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	<title>Ideas &#187; Annie Murphy Paul &#124; TIME.com</title>
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	<description>Essential Insights. Great Debates. Informed Opinions.</description>
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		<title>Ideas &#187; Annie Murphy Paul &#124; TIME.com</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com</link>
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		<title>How to Perform in a Clutch</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/05/08/how-to-perform-in-a-clutch/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/05/08/how-to-perform-in-a-clutch/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2013 14:19:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Health & Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[affirmation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[self-affirmation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[stress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[values]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[willpower]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=32091</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Life is full of vulnerable moments — occasions when we feel off-balance, unsure of ourselves and our abilities — and in these moments we are likely to perform less well than we might. Social psychologists have developed a simple activity, called a values affirmation, that can intervene in such situations to restore our sense of equilibrium. Here&#8217;s how it works: Make a list of the values that matter most to you, or for 10 minutes, write in-depth about a value that is central to your life. Perhaps it&#8217;s your close relationship with your family, or your skill with a camera or in the kitchen, or your strong religious faith. What matters is that it&#8217;s your value, your identity. (MORE: How Powerful People Think) It&#8217;s a quick and simple exercise, but numerous studies have shown that it can have tremendous effects. Some of the things a values affirmation can do: 1. Tamp down stress. A study led by psychologist Traci Mann of UCLA found that participants who affirmed their values had significantly lower cortisol responses to stress compared with control participants. &#8220;These findings suggest that reflecting on personal values can keep neuroendocrine and psychological responses to stress at low levels,&#8221; Mann and her coauthors write. 2. Strengthen willpower. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2009, researchers found that affirming one&#8217;s values can replenish willpower when it&#8217;s been depleted by repeated acts of self-control. The researchers conclude: &#8220;Self-affirmation holds promise as a mental strategy that reduces the likelihood of self-control failure.&#8221; (MORE: How to Use the “Pygmalion Effect”) 3. Increase openness. Joshua Correll of the University of Chicago found that a values-affirmation exercise allowed subjects in his study to objectively evaluate information that would otherwise evoke a defensive reaction. The participants became less biased in favor of their own position, and more discriminating in evaluating the strength or weakness of arguments made by others. 4. Improve accuracy. In a study published in the journal Psychological Science in 2012, researcher Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto and his<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=32091&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Brilliant: The Science of Smart</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/health-science/brilliant-the-science-of-smart/</primary_category_link>
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		<title>Learning From Mistakes Is Harder Than We Think</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/29/learning-from-mistakes-is-harder-than-we-think/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/29/learning-from-mistakes-is-harder-than-we-think/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:35:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Health & Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[beliefs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive dissonance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[learning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[misconceptions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mistakes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[refutation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=31849</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;Often mistaken, never in doubt.&#8221; That wry phrase describes us all more than we&#8217;d like to admit. The psychological study of misconceptions shows that all of us possess many beliefs that are flawed or flat-out wrong — and also that we cling to these fallacies with remarkable tenacity. As a result, just hearing the correct explanation isn&#8217;t enough. Most methods of instruction and training assume that if you provide people with the right information, it will replace any mistaken information listeners may already possess. But especially when our previous beliefs (even though faulty) have proved useful to us, and when they appear to be confirmed by everyday experience, we are reluctant to let them go. Donna Alvermann, a language and literacy researcher at the University of Georgia, notes that in study after study, &#8220;students ignored correct textual information when it conflicted with their previously held concepts. On measures of free recall and recognition, the students consistently let their incorrect prior knowledge override incoming correct information.&#8221; (MORE: Born to Be Bright: Is There a Gene for Learning?) It&#8217;s what our mothers called &#8220;in one ear and out the other.&#8221; We have to actively disabuse ourselves or others of erroneous conceptions, and research from cognitive science and psychology points the way. Although much of this research concerns misguided notions of how the physical world works, the techniques it has produced can be used to correct any sort of deficient understanding. Here, three ways to make that new information push out the old: Highlight the mistaken notion. The simplest way to correct mistaken notions is to point them out as the accurate information is being presented. In a 2010 article in the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, researcher Christine Tippett offers an example from a science book for children: &#8220;Some people believe that a camel stores water in its hump. They think that the hump gets smaller as the camel uses up water. But this idea is not true. The hump stores fat and grows smaller only if the camel has<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=31849&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Psychology</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/health-science/psychology/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/wrong.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">wrong</media:title>
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		<title>How Powerful People Think</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/22/how-powerful-people-think/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/22/how-powerful-people-think/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:05:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Health & Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[job interviews]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[leaders]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[leadership]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[power]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[powerful people]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=31598</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Successful leaders often seem to have sharper minds than the rest of us — isn&#8217;t that how they got to the top in the first place? While we often assume that people become powerful because of their superior thinking skills, research shows that the relationship flows in the other direction as well: Power changes the way a person thinks, making them better at focusing on relevant information, integrating disparate pieces of knowledge, and identifying hidden patterns than people who are powerless. People who feel powerful also show improved &#8220;executive functioning&#8221;: They are better able to concentrate, plan, inhibit unhelpful impulses and flexibly adapt to change. (MORE: The 2013 TIME 100) A sense of power &#8220;has dramatic effects on thought and behavior,&#8221; writes Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School, in a 2011 article in the journal Psychological Science. Indeed, &#8220;being in a high-power role transforms people psychologically.