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10 Years In, Tulsa’s Pre-K Investment Is Paying Off
NPR: Researchers have been tracking Jose Arriaga since he was 4 years old, waiting for the day he would start ninth grade. This fall, Jose is a freshman at Booker T. Washington High School, a selective public school in north Tulsa, Okla. And no one is more proud of him than his mother, Veronica Arriaga. "He's been a straight-A student throughout middle school," Mrs. Arriaga says in Spanish. "That's why he's here." ... "These children did show huge gains in early math and early literacy skills," says Deborah Phillips, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown University who has been overseeing the study.
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Les devoirs de maths de votre enfant vous stressent? Ne l’aidez pas! (Your child’s math homework stresses you out? Don’t help!)
Slate.fr: Les maths vous donnent des sueurs froides? Posez ce stylo, cette calculatrice et éloignez-vous tout de suite de cet enfant. C'est, plus ou moins, la recommandation faite par les chercheurs de l'université de Chicago, à travers une étude publiée dans la revue Psychological Science et relayée par le New York Times. Les enfants dont les parents sont rétifs aux mathématiques deviennent eux-mêmes allergiques à cette matière, mais seulement quand leurs parents les aident à faire leurs devoirs. Read the whole story: Slate.fr
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How understanding the prisoner’s dilemma can help bridge liberal and conservative differences
The Conversation: In my social psychology class, I pose an extra credit question where students choose between having two points or six points added onto their final term paper grade, with the stipulation that if more than 10% of the class chooses six points, no one gets any points. This exercise is a classroom demonstration of the commons dilemma, and similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. Essentially, people are forced to choose between what would maximize their personal outcomes (more points) and what would be best for the group as a whole (fewer points). It’s worth noting that this exercise was developed 25 years ago.
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Mindfulness May Make Memories Less Accurate
The mechanism that seems to underlie the benefits of mindfulness might also affect people’s ability to determine the origin of a given memory.
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How Startups Are Using Tech To Try And Fight Workplace Bias
NPR: We all harbor biases — subconsciously, at least. We may automatically associate men with law enforcement work, for example, or women with children and family. In the workplace, these biases can affect managers' hiring and promotion decisions. So when Pete Sinclair, who's chief of operations at the cybersecurity firm RedSeal, realized that — like many other Silicon Valley companies — his company had very few female engineers and few employees who weren't white, Chinese or Indian, he wanted to do something about it.
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Psychology Is Not in Crisis
The New York Times: IS psychology in the midst of a research crisis? An initiative called the Reproducibility Project at the University of Virginia recently reran 100 psychology experiments and found that over 60 percent of them failed to replicate — that is, their findings did not hold up the second time around. The results, published last week in Science, have generated alarm (and in some cases, confirmed suspicions) that the field of psychology is in poor shape. But the failure to replicate is not a cause for alarm; in fact, it is a normal part of how science works. Read the whole story: The New York Times
