What do young children need to be successful in school? Most people would say learning the ABCs and counting to 10. However, other important cognitive skills also are important. Inhibition (also sometimes labeled “inhibitory control” or “impulse control”) is a skill that is very important for children’s early success in school.
In a quite popular Ted Talk, Every Kid Needs A Champion, Dr. Rita Pierson says many great things about relationships and education. I have no doubt she was an incredible educator and mentor to students and teachers. You can see it and feel it in the way she delivers her talk; she’s got it. I believe this quote best summarizes her talk:
For some, summer already feels likes it’s over and the school bell is about to ring. For others, the start of school feels like it is barely on the horizon and that many long summer days are in between. Regardless of how you are feeling about the start of school, there are some easy things that you can do to make the transition into school easier for your Kindergartener. The way that children start school can contribute to establishing a positive trajectory in school. It is a good investment of a bit of your time over the summer to help get their school year off to a great start. Here are 7 Things to do this summer to get your child ready for Kindergarten:
Unless you’ve been under a rock, avoiding the most infamous jargon of education, you’ve heard the term ‘learning styles’. It has become quite the buzzword in the last decade or so and is almost said with a cringe today. In what can be described as a neuromyth, learning styles have taken a beating by recent research and should be laid to rest with other famous falsehoods of psychology and education. Shockingly enough, though, its proliferation still exists.
Are you a K-12 teacher, administrator, school support staff member or parent that feels concerned, confused or panicked when you hear a student make a threat? The following information will help you understand the 5 W’s related to threat appraisals, the safety process and help you create a plan of action to avoid major catastrophes now and in the future.
Too often teachers confuse compliance with accountability. Simply following directions and formulaically obeying the plan of the lesson is not accountability. In fact, punishing students with zeros, sending the student to the dean and other such tactics when they fall short of following the procedure of learning only results in reduced motivation and performance.
Social and emotional learning as a field of inquiry has gained tremendous momentum in academic research over the past decade. School leaders, looking for theoretical constructs to build successful school communities, find the pro-social data that supports social and emotional learning (SEL) in the classroom hard to ignore.
As social media drives information dissemination based on popularity rather than accuracy, “fake news” is seemingly everywhere. Political fake stories get more press, but science fake stories are also proliferating. Not all scientific misinformation is fake, strictly defined (Oremus, 2016). Much of it is simply misleading, sometimes even unintentionally. But regardless of the label, all variants of inaccurate information can be damaging to scientific literacy; it is incumbent on us to teach students to cull through scientific information in popular sources.
Fake science news is far from new. In the U.S., it has existed at least since an 1835 series in the New York Sun documenting life on the moon, which included unicorns and bat-like men who talked and flew (Goodman, 2010). The paper’s editors thought the hoax would be obvious, but the tales were widely believed. Such mass gullibility continues across a range of contexts, from scientific nonsense regarding causes of sexual orientation spread by sketchy academics (Shermer, 2016) to supposed medical miracles — think, goat’s milk that cleanses your body of parasites — spouted by actor Gwyneth Paltrow on her lifestyle website (Brown, 2017). The Stanford History Education Group studied middle school, high school and university students’ susceptibility to such misinformation and found shocking lapses of critical thinking at all levels (2016). For example, undergraduate students were shown a tweet with a link to a statistic about background checks for gun purchases. Only about a third noted the potential biasing influence of the political organizations that posted the tweet.
Fortunately, the psychology classroom provides ready opportunities to teach information literacy and scientific thinking, and there are increasingly ready-made teaching tools. The Stanford study provides sufficient detail to use their study stimuli as teaching tools. Even better, KQED’s The Lowdown provides a fake news lesson plan (PDF, 421KB) tied to the Stanford study, with links to additional helpful sources. The Center for News Literacy at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism also provides a wealth of resources, including a curriculum toolbox.
For its simplicity, however, the tool I use most often is the CRAAP test (Blakeslee, 2004). Many university libraries provide versions of the test that helps students ask good questions about a source’s:
Of the available versions, I’m partial to the one on Juniata College’s library website (PDF, 41KB) which lists several questions for each CRAAP test criterion.
CRAAP test detractors argue that it is overly simplistic (Burkholder, 2010). But others observe that we already naturally use heuristics in our evaluation of sources (Metzger, Flanagin & Medders, 2010). The CRAAP test might help us fine-tune these natural tendencies. Moreover, the CRAAP test is memorable and easy to use — elementary school students have even used it to evaluate sources about Big Foot (Knott & Szabo, 2013). And proponents of the tool stress the importance of teaching students to think about the spirit rather than the letter of the criteria (Wichowski, D. E. & Kohl, 2012).
