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How Students and Teachers Relate
How a teacher relates to his or her students has tremendous influence on a student’s learning experience. So Matthew G. Mandelbaum of Fordham University and PsySoEd Dynamics, LLC asked childhood and early-childhood educators about the approaches they use in their classrooms to solve problems and maintain motivation. He asked whether they would develop a new curriculum in an adventurous or a structured style, if they typically seek to develop deep relationships with students (relational approach), and if they pursued professional development opportunities (mastery). In general, he found that teachers who were adventurous were also more relational.
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Stereotype Threat, Self-Worth, and God’s Love
People who experience stereotype threat may depend on outside factors such as god’s love for confidence and self-esteem. These findings were presented by Claribel Candelario Martinez at the 24th APS Annual Convention in Chicago. Previous research shows that people exposed to stereotype threat — that is, “situations placing them at risk for confirming negative in-group stereotypes” — are more likely “to underperform on challenging tasks.” Women, for example, may feel threatened by (and underperform on) difficult math problems due to the stereotype that women lack the ability to excel in math.
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New Research From Current Directions in Psychological Science
Yuko Munakata, Hannah R. Snyder, and Christopher H. Chatham When children are young, they can get stuck in routine ways of thinking and behaving. As children grow, they develop the ability to break out of routines and think more flexibly. In this article, the authors discuss how the development of abstract goal representations supports three key transitions that lead to more flexible behavior. They conclude by discussing the current and future direction of this research. The Brain's Learning and Control Architecture Jason M.
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Expectations influences outcomes
United Press International: Suggestion -- a rabbit's foot or a lucky coin -- can influence how people perform on learning and memory tasks, New Zealand and U.S researchers said. Maryanne Garry and Robert Michael of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and Irving Kirsch of Harvard Medical School in Boston said the powerful and persuasive effect that suggestion has relies on a person's "response expectancies," or the ways in which people anticipate responses in various situations. These expectations set people up for automatic responses that actively influence how people get to the outcome expected, the researchers said.
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Why Smart People Are Stupid
The New Yorker: Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.) For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking.
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Diamond Jubilee: Why The ‘Right Kind Of Patriotism’ Benefits Health
Huffington Post: Ignore those twinges of cynicism and embrace your inner patriot this weekend, as studies regularly show that nationalism makes people happy. However, how happy you feel also depends on what you’re taking pride in, noted researchers earlier this year. In a report for Psychological Science, Matthew Wright, a political scientist at American University, and Tim Reeskens, a sociologist from Catholic University in Belgium found that more national pride correlated with greater personal wellbeing. But they also noticed that those individuals who connected nationalism with respect for a country’s institutions and values, rather than race or religion, were the most content.