&#8221; The good news is that we don&#8217;t have to wait until we&#8217;re the boss to reap the mental rewards of powerfulness. Here, three ways to take advantage of the power of power: 1. Find a role in which you feel powerful. All of us can identify some area of life in which we&#8217;re able to take the lead — and once we do so, changes in how we think and act will follow. &#8220;The social roles people inhabit can change their most basic cognitive processes,&#8221; notes Pamela Smith, a social psychologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Studies show that when people are assigned to the manager role (in a real organization or in one simulated in the lab), they immediately become more likely to act decisively, to take risks, to persist on tasks they take up, and to think more abstractly and optimistically. This has implications for how we treat others — students, employees, offspring — as well, suggesting that we should reverse the usual practice of waiting until individuals prove themselves worthy of holding power. Empowering people now, by giving them more control and autonomy, will lead them to think and<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=31598&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Psychology</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/health-science/psychology/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/powerful.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Business man looking out window of corner office</media:title>
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		<title>How to Stimulate Curiosity</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/15/how-to-stimulate-curiosity/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/15/how-to-stimulate-curiosity/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:18:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health & Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communication]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[curiosity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[information gap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[learning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[motivator]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=31311</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Curiosity is the engine of intellectual achievement — it&#8217;s what drives us to keep learning, keep trying, keep pushing forward. But how does one generate curiosity, in oneself or others? George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, proposed an answer in the classic 1994 paper, &#8220;The Psychology of Curiosity.&#8221; Curiosity arises, Loewenstein wrote, &#8220;when attention becomes focused on a gap in one&#8217;s knowledge. Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.&#8221; Loewenstein&#8217;s theory helps explain why curiosity is such a potent motivator: it&#8217;s not only a mental state but also an emotion, a powerful feeling that impels us forward until we find the information that will fill in the gap in our knowledge. (MORE: Secrets of the Most Successful College Students) Here, three practical ways to use information gaps to stimulate curiosity: 1. Start with the question. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham notes that teachers — along with parents, managers, and leaders of all kinds — are often &#8220;so eager to get to the answer that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the question,&#8221; Willingham writes in his book, Why Don&#8217;t Students Like School? Yet it&#8217;s the question that stimulates curiosity; being told an answer quells curiosity before it can even get going. Instead of starting with the answer, begin by posing for yourself and others a genuinely interesting question — one that opens an information gap. (MORE: How to Raise a Group&#8217;s IQ) 2. Prime the pump. In his 1994 paper, George Loewenstein noted that curiosity requires some initial knowledge. We&#8217;re not curious about something we know absolutely nothing about. But as soon as we know even a little bit, our curiosity is piqued and we want to learn more. In fact, research shows that curiosity increases with knowledge: the more we know, the more we want to know. To get this process started, Loewenstein suggests, &#8220;prime the pump&#8221; with some intriguing but incomplete<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=31311&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Psychology</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/health-science/psychology/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/curiosity.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Curiosity</media:title>
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		<title>How To Use the &#8220;Pygmalion&#8221; Effect</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/01/how-to-use-the-pygmalion-effect/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/01/how-to-use-the-pygmalion-effect/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:01:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health & Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[expectations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[learner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[learning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pygmalion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pygmalion effect]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=30270</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the story told by the Roman poet Ovid, Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has created. George Bernard Shaw borrowed the theme for his play Pygmalion — later turned into the musical My Fair Lady — in which Professor Henry Higgins makes over the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, becoming besotted with her even as he teaches her how to speak proper English (&#8220;The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain&#8230; &#8220;). Psychologists, too, have picked up the motif, researching what they call the &#8220;Pygmalion effect&#8221;. The finding, as social psychologist Robert Rosenthal puts it, is &#8220;that what one person expects of another can come to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy.&#8221; Rosenthal and his coauthor Lenore Jacobson coined the term to describe the striking results of an experiment they carried out in a California school in 1965. Students took a test that was said to be able to identify &#8220;growth spurters,&#8221; or those who were poised to make strides academically. Teachers were given the names of pupils who were about to bloom intellectually — and sure enough, these students showed a significantly greater gain in performance over their classmates when tested again at the end of the year. (MORE: How to Increase Your Stamina to Learn) But here&#8217;s the thing: the &#8220;spurters&#8221; were actually chosen at random. The only difference between them and their peers, Rosenthal writes, &#8220;was in the mind of the teacher.&#8221; And yet the expectations held in the mind of the teacher — or the parent, or the manager, or the coach — can make an enormous difference. Research conducted since Rosenthal and Jacobson&#8217;s original study has determined that the Pygmalion effect applies to all kinds of settings, from sports teams to the military to the corporate workplace. Just how do elevated expectations promote greater achievement? It&#8217;s not some magical act of inspiration. Rather, Rosenthal and others have found that higher expectations lead teachers (or other authority figures) to act differently in regard to the learner, in four very<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=30270&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Psychology</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/health-science/psychology/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/studentteacher.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Teacher assisting student</media:title>
