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What Makes Self-Directed Learning Effective?
In recent years, educators have come to focus more and more on the importance of lab-based experimentation, hands-on participation, student-led inquiry, and the use of “manipulables” in the classroom. The underlying rationale seems to be that students are better able to learn when they can control the flow of their experience, or when their learning is “self-directed.” While the benefits of self-directed learning are widely acknowledged, the reasons why a sense of control leads to better acquisition of material are poorly understood.
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Diss Information: Is There a Way to Stop Popular Falsehoods from Morphing into “Facts”?
Scientific American: A recurring red herring in the current presidential campaign is the verity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate. Although the president has made this document public, and records of his 1961 birth in Honolulu have been corroborated by newspaper announcements, a vocal segment of the population continues to insist that Obama's birth certificate proving U.S. citizenship is a fraud, making him legally ineligible to be president. A Politico survey found that a majority of voters in the 2011 Republican primary shared this clearly false belief. Scientific issues can be just as vulnerable to misinformation campaigns.
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Gelfand Receives Anneliese Maier Research Award
APS Fellow Michele J. Gelfand, who studies conflict and conducts comparative cultural research, accepted the Anneliese Maier Research Award at a September 13, 2012 ceremony at Heidelberg University in Germany. The award is granted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and includes a €250,000 prize, which will fund Gelfand’s collaboration with Klaus Boehnke and other colleagues at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. Gelfand has been recognized for her work contrasting “tight” societies that have little tolerance for deviation from their strict social norms with “loose” societies that have a higher tolerance for deviation from their weaker social norms.
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Till Death, or 20 Years, Do Us Part
The New York Times: It makes little sense to explore a new era of family values based around Hollywood couplings. Or, worse yet, around mere rumors of the way movie stars conduct their marital affairs. But might there be seeds of something worth considering in one such rumor, that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes signed a five-year marriage contract? It’s a dim data point but not an isolated one, suggesting people are rethinking marriage, at least around the edges. Prenuptial agreements, a different sort of contract, are on the rise, as is vowless cohabitation. The ages at which people marry have hit record highs, 28.7 years for men and 26.5 for women.
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Nothing to fear but anxiety therapy itself
Brisbane Times: Putting on a brave face could actually make your fear worse, a study shows. An international expert on fear and phobias says her research has found it helps people to talk about their fears while they are experiencing them - and in some cases the best treatments involve scaring them more. Michelle Craske, a professor of psychology and director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Centre at the University of California, Los Angeles, said keeping people in a heightened fear state seems to help them learn to deal with their fearful emotions.
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Why We Get Bored
NBC: Scientists are taking on boredom. No, they aren't working on a cure just yet, but they have written a new definition of boredom and outlined the mental processes behind ennui. The researchers, led by psychological scientist John Eastwood of York University in Ontario, Canada, define boredom as "an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity," which springs from failures in one of the brain's attention networks. The findings, detailed in the September issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, may speak to many Americans: In a large survey of high-school students across 26 U.S.