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Do College Admissions by Lottery
The New York Times: The intense competition for admission to highly selective colleges and universities is destroying our kids. Suniya Luthar has spent about 20 years studying and documenting the growth of dysfunction among upper middle class youth, the prime candidates for admission to selective colleges. Luthar has found that extreme substance abuse, clinical depression, eating disorders and promiscuous sex are growing fast among these young people. Could there be a connection between these trends and the stress associated with applying to college? I think so. About 10 years ago, I suggested that admission to highly selective institutions should be done by lottery.
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Six reasons you’d be happier if you stopped saying “busy”
The Washington Post: A study in the Journal of Psychological Science shows that we’re much happier when there’s a lot going on in our life. But if keeping active and “busy” is positive for our health, why do we often feel overwhelmed or exhausted by our list of responsibilities? It may not be our “to do list” that is the source of our unhappiness. Instead, our choice of words can have a negative effect on our experience. A study on the psychological aspects of language use tells us that our words have more power than we may think. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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The Sound of Employability: Interviewers Judge Your Voice
New research has identified one factor that can make a job applicant come across as smarter, warmer, and ultimately more employable than other candidates: the sound of their voice. When it comes to acing a job interview, common wisdom holds that job applicants should dress smart, show up on time, and come prepared; but a new study from psychological scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder of the University of Chicago suggests that in order to put your best foot forward with a potential employer, job applicants should also make sure their voices are heard.
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Focusing the Brain on Better Vision
The New York Times: As adults age, vision deteriorates. One common type of decline is incontrast sensitivity, the ability to distinguish gradations of light to dark, making it possible to discern where one object ends and another begins. When an older adult descends a flight of stairs, for example, she may not tell the edge of one step from the next, so she stumbles. At night, an older driver may squint to see the edge of white road stripes on blacktop. Caught in the glare of headlights, he swerves. But new research suggests that contrast sensitivity can be improved with brain-training exercises.
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Your baby is doing little physics experiments all the time, according to a new study
The Washington Post: When an infant sees an object behave in a surprising way, she does everything she can to learn more about its mysteries, and the initial surprise ends up helping her learn. A new study suggests that a baby can identify an unusual object as being more worthwhile than a typical one, and she can run simple "experiments" on it to help her understand it. So your baby is basically a tiny scientific genius, which is worth remembering the next time she coats the walls in spaghetti. She's probably just doing science, dad. ... According to her research, it may be that surprise acts as a learning aid, spurring a baby to test the unusual properties they've just seen in an object.
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Fighting to save cursive from the Common Core
The Boston Globe: WHEN IT comes to the classic “three Rs” of education, reading and ’rithmetic are still going strong. But ’riting — at least by hand — has fallen on hard times. Today, the vast majority of adult composition takes place at the keyboard, not the paper tablet. Is handwriting, particularly cursive, really necessary in the digital age? Increasingly, the answer is not really. Common Core standards issued in 2010 do not include any requirements for handwriting instruction. Even education experts who would like to see more classroom time devoted to writing question whether every student still needs to be taught two entirely different styles of handwriting. ...