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		<title>Can &#8216;Mindfulness&#8217; Really Help You Focus?</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/27/can-mindfulness-help-you-focus/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/27/can-mindfulness-help-you-focus/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:45:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Health & Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ACT]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[exams]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GRE]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[LSAT]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mindfulness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SAT]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[test-taking]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tests]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[working memory]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=30172</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If there&#8217;s any time when we should be paying close attention to what we&#8217;re doing, it&#8217;s when we&#8217;re under pressure to perform — whether taking a test like the SAT or on a deadline at work. But too often, our minds wander even in these crucial moments — distracted by a ticking clock or consumed with worries about how well we&#8217;re doing or how much time we have left. Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wondered if instruction in mindfulness — the capacity to focus on the here and now — could help. In a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, he and his co-authors describe an experiment in which 48 undergraduates were randomly assigned to either a mindfulness class or a nutrition class. Both classes met for 45 minutes, four times a week, for two weeks. During the mindfulness class, participants sat on cushions in a circle; they were asked to pay focused attention to some aspect of sensory experience, like the sounds of their own breathing. They practiced distinguishing between the simple thoughts that naturally arise in our minds (I have a test tomorrow) and the thoughts that become &#8220;elaborated&#8221; with emotion (I&#8217;m really worried that I won&#8217;t do well, and if I fail it, I&#8217;ll have to take the class over, and then I won&#8217;t graduate on time). The undergrads enrolled in the mindfulness class were taught how to reframe these more emotional concerns as mere &#8220;mental projections,&#8221; and how to allow their minds to rest naturally, rather than trying to suppress or get rid of their thoughts. (MORE: How to Increase Your Stamina to Learn) All of the participants, who had completed a measure of working memory and a verbal-reasoning section from the GRE (an exam for grad school) before the classes started, took these tests again after the classes were over. Researchers also checked how frequently the students&#8217; minds wandered while working on the tests. Schooler and his colleagues found that participants who had received the mindfulness training improved their GRE<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=30172&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Psychology</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/health-science/psychology/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/testing.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">testing</media:title>
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		<title>Four Ways to Give Good Feedback</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/18/four-ways-to-give-good-feedback/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/18/four-ways-to-give-good-feedback/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:29:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Business & Tech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cognitive science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[feedback]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[motivation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=29796</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When effectively administered, feedback is a powerful way to build knowledge and skills, increase skills, increase motivation, and develop reflective habits of mind in students and employees. Too often, however, the feedback we give (and get) is ineffectual or even counterproductive. Here, four ways to offer feedback that really makes a difference, drawn from research in psychology and cognitive science: 1. Supply information about what the learner is doing, rather than simply praise or criticism. In &#8220;The Power of Feedback,&#8221; an article published in the Review of Educational Research in 2007, authors John Hattie and Helen Timperley point out that specific information about how the learner is performing a task is much more helpful than mere praise or, especially, criticism. In particular, research by Hattie, Timperley, and others has found that feedback is most effective when it provides information on what exactly the learner is doing right, and on what he or she is doing differently (and more successfully) than in previous attempts.&#8217; (MORE: Secrets of the Most Successful College Students) 2. Take care in how you present feedback.  The eminent psychologist Edward Deci has identified several conditions under which feedback may actually reduce learners&#8217; motivation. When learners sense that their performance is being too closely monitored, for example, they may disengage from learning out of feelings of nervousness or self-consciousness. To counter this impression, the purpose of observing or supervising should be fully explained and learners’ consent obtained. Better yet, learners should be involved in collecting and analyzing data on their own performance, reducing the need for oversight by others. (And as the popularity of the &#8220;Quantified Self&#8221; movement has demonstrated, many people seem to enjoy keeping even minute records of their own behavior.) A second risk identified by Deci is that learners will interpret feedback as an attempt to control them — for example, when feedback is phrased as, &#8220;This is how you should do it.&#8221; Empower learners rather than controlling them by giving them access to information about their own performance and teaching them how to use<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=29796&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Psychology</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/health-science/psychology/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/feedback.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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		<title>Secrets of the Most Successful College Students</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/13/secrets-of-the-most-successful-college-students/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/13/secrets-of-the-most-successful-college-students/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:45:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Business & Tech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life & Style]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[college]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[college education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[college students]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[grades]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[higher education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=29179</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[College-admission letters go out this month, and most recipients (and their parents) will place great importance on which universities said yes and which said no. A growing body of evidence, however, suggests that the most significant thing about college is not where you go, but what you do once you get there. Historian and educator Ken Bain has written a book on this subject, What the Best College Students Do, that draws a road map for how students can get the most out of college, no matter where they go. (MORE: Does College Put Kids on a Party Pathway?) As Bain details, there are three types of learners: surface, who do as little as possible to get by; strategic, who aim for top grades rather than true understanding; and deep learners, who leave college with a real, rich education. Bain then introduces us to a host of real-life deep learners: young and old, scientific and artistic, famous or still getting there. Although they each have their own insights, Bain identifies common patterns in their stories: (MORE: Can Tough Competition Hinder Academic Performance?) Pursue passion, not A&#8217;s. When he was in college, says the eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, he was &#8220;moved by curiosity, interest and fascination, not by making the highest scores on a test.