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Why Paying Kids to Do Homework Can Backfire
TIME: Money talks, right? So why should kids be any less susceptible to what the dollars are telling them? They aren’t, and that’s the problem. Enticing kids with monetary rewards for reading books or performing well on tests is certainly tempting for parents, especially if their children are game. But the latest studies on paying kids to do academic tasks like reading more books, or to improve test scores found a negligible to zero positive effect on their standardized test results, and other measures of academic performance. ...
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The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience and the Science of Persuasion
Scientific American: On the heels of the decade of the brain and the development of neuroimaging, it is nearly impossible to open a science magazine or walk through a bookstore without encountering images of the human brain. As prominent neuroscientist, Martha Farah, remarked “Brain images are the scientific icon of our age, replacing Bohr’s planetary atom as the symbol of science”. The rapid rise to prominence of cognitive neuroscience has been accompanied by an equally swift rise in practitioners and snake oil salesmen who make promises that neuroimaging cannot yet deliver.
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Disaster Relief Donations Track Number of People Killed, Not Survivors
People pay more attention to the number of people killed in a natural disaster than to the number of survivors when deciding how much money to donate to disaster relief efforts, according to new research
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‘Everyday sadists’ receive emotional boost from seeing others suffer, studies show
National Post: Two new studies show that people who score high on a measure of sadism seem to enjoy pleasure from behaviours that hurt others, and are even willing to spend extra effort to make someone else suffer. New research led by psychological scientist Erin Buckels of the University of British Columbia suggests that everyday sadism is real and more common than previously thought. The new findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Parents’ Music Shapes the Way Kids Think, Study Finds
The Wall Street Journal: Today’s music fans have more positive memories of the songs of their parents’ generation than had been previously thought, according to a study published in the current edition of Psychological Science.
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Don’t waste your time: The best and worst study techniques
The Journal News: Are you highlighter happy? If so, you can blame that B- on the bright fluorescent pink, yellow and greens lines running through your textbooks. When it comes to study techniques, highlighters, mnemonics and re-reading just don’t make the grade, according to a report released by the Association for Psychological Science. In the report, Professor John Dunlosky of Kent State University and a team of psychological scientists reviewed the scientific evidence for 10 learning techniques commonly used by students. So what gets an A+, or as the report puts it, “high utility”?
