-
Does Teaching Kids To Get ‘Gritty’ Help Them Get Ahead?
NPR: It's become the new buzz phrase in education: "Got grit?" Around the nation, schools are beginning to see grit as key to students' success — and just as important to teach as reading and math. Experts define grit as persistence, determination and resilience; it's that je ne sais quoi that drives one kid to practice trumpet or study Spanish for hours — or years — on end, while another quits after the first setback.
-
The Brooding Mind: Making the Worst of Ambiguity
The Huffington Post: Imagine yourself at your 10-year high school reunion, a long anticipated get-together for you and all your old friends. You haven't seen many of them since graduation day, and naturally everyone is comparing notes on the lives they have lived since then. This puts you in a reflective mood, but not in a good way. Life has been unkind to you -- compared to the lives of your friends, who have all been spared your travails. For days after the reunion, you can't focus on anything but your difficulties, and the unfairness of it all. If you're a brooder, that is. Someone else might have the same reunion experience, yet come away with a very different interpretation.
-
Anxiety? There’s an App for That
Pacific Standard: The future of anxiety treatment may not be pills or therapy sessions, but games on your phone. Two researchers, one at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the other at CUNY’s graduate center, published a study in Clinical Psychological Science this month that looks at the effects of “gamifying” psychological interventions for people prone to stress. They found that a bit of play time on a specially designed mobile app before high-pressure situations reduces stress and boosts composure when the pressure’s on.
-
They Fill a Tribal Need
The New York Times: In this era of mobility in professional sports, fans can sometimes feel like they are rooting for the color of the uniforms rather than the players that wear them. This is a complicated world with serious problems -- unemployment, gross economic inequality, violence raging across Syria and Ukraine -- and so it can feel silly and frivolous to get so wrapped up in sports rivalries. But, taking part in rivalries has some real psychological benefits. First, we all have a need to affiliate with other people. We are wired to be part of a group and to treat our group members (our ingroup) as privileged over everyone else.
-
Kids Have an Instinct for Algebra—If They’re Taught Correctly
Motherboard: Given the fact that computers do all our computing for us now, I suspected that people would’ve given up trying to teach kids math. But as it turns out you can’t turn everything over to an engineer-bot yet, as building and programming robots turns out to require quite a bit of mathematics. And two studies this week have uncovered that, taught correctly, children seem to have a predilection for algebra. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences found that preschoolers and kindergarteners could also do basic algebra, solving for a hidden variable that was hidden in either a stuffed gator or cheetah’s cup.
-
Evolution Is Coming To A Storybook Near You
NPR: Young children are notorious for their surfeit of why questions, often directed at aspects of the biological world. Take a three-year-old to the zoo, for example, and you might be asked to explain why zebras have stripes, why elephants have trunks and why flamingos have such skinny legs. (Also: why you can't pet the lion, why another cookie is off limits and why it's really, really time to go home.) Yet this childhood curiosity about the adaptive traits of biological organisms, which Rudyard Kipling recognized with his whimsical "Just So Stories," is all but ignored by current education standards in the United States.
