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Q&A: Designing Game-Based Assessments That Engage Students
Education Week: Game-based assessments are making it easier for teachers to more quickly evaluate students in a dizzying number of ways. Arthur C. Graesser, a University of Memphis professor of experimental and cognitive psychology and the 2011 winner of the American Psychological Association's award for distinguished contributions of applications of psychology to education and training, spoke with Technology Counts Contributing Writer Robin L. Flanigan in a telephone interview about the current and future role of game-based assessments in the classroom. Read the whole story: Education Week
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Little kid brains vs. college smarts
San Francisco Chronicle: Guess what happened when some researchers gave an unusual gadget to both preschoolers and college students and asked them to figure out how it worked. Most parents already know the answer. Yep. The preschoolers took the college students to school. In short, the 4- and 5-year-old kids were more flexible, more willing to consider unlikely possibilities to make an seemingly unpredictable machine work, according to Alison Gopnik, UC Berkeley developmental psychologist and senior author of the paper released Thursday and published online in the journal, “Cognition.” Read the whole story: San Francisco Chronicle
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There’s a case against diversity in the workplace—but the alternative is even scarier
Quartz: Companies promote diversity in the workplace as a moral imperative with “bottom line benefits.” But research on the value of diversity is mixed. Some studies have found diverse teams—meaning workgroups comprised of employees of different races, genders, and backgrounds—promote creativity, nurture critical thinking, and tend to make better, more thoughtful decisions because they consider a wider range of perspectives. Other studies indicate diverse teams fuel interpersonal conflicts, reduce cohesion, and slow the pace of learning. The trouble with past research is it assumes only diverse settings are capable of changing how people behave, form impressions, and make decisions.
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Social Feedback Loop Aids Language Development
Verbal interactions between parents and children create a social feedback loop important for language development, according to research forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. That loop appears to be experienced less frequently and is diminished in strength in interactions with autistic children. “This loop likely has cascading impacts over the course of a child’s development,” says psychological scientist and study author Anne S. Warlaumont of the University of California, Merced.
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Be creative—like a criminal
The Boston Globe: If you need help thinking outside the box, you could do worse than to talk to some white-collar criminals. That’s one implication of a new study on the link between dishonesty and creativity. In several experiments, participants who were dishonest in reporting their performance on a task were also subsequently more creative. This was true even when controlling for initial creativity or when researchers made dishonest behavior hard to avoid. Because dishonesty is associated with breaking the rules, it enables more outside-the-box thinking; in fact, exposure to pictures of people breaking rules generated nearly the same effect. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Gestures Help Children Grasp Math
Science magazine: Children who are taught to use gestures to solve math problems demonstrate a deeper understanding of concepts, but why? A group of psychologists thinks it’s because the physical actions help youths understand abstract ideas. A study published online in Psychological Science describes how researchers taught a group of third graders to form a V-point gesture with their fingers (as seen in the image) to signify adding the numbers up, followed by pointing a finger at the blank in the equation to represent inserting the outcome in its place. Read the whole story: Science magazine