&#8221; As an adult, he points out, &#8220;no one ever asks you what your grades were. Grades become irrelevant.&#8221; In his experience as a student and a professor, says Tyson, &#8220;ambition and innovation trump grades every time.&#8221; Get comfortable with failure. When he was still a college student, comedian Stephen Colbert began working with an improvisational theater in Chicago. &#8220;That really opened me up in ways I hadn&#8217;t expected,&#8221; he tells Bain. &#8220;You must be O.K. with bombing. You have to love it.&#8221; Colbert adds, &#8220;Improvisation is a great educator when it comes to failing. There&#8217;s no way you are going to get it right every time.&#8221; Make a personal connection to your studies. In her sophomore year in college, Eliza Noh, now a professor of Asian-American studies at California State<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=29179&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Education</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/u-s/education/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/college.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">college students</media:title>
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		<title>Can Tough Competition Hinder Academic Performance?</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/22/can-tough-competition-hinder-academic-performance/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/22/can-tough-competition-hinder-academic-performance/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Feb 2013 13:00:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Health & Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[academics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ashley Merryman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[competition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NurtureShock]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[performance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Po Bronson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[stress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Top Dog]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=28541</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Top Dog, a new book by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman about &#8220;the science of winning and losing&#8221; is in large part a celebration of competition. The authors of the bestselling NurtureShock explore the benefits of what they call &#8220;competitive fire&#8221; — stories of Olympic swimmers, champion chess players, and upstart political candidates who reached the top by racing someone else. But just as interesting are the cases in which we do better without the element of competition. Sometimes, it turns out, competing against others can actually make our performance worse. Bronson and Merryman describe an experiment in which researchers gave 124 Princeton University underclassmen a test that drew its questions from the GRE, the graduate school admissions test. For some of the students, the investigators added to the stress of this difficult exam in two ways. First, the students were asked to report which high school they&#8217;d attended and how many of their high school classmates were also at Princeton. &#8220;This was intended to make most test-takers feel as if they were alone at Princeton, that they were lucky to be at Princeton, and that they had barely made the bar for admittance,&#8221; Bronson and Merryman explain. (MORE: Relax, It&#8217;s Only a Test) Second, researchers further added to students&#8217; stress by labeling the test as an &#8220;Intellectual Ability Questionnaire.&#8221; Bronson and Merryman again: &#8220;They wanted the test&#8217;s title to be threatening to the students, to make the students fear that, if they did poorly, the test would reveal they lacked the true ability to be at Princeton.&#8221; The other group of students answered the questions about high school only after taking the test, when it could no longer affect their performance, and their exam went by the less-threatening name &#8221;Intellectual Challenge Questionnaire.&#8221; The results? Students in the first group answered 72% of the questions correctly; those in the second group got 90% of their answers right. By subtly manipulating the competitive stress felt by the participants, Bronson and Merryman note, the researchers &#8220;were able to engineer an 18% difference in their test scores.&#8221; (MORE: Highlighting Is<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=28541&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Psychology</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/health-science/psychology/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/academicperformance.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Students taking exams</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">timeideasbrilliant</media:title>
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		<title>Does College Put Kids on a &#8216;Party Pathway&#8217;?</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/23/does-college-put-kids-on-a-party-pathway/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/23/does-college-put-kids-on-a-party-pathway/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:45:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[academics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[college]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[college tuition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[learning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tuition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=27548</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A fair amount of schadenfreude greeted the release last week of a study showing that the kids of parents who pay for college return their families’ largesse by achieving lower grades. The study, conducted by University of California at Merced professor Laura Hamilton and published in the American Sociological Review, offered those of us who worked our way through college — or took out burdensome student loans — a rare opportunity to gloat. But our self-congratulation is mistaken, or at least beside the point. Hamilton’s work, and that of other researchers, demonstrates that we should all be concerned about the state of higher education in the U.S. today and that college students enjoying a four-year paid vacation courtesy of their parents are merely a symptom of a larger problem. That problem is this: across the board, American colleges and universities are not doing a very good job of preparing their students for the workplace or their postgraduation lives. This was made clear by the work of two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. In 2011 they released a landmark study titled &#8220;Academically Adrift,&#8221; which documented the lack of intellectual growth experienced by many people enrolled in college. The authors examined the results of tests taken at the beginning, middle and end of students’ undergraduate careers and concluded that 45% of students &#8220;did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning&#8221; during their first two years of college, while 36% failed to demonstrate improved learning across all four years. In particular, Arum and Roksa found, college students were not developing the critical thinking, analytic reasoning and other higher-level skills that are necessary to thrive in today&#8217;s knowledge-based economy and to lead our nation in a time of complex challenges and dynamic change. (MORE: The Myth of the Four-Year College Degree) Arum and Roksa placed the blame for students’ lack of learning on a watered-down college curriculum and lax undergraduate work ethic. Although going to college is supposed to be a full-time job, the authors reported that students spent, on average, only 12<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=27548&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Education</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/u-s/education/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/student.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Student sleeping on campus</media:title>
