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Classroom Decorations Can Distract Young Students
Scientific American: Remember your kindergarten classroom? The maps on the wall, the charts of the seasons on bulletin boards, the alphabet over the blackboard? I know I spent hours staring at the brightly colored decorations—and not listening to what my teacher was saying. Maybe you did, too. And it looks like we’re not alone. The more decorations in a classroom, the more distracted students may be. So finds a study in the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Football Teams with Too Much Talent May Lose Out
Business Standard: Are you betting for the team with maximum top-notch stars this FIFA World Cup in Brazil? Read on. Contrary to popular belief, researchers have found that after a certain point, the addition of more superstar talent to a team can actually be detrimental, resulting in poorer team performance. The presence of too many individuals with top talent can undermine players' willingness to coordinate, which can compromise effective teamwork and overall team performance, the findings showed. Read the whole story: Business Standard
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Lean Out: The Dangers For Women Who Negotiate
The New Yorker: This spring, an aspiring professor—W, as she’s chosen to call herself in a blog post about the experience—attempted to negotiate her tenure-track job offer with the Nazareth College philosophy department. She wanted a slightly higher salary than the starting offer, paid maternity leave for one semester, a pre-tenure sabbatical, a cap on the number of new classes that she would teach each semester, and a deferred starting date. “I know that some of these might be easier to grant than others,” she acknowledged in her e-mail. “Let me know what you think.” Nazareth didn’t hesitate to do just that: W wrote that the college promptly let her know that she was no longer welcome.
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Character Lab Opens Request for Proposals
Character Lab, a nonprofit cofounded by Angela Duckworth, is working to help fund, and eventually scale, interventions to boost student character strengths and skills in school settings. To this end, we are excited to share with you Character Lab's Request for Proposals (RFP), which can be found at www.characterlab.org/research/2014-rfp/. Through this RFP, Character Lab will award a total of $1.2 million in grants to support the execution of two-year, school-based research projects focused on grit, self-control, gratitude, open-mindedness and/or prosocial purpose during the 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 school years. Each proposal may request up to $300,000.
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A Captive African Elephant Calf Exhibits Precocious Social Relationships
African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in their native habitats live in groups of 2 to 50 elephants called family units, usually containing genetically related adult females and calves and juveniles of both sexes. A calf spends most of its time near its mother. Older calves increase the time they spend with other members of the family unit. “Allomothers,” usually young female relatives, assist in rearing a calf by providing comfort and safety. The dominant animal in the group (the “matriarch”) plays a critical role in group dynamics and survival.
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Language, Mind, and Human Nature
Hailed as one of the world’s most influential people, experimental psychologist Steven Pinker’s interests span all aspects of language, mind, and human nature. In his classic book The Language Instinct, Pinker argues that languages are learned but that language is an instinct — an evolutionary adaptation for the communication of complex ideas. Pinker has studied the meaning and acquisition of verbs, and what they tell us about concepts of causation, space, time, and intentions.
