on the juice and Johnny can find the lowest common denominator? Here’s hoping it pans out.
Writing by hand is good for the brain, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.
. . . Some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.
“New software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate” handwriting.
I fill in crossword puzzles by hand, so maybe I’m getting an anti-Alzheimer’s twofer.
Motherhood also leads to brain growth, a study finds. New moms who gush the most about their baby’s wonderfulness show the most growth in brain cells.
Creativity isn’t a right-brain function. Logic isn’t a left-brain function. Left/right brain theory is bunk, writes cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham on The Answer Sheet.
In the usual mythology, the left hemisphere of the brain is logical, ordered, and analytic, and it supports reading, speech, math, and reasoning. The right hemisphere is more oriented towards feelings and emotions, spatial perception, and the arts, and is said to be more creative.
We have known for at least 30 years that this characterization is incorrect.
It takes a whole brain to read or listen to music or think sequentially or do just about anything. Educators who try to teach to one side of the brain or the other are wasting their time, Willingham writes.
Can Exercise Make Kids Smarter? Several recent experiments link aerobic exercise with brain development, reports the New York Times.
In a University of Illinois experiment involving nine- and 10-year-old students, the fittest children, as measured by a treadmill test, performed best on cognitive challenges; MRIs showed “significantly larger basal ganglia, a key part of the brain that aids in maintaining attention and executive control.”
Since both groups of children had similar socioeconomic backgrounds, body mass index and other variables, the researchers concluded that being fit had enlarged that portion of their brains.
A second Illinois study focused on complex memory, which is associated with activity in the hippocampus. The fittest children had larger hippocampi than the least-fit children.
A Swedish study of more than a million 18-year-old boys who joined the army, found “better fitness was correlated with higher I.Q.’s, even among identical twins,” the Times reports.
The fitter the twin, the higher his I.Q. The fittest of them were also more likely to go on to lucrative careers than the least fit . . . There’s no evidence that exercise leads to a higher I.Q., but the researchers suspect that aerobic exercise, not strength training, produces specific growth factors and proteins that stimulate the brain, said Georg Kuhn, a professor at the University of Gothenburg and the senior author of the study.
Aerobic endurance, not muscular strength, was linked to a livelier brain.
According to a new UI study, not yet published, Wii Fit will not make us smart. Twenty minutes of running on a treadmill improved test scores immediately afterward; 20 minutes of “playing sports-style video games at a similar intensity” did not.
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