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Practice without cramming can optimise learning, study reveals
The Telegraph: Quality is just as important as quantity when it comes to practice, a University of Sheffield study has revealed. The research, which analysed game play data from 850,000 people, has revealed that the way you revise or practise is potentially more important than how often, and can affect how efficiently people learn a skill. The study found that players who seemed to learn more quickly had either spaced out their practice or had a more variable early performance in the game.
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Goodnight. Sleep Clean.
The New York Times: SLEEP seems like a perfectly fine waste of time. Why would our bodies evolve to spend close to one-third of our lives completely out of it, when we could instead be doing something useful or exciting? Something that would, as an added bonus, be less likely to get us killed back when we were sleeping on the savanna? “Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild,” Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, told me. “It has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.” Read the whole story: The New York Times
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The Most Focused Kids in the World?
The Huffington Post: In her new, provocatively titled book, The Smartest Kids in the World, journalist Amanda Ripley tells the story of Kim, a 15-year-old Oklahoma girl who has the good fortune to spend a year going to school in Pietarsaari, on Finland's west coast. Kim is fortunate because she has landed quite by chance in a public school system that Ripley identifies as one of the world's best, a model of international academic performance year in and year out. Ripley reports on Kim's experience, and on the lives of her Finnish classmates, as she tries to identify the reasons for Finnish kids' superior academic performance.
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What’s a GPA? When College Campus Is a Strange Land
My grandfather entered the Pennsylvania coal mines as a child, and was out of work much of his adult life. Neither he nor my grandmother got much in the way of formal education, and they eked out a precarious living on the poverty line. I can’t know what they dreamed, but the idea of a college education was as distant as the moon. So when my father, a World War II veteran, decided to take advantage of the GI Bill and attend teachers’ college, he was hopelessly lost. He was academically unprepared, but even more troubling, he was culturally unprepared. He had nobody to guide his first steps into this strange new culture, with its unfamiliar institutions and arcane rules.
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Why Me? Perceptions of Justice Influence Pain Experiences
Life has its many twists and turns – to make sense of all of it, people sometimes take a “just world” approach, reasoning that people get more or less what they deserve. But there are some experiences – like chronic, intractable pain – that are difficult to reconcile with a sense of justice. “We learn that justice is important, but there is no universal consensus on what is just or unjust or guidance on how to respond to injustice,” write researchers Joanna McParland and Christopher Eccelston in a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
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Breathing In vs. Spacing Out
The New York Times: Two and a half millenniums ago, a prince named Siddhartha Gautama traveled to Bodh Gaya, India, and began to meditate beneath a tree. Forty-nine days of continuous meditation later, tradition tells us, he became the Buddha — the enlightened one. More recently, a psychologist named Amishi Jha traveled to Hawaii to train United States Marines to use the same technique for shorter sessions to achieve a much different purpose: mental resilience in a war zone.
