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Opinion: Math scares your child’s elementary school teacher — and that should frighten you
American students remain stumped by math. The 2019 scores for the National Assessment of Educational Progress test — known as NAEP — were published last month, showing that performance for fourth- and eighth-graders hasn’t budged since 2009. That’s a year after the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, convened by President George W. Bush, concluded that American math achievement was “mediocre.” The panel offered dozens of ideas for improvement, leading with the common-sense suggestion to strengthen the elementary math curriculum, which it deemed diffuse, shallow and repetitious in many schools.
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Charting how the time parents spend with kids changes as they grow up
There is a saying about kids passed down from one generation of parents to another: “When they are little, your arms hurt. When they are older, your heart hurts.” This is not just folk wisdom: According to data tracking how parents spend time with children at different ages, it checks out statistically. ... This is, of course, as it should be if the goal is to raise independent, competent adults. “Even if we could shape our children to come out a particular way, we would have defeated the point of having children in the first place,” says Alison Gopnik, a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Berkeley.
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The Secret Benefits of Retelling Family Stories
Telling family stories about crazy Uncle Joe or other eccentric relatives is a favorite pastime when families gather for the holidays. But will squirming children or Instagram-obsessed teens bother to listen? Actually, kids absorb more information from family stories than most adults think. And that knowledge bestows surprising psychological benefits, research shows. The best holiday stories are funny or entertaining and often convey life lessons, says Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor and director of Emory University’s Institute for Liberal Arts. “They have a very important function in teaching children, ‘I belong here.
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The world in a song
Although all human cultures appear to create music, the music of different cultures is incredibly varied, leading some scholars to question whether music is really, as Henry Longfellow claimed in 1835, a universal “language” of our species. If true, it would suggest that universal cognitive mechanisms exist that can both explain the unity and allow the diversity of the world's musics. Do such universal mechanisms exist? If so, can we investigate them empirically? On page 970 of this issue, a multidisciplinary team led by Samuel A.
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Why Gratitude Is Wasted on Thanksgiving
As a psychologist, I’ve spent the past 15 years studying how gratitude shapes people’s lives. Research, including my own, has shown that feeling grateful has positive effects on our behavior — making us more honest, increasing our self-control, enhancing our productivity at work and our relationships at home. Given that, you might expect me to think that Thanksgiving is one of the most important days of the year. After all, if there’s a day on which the benefits of gratitude are maximized, surely it’s the national holiday set aside for the purpose of expressing that emotion. ...
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Four Ways Gratitude Helps You with Difficult Feelings
Feeling grateful can bring us a variety of benefits, including better mental and physical health and improved relationships. We tend to think of gratitude as an emotion we experience when things are going well, one that is closely associated with well-being and contentment. But does it serve any purpose when life isn’t so rosy? ... In a 2014 study in Psychological Science, researchers asked 75 participants to remember a time they felt grateful, a time they felt happy, or what they did on a usual day. The participants then made a series of choices between smaller, short-term rewards (i.e., receiving less money but sooner) or larger, long-term rewards (i.e., receiving more money later).
