A Change in Perspective Could be All It Takes to Succeed in School

 
Knowing the right way to handle stress in the classroom and on the sports field can make the difference between success and failure for the millions of students going back to school this fall, new University of Chicago research shows.
“We found that cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress, can either be tied to a student’s poor performance on a math test or contribute to success, depending on the frame of mind of the student going into the test,” said Sian Beilock, associate professor in psychology at UChicago and one of the nation’s leading experts on poor performance by otherwise talented people.
She is the author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting it Right When You Have To, released this month in paperback.
In a new paper published in the current issue of the journal Emotion, Beilock and her colleagues explore the topic of performance failure in math and show, for the first time, that there is a critical connection between working memory, math anxiety and salivary cortisol.
Working memory is the mental reserve that people use to process information and figure out solutions during tests. Math anxiety is fear or apprehension when just thinking about taking a math test. Cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal gland and associated with stress-related changes in the body; it is often referred to as the “stress hormone.” [continue reading…]

Research is stimulated that by previous studies . So then what explains the finding of 2 John Hopkins researchers, Karen A. Robinson and Dr. Steven N. Goodman, how looked at how often clinical research studies cite previous findings.

They report in the Jan. 4 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine what Dr. Goodman describes as “a rather shocking result.” He summarizes: “No matter how many randomized clinical trials have been done on a particular topic, about half the clinical trials cite none or only one of them.“As cynical as I am about such things, I didn’t realize the situation was this bad,” Dr. Goodman said. It seems, Dr. Goodman said in an e-mail, that “either everyone thinks their study is really unique (when others thought it wasn’t), or they want to unjustifiably claim originality, or they just don’t know how or want to look.

Curious? Continue reading

Source: New York Times

Students can combat test anxiety and improve performance by writing about their worries immediately before the exam begins, according to a University of Chicago study published in the journal Science.

Researchers found that students who were prone to test anxiety improved their high-stakes test scores by nearly one grade point after they were given 10 minutes to write about what was causing them fear, according to the article, “Writing about Testing Boosts Exam Performance in the Classroom.” The article appears in the Jan. 14 issue of Science and is based on research supported by the National Science Foundation. [continue reading…]