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		<title>Highlighting Is a Waste of Time: The Best and Worst Learning Techniques</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/09/highlighting-is-a-waste-of-time-the-best-and-worst-learning-techniques/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/09/highlighting-is-a-waste-of-time-the-best-and-worst-learning-techniques/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:30:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Brilliant: The Science of Smart]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[best learning strategies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[highlighting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Dunlosky]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[practice tests]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rereading]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[taking notes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[underlining]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=27269</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In a world as fast-changing and full of information as our own, every one of us — from schoolchildren to college students to working adults — needs to know how to learn well. Yet evidence suggests that most of us don’t use the learning techniques that science has proved most effective. Worse, research finds that learning strategies we do commonly employ, like rereading and highlighting, are among the least effective. (MORE: How to Use Technology to Make You Smarter) The scientific literature evaluating these techniques stretches back decades and across thousands of articles. It’s far too extensive and complex for the average parent, teacher or employer to sift through. Fortunately, a team of five leading psychologists have now done the job for us. In a comprehensive report released on Jan. 9 by the Association for Psychological Science, the authors, led by Kent State University professor John Dunlosky, closely examine 10 learning tactics and rate each from high to low utility on the basis of the evidence they’ve amassed. Here is a quick guide to the report’s conclusions: The Worst Highlighting and underlining led the authors’ list of ineffective learning strategies. Although they are common practices, studies show they offer no benefit beyond simply reading the text. Some research even indicates that highlighting can get in the way of learning; because it draws attention to individual facts, it may hamper the process of making connections and drawing inferences. Nearly as bad is the practice of rereading, a common exercise that is much less effective than some of the better techniques you can use. Lastly, summarizing, or writing down the main points contained in a text, can be helpful for those who are skilled at it, but again, there are far better ways to spend your study time. Highlighting, underlining, rereading and summarizing were all rated by the authors as being of “low utility.” The Best In contrast to familiar practices like highlighting and rereading, the learning strategies with the most evidence to support them aren’t well known outside the psych lab.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=27269&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Education</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/u-s/education/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/1500_signature_0108.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Techniques</media:title>
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		<title>How to Use Technology to Make You Smarter</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2012/11/29/how-to-use-technology-to-make-you-smarter/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2012/11/29/how-to-use-technology-to-make-you-smarter/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2012 10:45:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Brilliant: The Science of Smart]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Business & Tech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gadgets]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Internet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[auto-complete]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[email]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intelligence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IQ]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[is google making us stupid?]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mobile]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[surfing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[texting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[websites]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=25853</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can a calculator make you smarter? The QAMA calculator can. You use it just like a regular calculator, plugging in the numbers of the problem you want to solve — but QAMA won’t give you the answer until you provide an accurate estimate of what that answer will be. If your estimate is way off, you’ll have to go back to the problem and see where you went wrong. If your estimate is close, QAMA (developed by Ilan Samson, an &#8220;inventor-in-residence&#8221; at the University of California, San Diego) will serve up the precise solution, and you can compare it to your own guess. Either way, you’ll learn a lot more than if you simply copied the answer that a calculator spit out. Ever since journalist Nicholas Carr posed a provocative question — “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” — in a widely-read 2008 Atlantic magazine article, we’ve been arguing about whether the new generation of digital devices is leading us to become smarter, or stupider, than we were before. Now psychologists and cognitive scientists are beginning to deliver their verdicts. Here, the research on an array of technological helpers: Calculators. Cognitive scientists long ago identified the “generation effect” — the fact that we understand and remember answers that we generate ourselves better than those that are provided us (by a calculator, for instance). But a study published last year in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that adults who tried to solve arithmetic problems on their own but then obtained the answer from a calculator did just as well on a later test as those who didn’t use calculators at all. If you don’t have a QAMA calculator around, you can approximate its effects by holding off using a traditional calculator until you’ve tried to come up with a solution yourself. (MORE: Does Listening to Music While Working Make You Less Productive?) Auto-complete. Frequent users of smartphones quickly get used to the “auto-complete” function of their devices—the way they need only type a few letters and the phone fills in the rest.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=25853&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Internet</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/business-tech/internet/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/tech1.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Businessman using digital tablet, close up</media:title>
