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Competence vs. Performance
The field of developmental psychology is fraught with some very popularized but misunderstood dichotomies. Nature versus is nurture is probably the most well known, but another important distinction is that between competence and performance. Jeff mentioned a little bit about this distinction a few months ago in his post about desirable difficulties in the classroom…
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What are the Areas of Study within Psychology?
The field of psychology had its modern origin just over 100 years ago, and yet interest in the field has grown rapidly. Researchers with broad and varied interests have expanded the field, and as a result there are many different subdisciplines. Highlighted here are several key areas of psychology. Biological psychologists apply biological principles to…
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The Power of Glasses: Evidence-Based Charitable Giving, Part 2
In the poor, rural Gansu province in China, 10-15% of young students need glasses but only 2% of those kids actually have glasses. To follow up on my previous post on the science of charitable giving, in this post I’ll briefly describe a recent study which found that simply giving these students glasses significantly increased…
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Society For Research in Child Development – Day 2
Up to the minute reporting. This was first posted on the Society for Research in Adolescence’ website. So much interesting research to report on. Today was the day I presented at a symposium I organized that Brad Brown chaired called From Texting to Social Networking Sites to Virtual Worlds: Examining Youth Media Practices. Many of…
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China – Education and Parenting — How does it differ from US?
This is the last piece in a four part series on sociocultural forces that influence academic achievement in India, Japan and China first posted on Parenting in the Digital Age. The last article talked about Japan. China: Educational Promise Out of the three countries of comparison, China holds the most promise to overtake the US…
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Who Should Get Your Charity Money? Scientific Perspectives on Giving
In the past, my partner and I have mostly haphazardly divvied up our good intentions to whichever charities are most easily accessible to us because of advertisements or a person standing in a grocery store parking lot. Lately, we are rethinking that (lack of) strategy. As Yale economists Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel wrote in…
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Affirming Values and Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap
As school performance becomes a bigger issue in the United States, many policy leaders, teachers and administrators are looking at the plethora of issues faces our schools. One such issue is the racial achievement gap. It seems that many minorities are not receiving the same grades as their white and Asian peers. A number of…
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Desirable Difficulties in Math Teaching
Continuing in the spirit of my last post, which overviewed the desirable difficulties literature, and Carole Yue’s recent post on how desirable difficulties can improve induction tasks, today I’m highlighting some recent research on applying such difficulties to math learning and practice. As a quick recap, desirable difficulties are adjustments to teaching that slow down…
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Desirable Difficulties and Inductive Learning
Last month, Jeff Bye’s post on desirable difficulties in the classroom inspired some good discussion. One question that came up was, Do desirable difficulties only apply to rote memory tasks, or can we use them for other types of learning as well? I’m going to expand on that idea using inductive learning as an example.…
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Child development outcomes with same-sex parents
In November 2010, the Pew Research Center released results of a poll that showed that 43% of people agreed with the statement that gay or lesbian couples raising children are bad for society, 41% believe that it doesn’t make a difference, and only 12% saying that they believed it was good for society. The authors…