Published: December 17, 2009
Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you’ve pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you’re not alone— for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student’s particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public.
The wide appeal of the idea that some students will learn better when material is presented visually and that others will learn better when the material is presented verbally, or even in some other way, is evident in the vast number of learning-style tests and teaching guides available for purchase and used in schools. But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their own unique style?
Unfortunately, the answer is no, according to a major new report published this month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, [continue reading…]
Published: December 10, 2009
Children with poor reading skills who underwent an intensive, six-month training program to improve their reading ability showed increased connectivity in a particular brain region, in addition to making significant gains in reading, according to a study funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The study was published in the Dec. 10, 2009, issue of Neuron. [continue reading…]
Published: September 16, 2009
Reading a book by Franz Kafka –– or watching a film by director David Lynch –– could make you smarter!
According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions. The researchers’ findings appear in an article published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science. [continue reading…]
Published: September 10, 2009
Image: iStockphoto
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In Newsweek today Wray Herbert tell us why Sucking up his its limits
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 Remember the apple polisher? In my school days, apple polishers were kids who kissed up to the teacher. They would tell their biology teacher, I’ve wanted to be a biologist since I was 3; or say to the English instructor, I’m reading Faulkner’s novels on my own time, just for fun. They’d ask for permission to work ahead.
The phrase may be archaic, but kids still try to game the system, from grade school to college. And we’re not talking about total frauds, those modern-day Eddie Haskells dripping insincerity. Some of these kids believe that ingratiating themselves with teachers and professors is the proper path to success. They really do want to do well in school, but they see being popular with the teacher as a measure of their success …. continue reading
Source: Newsweek
