Presence of Learning Styles on Twitter: A One-Month Analysis
(What-is-my-learning-style.com)
I tapped into my experimental psychology expertise (that last word expressed oh so loosely) to gauge how learning styles are represented on Twitter among English speakers. Does the Twitterverse largely favor them, oppose them, or represent a collision of the irresistible force and the immovable object (which one is which I will let you, the reader, decide)?
Your Guide to Flying Solo at APA 2019
(APA 2019 Blog)
Heading to APA 2019 on your own? Not sure how to engage with other attendees? Don’t worry! There are many ways to make connections as a solo attendee.
Tackling Misconceptions Through Conceptual Change – Part 2
(3-Star Learning Experiences)
In our last blog, we discussed what misconceptions are and that they’re very hard to eradicate. In this blog, we dive into some examples of misconceptions to make it a bit more concrete and to understand, as learning professionals, what types of misconceptions people can have so that we can design accordingly.
New Study Links Problematic Smartphone Use to Poor Academic Grades, Alcohol Misuse and Mental Health Problems
(AFP Relax News via Yahoo News)
New research has found that university students who describe their smartphone use as “problematic” are also more likely to experience mental health problems, have a higher number of sexual partners, and receive lower grades.
Student Debt Forgiveness Sounds Good. What Might Happen If The Government Did It?
(NPR – Education)
Americans owe about $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. That’s about twice the current budget for the Defense Department and around 22 times the budget for the Education Department.
See the Winning Videos of the APA PsycShorts Contest
(APA’s Psychological Science Agenda)
Twelve exceptional videos communicate the breadth and depth of psychological science. Entrants were asked to create a video — no longer than two minutes in length — that accurately and creatively explains a concept or finding from psychological science. Supporting references were required with each submission. Nearly 200 videos from across the world, from people of all ages, and representing all areas of psychology were submitted by the April 2019 deadline.
Working With Undergraduate Research Assistants: Effective for You, Enriching for Them
(APA’s Psychological Science Agenda)
Undergraduate research assistants (RAs) are an essential component of most psychology research labs. They recruit and run participants, enter data, act as confederates, code surveys and so much more. Many of us worked as RAs during our own undergraduate careers and perhaps even discovered our passion for psychological science in the process.
A New Device for Treating ADHD in Children
(APA’s Monitor on Psychology)
The FDA-cleared device produced a meaningful reduction in ADHD symptoms in a clinical trial
Good Home Learning in Early Years Boosts Your Secondary School Achievements
(Science Daily)
The positive effects of a rich home learning environment during a child’s early years continue into adolescence and help improve test scores later in life, according to a new study.
Teens ‘Mocked’ by Their Parents Are at Greater Risk for Bullying, Victimization
(Science Daily)
New evidence suggests that adolescent bullying and victimization may have origins in the home. Many bullies have parents who are hostile, punitive and rejecting. A unique longitudinal study provides a more complete understanding of how parents’ belittling and critical interactions with adolescents thwart their ability to maintain positive relationships with peers. Derisive parenting precipitates a cycle of negative affect and anger between parents and adolescents, which ultimately leads to greater adolescent bullying and victimization.
How Does Playing With Other Children Affect Toddlers’ Language Learning?
(Science Daily)
Toddlers are surprisingly good at processing the speech of other young children, according to a new study. And toddlers who have more exposure to other children, such as those in daycare, may be particularly good at certain word learning skills.
Socrates’ Critique of 21st-Century Neuroscience
(Scientific American)
The ancient thinker saw limits to what natural science can tell us about ourselves
In the Tough Academic Job Market, Two Principles Can Help You Maximize Your Chances
(Scientific Magazine)
The job market—both inside and outside of academia—is full of random events. There are major differences in the hiring processes between countries, between schools, between departments, between search committees in different years, and even between people within a single search committee in a given year. This noise in the system makes it difficult to determine exactly how decisions are made or what you can do to prepare.
Odds Are, Your Doctorate Will Not Prepare You for a Profession Outside Academe
(The Chronicle of Higher Education)
As a Ph.D., you may end up in a lot of different careers outside of academe, but you don’t need a doctorate for the vast majority of them. Those careers are not something you do with the Ph.D.; they’re what you do after the Ph.D. The distinction matters.