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		<title>Why Kids Should Learn Cursive (and Math Facts and Word Roots)</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2012/11/08/why-kids-should-learn-cu-cursive/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2012/11/08/why-kids-should-learn-cu-cursive/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:30:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Family]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cursive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Greek]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[handwriting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Latin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[math facts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[memorization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[penmanship]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[root words]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rote learning]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=25071</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When Suzanne Kail, an English teacher at a public high school in Magnolia, Ohio, was told that she would be required to teach her students Latin and Greek word roots, she groaned and rolled her eyes. Kail believes in a progressive approach to education, in which active engagement in meaningful learning is paramount. In an account of her experience in the English Journal, she wrote, “asking students to do rote memorization was the antithesis of what I believed in most.&#8221; Still, her department head insisted on it, so Kail went forward with the attitude, &#8220;I&#8217;ll do it, but I won&#8217;t like it.&#8221; She was sure her students wouldn&#8217;t like it, either. Kail was in for a surprise — as is anyone who takes a look at a raft of recent studies supporting the effectiveness of &#8220;old school&#8221; methods like memorizing math facts, reading aloud, practicing handwriting and teaching argumentation (activities that once went by the names drill, recitation, penmanship and rhetoric). While the education world is all abuzz about so-called 21st century skills like collaboration, problem solving and critical thinking, this research suggests that we might do well to add a strong dose of the 19th century to our children&#8217;s schooling. (MORE: Paul: Why Third Grade Is So Important: The &#8216;Matthew Effect&#8217;) Kail&#8217;s experience is instructive. As soon as she began teaching her students the Greek and Latin origins of many English terms — that the root sta means &#8220;put in place or stand,&#8221; for example, and that cess means &#8220;to move or withdraw&#8221; — they eagerly began identifying familiar words that incorporated the roots, like statue and recess. Her three classes competed against one another to come up with the longest list of words derived from the roots they were learning. Kail&#8217;s students started using these terms in their writing, and many of them told her that their study of word roots helped them answer questions on the SAT and on Ohio&#8217;s state graduation exam. (Research confirms that instruction in word roots allows students to learn new vocabulary and figure out the meaning of words in context more easily.) For her part, Kail reports that she no longer sees rote memorization as &#8220;inherently evil.&#8221; Although committing the word roots to<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=25071&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Education</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/u-s/education/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/education.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Image: Hands raised in classroom</media:title>
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		<title>Why Parenting Is More Important Than Schools</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2012/10/24/the-single-largest-advantage-parents-can-give-their-kids/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2012/10/24/the-single-largest-advantage-parents-can-give-their-kids/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life & Style]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[academics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[parenting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[schoolwork]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[student achievement]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=24410</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Given all the roiling debates about how America’s children should be taught, it may come as a surprise to learn that students spend less than 15% of their time in school. While there’s no doubt that school is important, a clutch of recent studies reminds us that parents are even more so. A study published earlier this month by researchers at North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University and the University of California-Irvine, for example, finds that parental involvement — checking homework, attending school meetings and events, discussing school activities at home — has a more powerful influence on students’ academic performance than anything about the school the students attend. Another study, published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, reports that the effort put forth by parents (reading stories aloud, meeting with teachers) has a bigger impact on their children’s educational achievement than the effort expended by either teachers or the students themselves. And a third study concludes that schools would have to increase their spending by more than $1,000 per pupil in order to achieve the same results that are gained with parental involvement (not likely in this stretched economic era). (MORE: Why Third Grade Is So Important: The Matthew Effect) So parents matter — a point made clear by decades of research showing that a major part of the academic advantage held by children from affluent families comes from the “concerted cultivation of children” as compared to the more laissez-faire style of parenting common in working-class families. But this research also reveals something else: that parents, of all backgrounds, don’t need to buy expensive educational toys or digital devices for their kids in order to give them an edge. They don’t need to chauffeur their offspring to enrichment classes or test-prep courses. What they need to do with their children is much simpler: talk. But not just any talk. Although well-known research by psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley has shown that professional parents talk more to their children than less-affluent parents — a lot more, resulting<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=24410&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Education</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/u-s/education/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/1500_parenting_1023.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Why Parenting Is More Important Than Schools</media:title>
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		<title>Why Third Grade Is So Important: The &#8216;Matthew Effect&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/26/why-third-grade-is-so-important-the-matthew-effect/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/26/why-third-grade-is-so-important-the-matthew-effect/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Sep 2012 11:30:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[3rd grade]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Book of Matthew]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fourth grade slump]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[learning to read]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[matthew affect]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reading to learn]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=22645</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Take a guess: What is the single most important year of an individual’s academic career? The answer isn’t junior year of high school, or senior year of college. It’s third grade. What makes success in third grade so significant? It’s the year that students move from learning to read — decoding words using their knowledge of the alphabet — to reading to learn. The books children are expected to master are no longer simple primers but fact-filled texts on the solar system, Native Americans, the Civil War. Children who haven’t made the leap to fast, fluent reading begin at this moment to fall behind, and for most of them the gap will continue to grow. So third grade constitutes a critical transition — a “pivot point,” in the words of Donald J. Hernandez, a professor of sociology at CUNY–Hunter College. A study Hernandez conducted, released last year by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, found that third-graders who lack proficiency in reading are four times more likely to become high school dropouts. (MORE: Paul: Born to be Bright: Is There a Gene For Learning?) Too often the story unfolds this way: struggles in third grade lead to the “fourth-grade slump,” as the reading-to-learn model comes to dominate instruction. While their more skilled classmates are amassing knowledge and learning new words from context, poor readers may begin to avoid reading out of frustration. A vicious cycle sets in: school assignments increasingly require background knowledge and familiarity with “book words” (literary, abstract and technical terms)— competencies that are themselves acquired through reading. Meanwhile, classes in science, social studies, history and even math come to rely more and more on textual analysis, so that struggling readers begin to fall behind in these subjects as well. (MORE: Paul: What Distinguishes A Super School From The Rest) In operation here is what researchers call the “Matthew effect,” after the Bible verse found in the Gospel of Matthew: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=22645&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Education</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/u-s/education/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/151021219.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Students studying</media:title>
