New study links student motivations for going to college to their success. Why did you decide to go to college? Asking that question of new students in a more formal way might help colleges find ways to encourage more students to complete their programs, according to a new study from University of Rochester education researchers published in The Journal of College Student Development. The study found that students motivated by a desire for autonomy and competence tended to earn higher grades and show a greater likelihood of persistence than did other students. (The findings were controlled for academic background and various other factors, and were based on surveys of 2,500 students at a community college and a liberal arts college that were not identified.) The study comes at a time when many researchers are exploring the qualities that make some students more likely than others (of similar socioeconomic backgrounds and academic preparation) to succeed.
An Open Letter to College Freshmen. Improving Memory Involves More Than Gimmicks. Memory techniques, like visualized associations, are important for improving memory. I sometimes get chided, as in a recent commentary, for writing about things that readers think are unrelated to memory. But memory is not independent of everything else that brains do. This includes general thinking abilities, motivation , attitudes, lifestyle, and the mental challenges that a person seeks. General health, exercise, sleep , response to stress , and diet are also important. Another under-appreciated area about memory is the role of learning.
Memory ability is multi-dimensional. What Actors Can Teach Us About Memory and Learning. So you say you have a wedding toast to memorize? A 20-min. speech you have to know by heart? A list of people’s names you absolutely must remember? Pshaw. Imagine delivering the long soliloquies of Shakespeare or the impassioned speeches of Arthur Miller or the cut-glass dialogue of David Mamet. When it comes to memorization, professional actors can claim bragging rights. They must reproduce their scripts exactly — no improvising allowed — night after night, under blinding lights, in front of a demanding audience. How do they do it? (MORE: Paul: Why Morning Routines Are Creativity Killers) Noice’s first and most surprising discovery is that most actors don’t memorize their lines in the traditional sense at all. They are searching for the intentions of the play’s characters: why they do what they do, and especially, why they say what they say.
Another key to actors’ superlative memories: words are often intimately connected to actions onstage. To perform with less effort, practice beyond perfection. Feb. 9, 2012 — Whether you are an athlete, a musician or a stroke patient learning to walk again, practice can make perfect, but more practice may make you more efficient, according to a surprising new University of Colorado Boulder study. The study, led by CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Alaa Ahmed, looked at how test subjects learned particular arm-reaching movements using a robotic arm. The results showed that even after a reaching task had been learned and the corresponding decrease in muscle activity had reached a stable state, the overall energy costs to the test subjects continued to decrease.
By the end of the task, the net metabolic cost as measured by oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide exhalation had decreased by about 20 percent, she said. "The message from this study is that in order to perform with less effort, keep on practicing, even after it seems as if the task has been learned," said Ahmed of CU-Boulder's integrative physiology department. Story Source: H.
100 Amazing Memory Hacks to Maximize Your Brain. March 4th, 2010 Students, business professionals, and average Janes and Joes–just about everyone would love to have a fool-proof memory, and with these amazing memory hacks, you can. These suggestions, tools, and tricks are sure to have you using your brain to the best of its abilities, whether you need to remember a semester’s worth of Biology 101, keep finding yourself in the awkward spot of not remembering names, or anywhere in between.
Remembering Names Never forget another name when you use these awesome memory hacks. Draw a map. Remembering Lists Keeping all the items from a list in your head no longer has to be a challenge when you use these great tips and techniques. Write things down. Learning New Things When learning new things, try these hacks to keep all that new information in your head. Switch to a different task. Remembering What You Read These hacks will help you remember what you are reading, whether for school, work, or pleasure.
Make notes. General Memory Tips Nap. Brain Games. Annie Murphy Paul: How Hand Gestures Help You Learn. Frederic Mishkin, who’s been a professor at Columbia Business School for almost 30 years, is good at solving problems and expressing ideas. Whether he’s standing in front of a lecture hall or engaged in a casual conversation, he’s a blur of motion, his hands waving, pointing, jabbing the air. “I talk with my hands,” he says. “I always have.” When he was in graduate school, in fact, one of his professors was so exasperated by this constant gesticulating that he made the young economist sit on his hands whenever he visited the professor’s office. It turns out, however, that Mishkin’s mentor had it exactly wrong.
Gesture doesn’t hinder clear thought and speech — it facilitates it. (MORE: In Praise of Tinkering) Many of the studies establishing the importance of gesture to learning have been conducted by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. (MORE: Is English Making Us Dyslexic?) So how can you crack learning’s secret code? Learning to Learn Re-visited. Learning is not only empowering but fulfilling. It gives our lives meaning and can benefit us professionally. Learning is also perhaps the best antidote to boredom and depression . And the really good news is that we can improve our ability to learn. As the brain re-wires itself from experience, it can change the capacity for learning. That is, it can learn how to learn. This is especially true for certain kinds of learning skills. The brain also learns a hierarchy of emotional responses to enrich the awareness and growth of our attitudes and feelings.
What was incompletely considered in the original formulation of emotional learning is the influence of emotions on the memorization process. When a person knows a body of knowledge across all levels of the learning hierarchy, we can call them an expert. Mental templates or schema put the brain on autopilot, enabling it to accomplish tasks without much effort. Schema manifests in other ways too. Say it loud: I’m creating a distinctive memory. Cognitive Enhancement Without Drugs. It’s Smart to Sleep. {*style:<b> Sleep for Successful Students </b>*} As a neurologist and middle school teacher I have often been asked about the best schedule to maximize children’s health and brainpower.
During sleep , the higher thinking regions of the brain are less active because information enters the brain during sleep. This is when the brain can devote a greater portion of its energy (metabolism) to organization and filing the information learned during the day. This brain state is just what is needed to allow recently learned material to be stored in long-term memory . During the longest periods of uninterrupted deep sleep, (rather than during the "dream sleep" associated with rapid eye movement known as REM sleep) memory storage in the brain is most efficient. The amount of information held in a single neuron is minute. Long-term memory consolidation with dendrite growth involves the building of new proteins in the memory circuits.
Sleep performs a restorative function for the body and the brain. Clenching right fist may give better grip on memory. Clenching your right hand may help form a stronger memory of an event or action, and clenching your left may help you recollect the memory later, according to research published April 24 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Ruth Propper and colleagues from Montclair State University. Participants in the research study were split into groups and asked to first memorize, and later recall words from a list of 72 words.
There were 4 groups who clenched their hands; One group clenched their right fist for about 90 seconds immediately prior to memorizing the list and then did the same immediately prior to recollecting the words. Another group clenched their left hand prior to both memorizing and recollecting. Two other groups clenched one hand prior to memorizing (either the left or right hand) and the opposite hand prior to recollecting. "The findings suggest that some simple body movements -- by temporarily changing the way the brain functions- can improve memory.