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Focusing the Brain on Better Vision
The New York Times: As adults age, vision deteriorates. One common type of decline is incontrast sensitivity, the ability to distinguish gradations of light to dark, making it possible to discern where one object ends and another begins. When an older adult descends a flight of stairs, for example, she may not tell the edge of one step from the next, so she stumbles. At night, an older driver may squint to see the edge of white road stripes on blacktop. Caught in the glare of headlights, he swerves. But new research suggests that contrast sensitivity can be improved with brain-training exercises.
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Your baby is doing little physics experiments all the time, according to a new study
The Washington Post: When an infant sees an object behave in a surprising way, she does everything she can to learn more about its mysteries, and the initial surprise ends up helping her learn. A new study suggests that a baby can identify an unusual object as being more worthwhile than a typical one, and she can run simple "experiments" on it to help her understand it. So your baby is basically a tiny scientific genius, which is worth remembering the next time she coats the walls in spaghetti. She's probably just doing science, dad. ... According to her research, it may be that surprise acts as a learning aid, spurring a baby to test the unusual properties they've just seen in an object.
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Fighting to save cursive from the Common Core
The Boston Globe: WHEN IT comes to the classic “three Rs” of education, reading and ’rithmetic are still going strong. But ’riting — at least by hand — has fallen on hard times. Today, the vast majority of adult composition takes place at the keyboard, not the paper tablet. Is handwriting, particularly cursive, really necessary in the digital age? Increasingly, the answer is not really. Common Core standards issued in 2010 do not include any requirements for handwriting instruction. Even education experts who would like to see more classroom time devoted to writing question whether every student still needs to be taught two entirely different styles of handwriting. ...
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How Being a Worrywart Helps at Work
The Wall Street Journal: Most people seek to project an upbeat, confident attitude on the job. But sometimes it is better to be a worrywart. While ample research has documented the benefits of optimism at work, dozens of studies in the past several years have explored the flip side of the coin—how a moderate amount of pessimism can yield better performance. A little worry can motivate people to be more persistent in doing difficult tasks, studies show. Some people actually summon up a certain amount of worry or fear before starting especially tough assignments, research shows. Others who are too cheery learn to recruit downbeat colleagues to provide some of the caution or realism they need.
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Mental Health for the Masses
Ricardo Muñoz thinks that MOOCs get a bad rap. MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses, Internet-based higher education available to anyone in the world, regardless of age or qualifications, and usually for free. MOOCs have become very popular in recent years, and now attract millions of students who want to learn art history or calculus or abnormal psychology with some of the world’s best professors. Critics focus on MOOCs’ dismal attrition rates. While millions of eager students may sign up, they say, most of these drop out. They point to examples, including one MIT MOOC, in which 155,000 enrolled but only 7,157 passed the course. That’s a paltry 4.6 percent completion rate.
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First-Generation Students Unite
The New York Times: Ana Barros grew up in a two-family house built by Habitat for Humanity, hard by the boarded-up buildings and vacant lots of Newark. Neither parent attended college, but she was a star student. With a 2200 on her SATs, she expected to fit in at Harvard. Yet here she was at a lecture for a sociology course called, paradoxically, “Poverty in America,” as a classmate opened her laptop and planned a multicountry spring break trip to Europe. (Ms. Barros can’t afford textbooks; she borrows from the library.) On the sidewalks of Cambridge, students brush past her in their $700 Canada Goose parkas and $1,000 Moncler puffer jackets. (Ms.