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		<title>Does Listening to Music While Working Make You Less Productive?</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/12/does-listening-to-music-while-working-make-you-less-productive/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/12/does-listening-to-music-while-working-make-you-less-productive/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Sep 2012 11:40:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Health & Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life & Style]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[driving]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[listening to music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=22105</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In a previous column about the stress of working in an &#8220;open&#8221; office, I suggested that the popular practice of listening to music with earbuds or headphones not only cuts down on background noise but may also give employees a sense of control over their aural environment. But does having a constant soundtrack to your day also distract you from the task at hand? That depends on the task. Research shows that under some conditions, music actually improves our performance, while in other situations music makes it worse — sometimes dangerously so. (MORE: Workplace Woes: The &#8220;Open Office&#8221; Is a Hotbed of Stress) Absorbing and remembering new information is best done with the music off, suggests a 2010 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Adults aged 18 to 30 were asked to recall a series of sounds presented in a particular order. Participants’ performance suffered when music was played while they carried out the task as compared to when they completed the task in a quiet environment. Nick Perham, the British researcher who conducted the study, notes that playing music you like can lift your mood and increase your arousal — if you listen to it before getting down to work. But it serves as a distraction from cognitively demanding tasks. That finding is key to understanding another condition under which music can improve performance: when a well-practiced expert needs to achieve the relaxed focus necessary to execute a job he’s done many times before. A number of studies have found, for example, that surgeons often listen to music in the operating room and that they work more effectively when they do. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that surgeons carrying out a task in the laboratory worked more accurately when music that they liked was playing. (Music that they didn’t like was second best, and no music was least helpful of all.) (MORE: Remember More Without Trying) The doctors listening to their preferred music were also the most relaxed, as revealed by measurements of their<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=22105&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Life &amp; Style</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/life-style/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/137086957.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Businessman with headphones on</media:title>
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		<title>What Distinguishes a Superschool From the Rest</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/06/what-distinguishes-a-superschool-from-the-rest/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/06/what-distinguishes-a-superschool-from-the-rest/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[academics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[American Mathematics Competition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disadvantaged students]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[graduation rates]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[school]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=21711</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As the academic year starts up again, we’ll be hearing a lot about those schools that work miracles in unforgiving places: educational outliers that manage to produce college-bound graduates despite the poverty, crime and drugs that dominate the neighborhoods around them. But what about those schools that start out lucky, full of students from prosperous, educated families? It turns out that these schools have their outliers, too. According to a new study, even among schools that are “demographically similar” in their affluence, a small handful produce superstar students at a much higher-than-expected rate. The authors of the study, Glenn Ellison and Ashley Swanson of MIT, identified the high-flying schools by analyzing data from the American Mathematics Competition (AMC), an annual contest in which more than 100,000 U.S. high school students participate. In their study of more than 2,000 schools that sent students to the AMC, Ellison and Swanson found “large differences among seemingly similar schools” and concluded that high-achieving students are “very far from evenly distributed.” Four percent of the schools the authors looked at produced top math students at a rate at least three times the average of all schools studied, and two percent boasted a rate five times the average. A very few were churning out math phenoms at a rate 10 times the average. (MORE: Why Grit Is More Important Than Grades) Which schools were the math powerhouses? Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif., Naperville North High School in Naperville, Ill., Vestavia Hills High School in Vestavia, Ala., H.M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto, Calif., and New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill. lead the list of those schools producing an exceptional numbers of high-scorers, as reported in Education Week. (Because all the schools the authors examined were public, and none were magnet or charter schools, elite private schools and selective public schools, like New York’s Stuyvesant High School and Massachusetts’s Boston Latin, were excluded from the analysis.) What the study shows, Ellison and Swanson suggest, is that a school&#8217;s expectations and environment matter even<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=21711&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Education</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/u-s/education/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/149629587.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">students at desks in classroom</media:title>