In many of my courses, I end each chapter or section of the course with a 20-minute CRAAP-test activity. I share a source related to psychological science: a blog post, an app, a news article, a company, an information website. Students discuss in pairs, digging beyond the source to check out any links or citations. Then, we have a group discussion for students to share their evaluations. I sometimes choose an evidence-based article from a lesser-known publication or organization, so students are not immediately tipped off by the source — say, an article on the potential psychological damage from ballet training. More often, I choose a problematic one. For example, on the website for a company aimed at treating mental illness, my students found problems with claims that were exaggerated or either loosely connected or unrelated to the cited data, and discovered that a founder’s previous company had been cited for unscientific interventions. Toward the end of the semester, each student chooses her or his own source, which I approve, and succinctly critiques it using the CRAAP test in a two-page assignment. (See Nolan & Hockenbury, 2015, for additional critical thinking activities to promote scientific literacy.)
More research is needed to determine the outcomes of using tools like the CRAAP test, but psychology classrooms seem ideal for teaching students to critique scientific sources and studying how well various interventions work. Findings from scholars of teaching and learning may one day support the view that the CRAAP test is “the most concise, flexible and memorable evaluation tool of the series of checklist tests that have been proposed since the late 1990s” (Wichowski & Kohl, 2012).
Blakeslee, S. (2004). The CRAAP test. LOEX Quarterly, 31(3), 6-7.
Brown, K. (March 9, 2017). A women’s health magazine just printed Gwyneth Paltrow’s terrible health advice. Gizmodo. Retrieved from http://gizmodo.com/a-womens-health-magazine-just-printed-gwyneth-paltrow-s-1793122236.
Burkholder, J. M. (2010). Redefining sources as social acts: Genre theory in information literacy instruction. Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal). Paper 413. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/413.
Goodman, M. (2010). The sun and the moon: The remarkable true account of hoaxers, showmen, dueling journalists, and lunar man-bats in nineteenth-century New York. New York: Basic Books.
Knott, D., & Szabo, K. (2013). Bigfoot hunting Academic library outreach to elementary school students. College & Research Libraries News, 74, 346-348.
Metzger, M.J., Flanagin, A.J., & Medders, R.B. (2010). Social and heuristic approaches to credibility evaluation online. Journal of Communication, 60(3), 413-439.
Nolan, S.A. & Hockenburg, S.E. (2015). Think like a scientist: harnessing current events to teach psychological science. Psychology Teacher Network, 25(4). Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/ptn/2015/12/think-like-scientist.aspx.
Oremus, W. (Dec. 6, 2016). Stop calling everything “fake news.” Slate. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/12/stop_calling_everything_fake_news.html.
Shermer, M. (Dec. 1, 2016). Beware bogus theories of sexual orientation. Scientific American. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/beware-bogus-theories-of-sexual-orientation/.
Stanford History Education Group. (2016). Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Retrieved from https://sheg.stanford.edu/upload/V3LessonPlans/Executive%20Summary%2011.21.16.pdf (PDF, 3.36MB).
Wichowski, D.E., & Kohl, L.E. (2012). Establishing credibility in the information jungle: Blogs, microblogs, and the CRAAP test. In M. Folk & S. Apostel (Eds.), Online credibility and digital ethos: Evaluating computer-mediated communication (pp. 229-251). Hershey, Pennsylvania: Information Science Reference.
Kindergarten screening is a way to gauge your child’s current functioning and growth. It is a brief evaluation or assessment of several developmental domains of functioning in young children that typically takes place prior to the beginning of kindergarten. Although there are myriad benefits to kindergarten screening such as providing accurate estimates of your child’s functioning, informing you and professionals of areas of strengths and challenges, and assisting in planning interventions if necessary, it is not routinely conducted in the United States perhaps because it is not required. As the benefits of kindergarten screening continue to emerge, however, school systems may be more open to begin or enhance their kindergarten screening procedures. As a parent or caretaker, here’s what you should know.
Kevin, a bright, enthusiastic second-grader, has tremendous difficulties in school. He can’t seem to pay attention to his teacher’s instruction, gets distracted easily by activities around him, has trouble staying still in his seat, and often bothers his classmates by talking to them during work time or calling out without permission. As a result, Kevin gets very little work done and is getting increasingly further behind in math and reading. Kevin’s teacher and parents are very frustrated and blame each other for Kevin’s difficulties. Unfortunately, Kevin’s situation is very typical for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); a condition that affects between 5 to 10% of students in the US.