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The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common.

Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.

The study followed people who used computer screens for learning versus paper reading to learn, and found that while screen learning helped solidify the details of the learning, paper reading helped readers better understand abstract concepts.

Better put, concrete memory from reading involves the who and when, whereas abstract concepts tend to lean towards where and why.

The results showed that abstract thinking was impacted by computer screens but concrete memory was not.

prevented them from zooming out to see a neighborhood, state or country

Because of these preferences—and because getting away from multipurpose screens improves concentration—people consistently say that when they really want to dive into a text, they read it on paper

Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory experiences typically associated with reading—especially tactile experiences—matter to people more than one might assume.

Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes

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Google Forms is a great free service for us in education

we are going to draw

kids are distracted and a little on edge these days, says the Tufts psychologist Christopher Willard

Child’s Mind: Mindfulness Practices to Help Our Children Be More Focused, Calm and Relaxed (Parallax Press)

The central idea of mindfulness, he says, is to bring a very focused awareness of the present moment into our everyday lives through things such as breathing exercises and actively listening to and observing the world around us.

We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.   We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.

I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.

The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.

What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.

However, this investigation does present a promising music-assisted treatment approach.

Factors contributing to the lack of findings from the cognitive measures included small sample size and inconsequential performance conditions. The results of this pilot study found a non-statistically significant trend in reduced cognitive symptoms of anxiety.

. Though relaxation training home-practice was monitored informally (i.e., via review of relaxation record sheets), a more formal record of compliance data would have helped to determine the impact of treatment adherence on treatment outcome.

We are pretty good at listening to students in terms of moans, groans and satisfaction,” says Healey. “We are not as good at going to the next stage, where partnership comes in, where we have students sitting at the table with us and making decisions