Articles About learning science
The Von Restorff Effect: Distinctive Items Survive, Similar Ones Blur
The story everyone tells puts a spotlight on the odd item. The woman whose name is on the effect argued something closer to the opposite about the crowd.
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33
9 Sep
The Serial Position Effect: The Middle of a List Disappears First
The curve is real and replicates in list after list. But the textbook account of half of it has been disputed since 1974, and the leftover is the good part.
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35
8 Sep
Goal Setting Theory: Specific and Hard Beats Do Your Best
The theory is usually taught as five principles with no numbers attached. Here are the numbers, and the failure mode built into the same mechanism.
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35
5 Sep
Productive Failure: Why Solving It Wrong First Makes the Lesson Stick
The best experiment against this method tested ten-year-olds. The meta-analysis for it says the effect reverses at that age. Neither side cites the other on it.
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35
23 Aug
Peer Pressure: Why the Presence of Friends Changes an Adolescent Brain
In the experiments that made this finding famous the friends were in another room and could not speak to the teenager at all. The risk taking went up anyway.
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35
23 Aug
Mastery Goals vs Performance Goals: What You Are Really Studying For
For thirty years the advice was to study to learn and not to compete. Then somebody pooled 243 studies and found the opposite pattern in the grades.
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49
21 Aug
Self-Determination Theory: Why Rewarding a Child for Reading Makes Them Read Less
The famous meta-analysis narrows the damage to one shape of reward. What decides the outcome is not the size of the prize but its distance from reading.
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54
21 Aug
Learned Helplessness: The Famous Experiment Its Own Author Later Corrected
The 1967 experiment is famous. What almost nobody mentions is that the researchers behind it later published a paper calling their own interpretation backwards.
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49
16 Aug
Brain Temperature: Why Heat Slows Thinking Before You Notice It
Your brain runs about two degrees hotter than your mouth, swings almost a full degree across the day, and loses control before heat feels like a problem.
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40
14 Aug
