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THE 34th ANNUAL NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON THE TEACHING OF PSYCHOLOGY
NITOP January 2012: There Is Still Time to Register Registration is still open as of Novermber 15, 2011, for the 34th Annual National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology, January 3-6, 2012, at the TradeWinds Island Grand Hotel in St. Pete Beach, Florida. For the full program, other details about the conference, and to register, visit www.nitop.org.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Independent Allocation of Attention to Eye and Hand Targets in Coordinated Eye-Hand Movements Donatas Jonikatis and Heiner Deubel When a person reaches for an object, he or she will often look where they reach. But which requires more attention, the hand or the eye movements? Researchers conducted a series of experiments in which participants made simultaneous hand and eye movements to separate locations. The participants were able to allocate their attention equally to both locations, which suggests that even though hand and eye movements are connected, attention limits do not constrain the selection of targets for hand and eye movements.
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Return Migration and Identity: Nan Sussman
Check out APS Member Nan Sussman of the College of Staten Island, The City University of New York in this WNYC segment: The Leonard Lopate Show: Return Migrations and Identity from March 16, 2011. Nearly a million residents of Hong Kong migrated to North America, Europe, and Australia in the 1990s; recently many of these immigrants have returned to their homeland. In Return Migrations and Identity, psychology professor Nan Sussman chronicles this global trend and explains why there is a unique relevance for Hong Kong. She’s joined by Byron Shen, a Chinese immigrant who came to the United States for his Ph.D.
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Why Arguing Improves Students’ Reasoning Skills
TIME: American educators agreed last year that argumentative reasoning should be taught in schools when those in most states adopted the new Common Core State Standards, a state-led effort to establish educational benchmarks to prepare kindergarten through 12th grade students for college and career. Reaching a similar consensus on how to teach the art of arguing, however, hasn't been as easy. But a new study published in the journal Psychological Science could offer a solution in the form of dialogue. Researchers Deanna Kuhn and Amanda Crowell created a new curriculum for teaching reasoning skills that emphasized discussion and tested it on 48 sixth graders.
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Social Science Palooza II
The New York Times: The nice thing about being human is that you never need to feel lonely. Human beings are engaged every second in all sorts of silent conversations — with the living and the dead, the near and the far. Researchers have been looking into these subtle paraconversations, and in this column I’m going to pile up a sampling of their recent findings. For example, Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim wrote a fantastic book excerpt in Sports Illustrated explaining home-field advantage. Home teams win more than visiting teams in just about every sport, and the advantage is astoundingly stable over time. So what explains the phenomenon? Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries?
It's not just how free the market is. Some economists are looking at another factor that determines how much a country's economy flourishes: how smart its people are. For a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies. In the last 50 years or so, economists have started taking an interest in the value of human capital. That means all of the qualities of the people who make up the workforce.