Public Attitudes Toward Gifted Education: Supportive, Complacent, Incomplete
(Flypaper)
Gifted education, by comparison, is limp, struggling, and low visibility. (In my experience, its weakness in advocacy is matched only by education research!) It has few influential champions, save for a handful of superintendents and local board members.
Want More Creativity? Help Children See Themselves Differently
(Education Week’s Inside School Research – Subscription Required, Free Trial)
A series of experiments published in the journal Developmental Science finds that children who are reminded that they have “multiple identities”—being a brother, a student, and a baseball player at the same time, for example—performed better at creative problem-solving tasks than peers in a control group. They also were more likely to go beyond basic gender and race when considering other people’s identities.
The Deficit Lens of the ‘Achievement Gap’ Needs to Be Flipped. Here’s How
(Education Week – Subscription Required, Free Trial)
My fellow social psychologists and I spent years documenting the conditions that students need to thrive and develop, like the need to belong, to see work as relevant, and to understand that academic abilities can improve. But as those concepts have been popularized in education in recent years, I have watched in terror as those insights about the conditions students need to thrive have transformed into yet another set of “competencies” in which students can be labeled deficient.
A Growing Number of American Teenagers – Particularly Girls – Are Facing Depression
(Pew Research Center’s FactTank)
Academic and social pressures are among the reasons cited by experts who have studied teen depression. The Center’s survey asked about some of those pressures teens face in their daily lives. About six-in-ten teens (61%) said they personally felt a lot of pressure to get good grades, while roughly three-in-ten reported a lot of pressure to look good and fit in socially (29% and 28%, respectively).
At Your Wits’ End With A Screen-Obsessed Kid? Read This
(NPR)
The negative relationship between teens’ mental health and technology use is real — but tiny, the researchers found. It is extremely, extremely small,” says Amy Orben, the lead author of that paper and two other related studies. “A teenager’s technology use can only predict less than 1% of variation in well-being. It’s so small that it’s surpassed by whether a teenager wears glasses to school.”
This Is How Students Really Feel About Retrieval Practice
(Retrieval Practice)
Here’s how my college students reacted yesterday when I asked them about retrieval practice. (Spoiler alert: They love them – and literally ask for more.)
Many Students Are in Crisis. So Is America’s School Counseling System
(Governing)
As mental health becomes less stigmatized and existential threats like school shootings and climate change supercharge a school child’s worries, kids are beginning to expect — and need — more mental health guidance. Menard says kids are googling their symptoms and come into her office and say they have depression or anxiety. “It’s self-diagnosis,” she says, “but still, there’s something behind that — they have a need.”
Educating the Next Generation
(APA’s Monitor on Psychology – Datapoint)
Approximately one in five psychologists with a research doctorate work primarily as college and university professors, according to a 2017 survey from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.
Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong
(The Atlantic)
In the early grades, U.S. schools value reading-comprehension skills over knowledge. The results are devastating, especially for poor kids.
These Are The People Struggling The Most To Pay Back Student Loans
(NPR)
The people who are really struggling, experts say, are the roughly 1 million borrowers who default on their student loans each year — about 7 million borrowers in total at the end of 2018, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Education Department.
Exclusive: Growth Mindset Lessons Had No Impact
(Tes.Com)
Study of more than 5,000 Year 6 pupils found growth mindset lessons made no difference to maths or reading results.
Six Tips for Teaching Writing in Psychology
(Division 2’s Society for the Teaching of Psychology)
Since 2014, I have been teaching PSY 201: Writing for Psychology, which is a required writing intensive course for our Psychology majors. Initially, being in charge of this course was anxiety-provoking as I did not have any prior experience of teaching something similar. From my students’ perspective, taking another writing course after their two 100-level English courses was also not too exciting. Overtime, however, I have developed a strong passion for teaching this course. Not only do I enjoy teaching writing, I have also developed a few ideas based on evidence-based teaching principles to enhance the quality of my teaching. The purpose of this essay is to share these tips with fellow psychology instructors in the hope that they may find them helpful.
