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Many students don’t know how to study. Here’s how parents can help.
Among the creative and maddening reasons kids come up with for not studying, one familiar one might be worth addressing: They don’t know how. Researchers and experienced educators have found that often students don’t have good study habits and skills, or that they rely on strategies that don’t work, frequently at the urging of teachers and parents. “It is somewhat shocking how many students just don’t know how to do it, which frustrates them and can turn them off to enjoying learning,” says Henry Roediger III, a professor of psychology and brain science at Washington University in St.
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Inside the lab using mind-changing psychology experiments to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict
To read a man’s mind, first you have to outline his skull. Last November, I watched a psychologist use a digital pen to draw the circumference of a man’s head. The coordinates of his brain were quickly mapped, pinpointing the precise areas within his skull that process emotions. Behind him, a massive magnetic mind-reader—a neuroimaging device called a magnetoencephalography, or MEG—emerged from the wall, funneling into an oversized white helmet. It took two scientists to slowly maneuver the apparatus into position around his head. As the man lay still, staring blankly up at a screen, researchers crossed wires over his body and taped sensors to his temples.
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What Can A Personality Test Tell Us About Who We Are?
In one of the most famous scenes from the Harry Potter series, a group of kids, new to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, line up before an old and crumpled wizard's hat. It is the sorting hat. The hat will tell them which house they'll belong to during their Hogwarts education. There is something deeply appealing about the sorting hat. It is wise. It seems to know people better than they know themselves. We humans love this kind of insight. And our drive to better understand ourselves and the people around us has led to the creation of a multi-billion dollar industry built around personality testing.
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Precrastination: When the Early Bird Gets the Shaft
My baby teeth never fell out. Instead, I yanked them out, roots and all, as soon as they were loose. I could have saved myself considerable pain by letting nature take its course. But I’m a serial “precrastinator”: I flip pancakes before bubbles have formed on the surface; I get to the grocery store before it opens; I turn in work before it’s due. The urge to complete a task is so strong I forge ahead even when I know waiting would lead to a better outcome. Yes, this might sound a little nonsensical. But it’s not uncommon.
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What Would a Dog Do on Mars?
Recently, NASA released colorful, dreamy illustrations depicting an imagined future in which human beings have made it to other worlds. A curly-haired astronaut floats inside a lunar space station, with the crater-pocked moon behind her. A lunar explorer steadies a camera on a tripod to photograph Earth in the distance. And an astronaut stands on the dunes of Mars with her hands in the pockets of her spacesuit, a dog at her side. Wait, a dog? To be clear, NASA’s ambitious plans for missions to the moon and Mars do not include dogs. (At least, none that the public knows about.
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Trying To Do Good
It's always better to help someone than not, right? We begin this episode in a virtual classroom. Several years ago Kellie Gillespie took an online course in social psychology, taught by Scott Plous of Wesleyan University. Hundreds of thousands of other people enrolled in the same online course. Kellie and her classmates were exposed to psychological concepts such as the norm of reciprocity: if you're nice to someone, or you open up to them, they're likely to do the same with you. They also learned about the power of empathy: when you put yourself in someone else's shoes, the relationship you have with them profoundly changes.
