Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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anonymous on 09 Sep 10Wow!!!! If true, this is fascinating!!! Your brain is linking the Marshall Plan or Endocrine Systems to the shades of light in your bedroom or the smell of your couch.
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Max Cheng on 09 Sep 10It is interesting how you came across this article and liked it. My orchestra teacher Ms. Pipkin also showed the orchestra about this article and I liked it a lot and decided to do it for my blogging assignment. Ivan coincidentally also has the same article. I believe that this article is very TOK in form because it discusses the flaws of study habits, something we perceive as always right. Many believe that studying in a quiet place for a long time and focusing on subject by subject are the keys to success and getting the most out of each study period. However, through cognitive science studies, it is interesting how many scientists argue that a person should be in a room where the outside world can be sen (to have some distraction but not too much) and that a person should expose him or herself with many areas during one study sitting. So the whole argument boils down to "what is the right way to study?" and whether or not studying really helps. -max
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“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.
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Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.
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they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.
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“The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.
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“We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,”
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psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.
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The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.