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		<title>Workplace Woes: The &#8216;Open&#8217; Office Is a Hotbed of Stress</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-hotbed-of-stress/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-hotbed-of-stress/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:58:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Business & Tech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[career]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cubicles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[open office]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[open-plan office]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[workplace distractions]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=20914</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ringing phones. Pinging e-mail. Co-workers&#8217; ringing phones and pinging e-mail. How is anyone supposed to get work done in this place? The modern open office was designed for team building and camaraderie but is mostly distinguished by its high noise levels, lack of privacy and surfeit of both digital and human distractions. And indeed, several decades of research have confirmed that open-plan offices are generally associated with greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and reduced satisfaction with the physical environment. But there are some ways to combat those detrimental effects and still be productive. (MORE: Paul: Can You Learn Everything &#8216;on the Job&#8217;?) The noise of the open office is one of employees’ chief complaints about it, and research shows that the ceaseless hubbub can actually undermine our motivation. In a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, 40 female clerical workers were subjected to three hours of “low-intensity noise” designed to simulate the sounds heard in a typical open office. A control group experienced three hours of blessed quiet. Afterward, both groups were given puzzles to solve; unbeknownst to them, the puzzles had no solution. The participants who’d been treated to a quiet work setting kept plugging away at the puzzles, while the subjects who’d endured the noisy conditions gave up after fewer attempts. Look around any open-plan office today (especially one full of younger employees) and you’ll see that many workers deal with this problem by wearing ear buds or headphones. Although it might seem that importing one’s own noise wouldn’t be much of a solution — and although we don’t yet have research evidence on the use of private music in the office — experts say that this approach could be effective on at least one dimension. Part of the reason office noise reduces our motivation is that it’s a factor out of our control, so the act of asserting control over our aural environment may lead us to try harder at our jobs. (MORE: Workplace Bullying: The Problem — and the Costs — Are Worse than<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=20914&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Business &amp; Tech</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://ideas.time.com/category/business-tech/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeopinions.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/106953761.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">office</media:title>
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		<title>Remember More Without Trying</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/01/remember-more-without-trying/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/01/remember-more-without-trying/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:16:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Health & Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hristo Bojinov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[implicit learning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[learning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sleep]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[uSENIX Security Symposium]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://ideas.time.com/?p=20197</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It’s rare that a computer science lab brings us a scenario worthy of a spy novel, but that’s what happened earlier this month when Hristo Bojinov, a researcher at Stanford University, divulged his latest project. Here’s the setup: Imagine an operative has been entrusted with top-secret computer files. He needs a password to enable him to access the information — but what if he falls into the hands of the enemy, and they force him to reveal the code? Bojinov and his colleagues concocted the perfect solution: a password that the spy could use any time he needed it, but which was not available to his conscious mind. He couldn’t give up the code to his captors even if he wanted to. In effect, the scientists would be hiding the password in the brain of the spy. (MORE: Born to Be Bright: Is There a Gene for Learning?) As cloak-and-dagger as it sounds, the technique the Stanford scientists have developed takes advantage of a common phenomenon known as implicit learning. This is the absorption of information without conscious intent or awareness, and all of us are doing it all of the time. It’s how a young child can put together a coherent sentence without knowing the rules of English grammar; it’s how a longtime fisherman knows that the weather will be good and the fish will be biting, based on shades of the sea and sky that others wouldn’t notice and he couldn’t explain. Still not persuaded? If you’re reading this at a computer, try reciting the letters that make up the middle row of keys on your keyboard. (No peeking!) Likely you couldn’t reel off “A-S-D-F-G-H-J-K-L” — and yet you’ve implicitly learned the location of those letters (unless you type hunt-and-peck style). Bojinov’s study, which he will present next month at a gathering of computer security experts, showed that volunteers in the lab could be trained to learn a 30-digit password by playing a computer game in which the password was embedded. Although the rest of us don’t have access<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=20197&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<title>Born to Be Bright: Is There a Gene for Learning?</title>
		<link>http://ideas.time.com/2012/07/18/born-to-be-bright-is-there-a-gene-for-learning/</link>
		<comments>http://ideas.time.com/2012/07/18/born-to-be-bright-is-there-a-gene-for-learning/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Jul 2012 12:00:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Annie Murphy Paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Brilliant: The Science of Smart]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health & Science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DAT1]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[developmental psychology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DNA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DRD2]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DRD4]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[genes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[learning]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Earlier this month, researcher Kevin Beaver of Florida State University reported that he and his co-authors had identified genetic markers associated with academic achievement. In their study, published in the journal Developmental Psychology, the scientists found that young people who possessed particular versions of three genes were more likely to finish high school and go on to college than those who carried other forms of the genes. The genes in question — DAT1, DRD2 and DRD4 — are involved in regulating the action of dopamine in the brain, and have been linked in other studies to levels of motivation, attention and intelligence. The notion that how well we learn is influenced considerably by our genes has gone from being “taboo,” Beaver writes, to achieving something like “common acceptance.” (MORE: Paul: We Should Follow Those Who Finish Second, Not First) It is true that in recent years, scientists have produced a growing number of studies linking the capacity to learn to specific genes. A team at King’s College London, for example, has published several articles relating ability in mathematics to variations in DNA. Children who carried 10 or more of the “risk” gene variants identified by the researchers were nearly twice as likely to perform poorly in math, according to a 2010 study generated by the group. In another intriguing experiment, scientists Dan Dediu and Robert Ladd of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that some individuals possess variants of two genes involved in brain development that may make it easier for them to learn tonal languages like Chinese. (MORE: Paul: Want to Prevent Aging? Learn a New Language) But scientists have long warned against attributing complex human behaviors to the action of a few genes — and learning is among the most complex things we do. The authors of these studies acknowledge this. “Mathematical ability and disability are influenced by many genes generating small effects across the entire spectrum of ability,” writes Sophia Docherty, who heads the King’s College team. Moreover, environment<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=ideas.time.com&#038;blog=27622548&#038;post=19570&#038;subd=timeopinions&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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