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The Most Focused Kids in the World?
The Huffington Post: In her new, provocatively titled book, The Smartest Kids in the World, journalist Amanda Ripley tells the story of Kim, a 15-year-old Oklahoma girl who has the good fortune to spend a year going to school in Pietarsaari, on Finland's west coast. Kim is fortunate because she has landed quite by chance in a public school system that Ripley identifies as one of the world's best, a model of international academic performance year in and year out. Ripley reports on Kim's experience, and on the lives of her Finnish classmates, as she tries to identify the reasons for Finnish kids' superior academic performance.
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What’s a GPA? When College Campus Is a Strange Land
My grandfather entered the Pennsylvania coal mines as a child, and was out of work much of his adult life. Neither he nor my grandmother got much in the way of formal education, and they eked out a precarious living on the poverty line. I can’t know what they dreamed, but the idea of a college education was as distant as the moon. So when my father, a World War II veteran, decided to take advantage of the GI Bill and attend teachers’ college, he was hopelessly lost. He was academically unprepared, but even more troubling, he was culturally unprepared. He had nobody to guide his first steps into this strange new culture, with its unfamiliar institutions and arcane rules.
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Why Me? Perceptions of Justice Influence Pain Experiences
Life has its many twists and turns – to make sense of all of it, people sometimes take a “just world” approach, reasoning that people get more or less what they deserve. But there are some experiences – like chronic, intractable pain – that are difficult to reconcile with a sense of justice. “We learn that justice is important, but there is no universal consensus on what is just or unjust or guidance on how to respond to injustice,” write researchers Joanna McParland and Christopher Eccelston in a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
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Breathing In vs. Spacing Out
The New York Times: Two and a half millenniums ago, a prince named Siddhartha Gautama traveled to Bodh Gaya, India, and began to meditate beneath a tree. Forty-nine days of continuous meditation later, tradition tells us, he became the Buddha — the enlightened one. More recently, a psychologist named Amishi Jha traveled to Hawaii to train United States Marines to use the same technique for shorter sessions to achieve a much different purpose: mental resilience in a war zone.
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Can Having a Foreign Accent Hurt Your Career?
English is increasingly considered to be the global language of business. But people who speak it as a second language are generally passed over for top managerial jobs and executive positions, studies have shown. New psychological research reveals the factors underlying this glass ceiling. A trio of researchers led by Laura Huang, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, hypothesized that non-native speakers of English are perceived as having weak political skills — which is considered essential for career success.
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How to Keep Your Resolutions
The New York Times: IT’S that time of year again. Maybe it’s your waistline you’re worried about, or maybe it’s the smoking habit you just can’t seem to kick. To improve your chances of keeping your New Year’s resolutions, we offer four tips inspired by recent research on behavioral economics and health. We focus on health, but our suggestions should help with other goals, too. First, make a concrete plan. When you do so, you both embed your intentions firmly in memory (which reduces forgetting) and make it harder to postpone good behavior, since doing so requires breaking an explicit commitment to yourself.
