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A Small Fix in Mind-Set Can Keep Students in School
The Wall Street Journal: Education is the engine of social mobility and equality. But that engine has been sputtering, especially for the children who need help the most. Minority and disadvantaged children are especially likely to be suspended from school and to drop out of college. Why? Is it something about the students or something about the schools? And what can we do about it? Two recent studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offer some hope. Just a few brief, inexpensive, online interventions significantly reduced suspension and dropout rates, especially for disadvantaged groups.
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Tutors See Stereotypes and Gender Bias in SAT. Testers See None of the Above.
The New York Times: In an annual ritual, hundreds of thousands of students took the SAT this spring as they made their first steps toward applying to college. But they were not the only ones being tested. Sprinkled among them in May, when the SAT was given for the second time since a much-ballyhooed revamping, were a number of people long past college — members of the test-prep industry who took the exam to see how those changes played out in practice so that they could improve their tutoring services. Armed with perhaps sharper pencils and a more jaundiced eye than the typical 17-year-old, they noticed two questions that some thought could throw off the performance of girls. ...
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Does being paid hourly vs. yearly change how you save?
PBS: The majority of all workers in the United States were paid hourly last year. Typically, hourly wage earners have low incomes and are vulnerable to economic shocks. So we wondered, does being paid hourly instead of yearly somehow change the way people view themselves and their work? According to a well-established psychological theory known as “construal theory,” the answer is yes. According to construal theory, people view the distant future much differently than they view today, tomorrow or next week. When we think about long-term plans, we consider intangible factors like goals and desires. When we think about our future retirement, we envision ourselves relaxing on the golf course.
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The War on Stupid People
The Atlantic: As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores.
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How You Fight With Your Spouse May Affect Different Body Parts
The New York Times: Emotions are known to influence health, especially when they are negative or intensely felt. Chronically angry, sad, frustrated or fearful people tend to become chronically unwell, though which emotions go with which conditions has not received much scrutiny in recent years. A new look at old research from a long-term study of married couples, however, has found some striking correlations, according to an article that appeared in the journal Emotion in May. ... “We just pushed the right buttons,” says Robert Levenson, a professor of psychology at Berkeley and the senior author of the new study. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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How We Explain Things Shapes What We Think Is Right
New research focuses on a fundamental human habit: When trying to explain something (why people give roses for Valentine’s Day, for example), we often focus on the traits of the thing itself (roses are pretty) and not its context (advertisers promote roses). In a new study, researchers found that people who tend to focus on “inherent traits” and ignore context also are more likely to assume that the patterns they see around them are good. The findings are forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
