Read With Your Children, Not to Them

 Research has found that reading with young children and engaging them can make a positive impact on the child's future and their family.

Bradford Wiles is an Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist in early childhood development at Kansas State University. For most of his career, Wiles' research has focused around building resilience in vulnerable families.
His current research is focused on emergent literacy and the effect of parents reading with their children ages 3 to 5 years old.
"Children start learning to read long before they can ever say words or form sentences," said Wiles. "My focus is on helping parents read with their children and extending what happens when you read with them and they become engaged in the story."
The developmental process, known as emergent literacy, begins at birth and continues through the preschool and kindergarten years. This time in children's lives is critical for learning important preliteracy skills.
Although his research mainly focuses on 3-5 year olds, Wiles encourages anyone with young children to read with them as a family at anytime during the day, not just before going to bed. He also believes that it is okay to read one book over and over again, because the child can learn new things every time.
"There are always opportunities for you both to learn," said Wiles, "and it creates a family connection. Learning is unbelievably powerful in early childhood development."
It goes deeper than just reading to them, as parents are encouraged to read with their children. Engaging children is how they become active in the story and build literacy skills.
"There is nothing more powerful than your voice, your tone, and the way you say the words," said Wiles. "When I was a child, my dad read to me and while that was helpful and I enjoyed it, what we are finding is that when parents read with their children instead of to them, the children are becoming more engaged and excited to read."
Engaging the child means figuring out what the child is thinking and getting them to think beyond the words written on the page. While reading with them, anticipate what children are thinking. Then ask questions, offer instruction, provide examples and give them some feedback about what they are thinking.
"One of the things that I really hope for, and have found, is that these things spill over into other areas," said Wiles. "So you start out reading, asking open-ended questions, offering instruction and explaining when all of the sudden you aren't reading at all and they start to recognize those things they have seen in the books. And that's really powerful."
Wiles explains it in a scenario where a mother reads a book with her 4 year old about a garden. Then they go to the supermarket and the 4 year old is pointing and saying, "look there's a zucchini." The child cannot read the sign that says zucchini but knows what that is because they read the book about gardens.
During this time called the nominal stage, the developmental stage where children are naming things, a child's vocabulary can jump from a few hundred words to a few thousand words. The more exposure they've had through books and print materials, the more they can name things and understand. It's the emergent literacy skills that can set the stage for other elements.
The school of Family Studies and Human Services at Kansas State University is producing lesson plans to help families learn how to read with young children. These lesson plans are research-based but they have been condensed into usable and applicable lessons for families.

The importance of over learning

“The message from this study is that in order to perform with less effort, keep on practicing, even after it seems the task has been learned,” says Ahmed. “We have shown there is an advantage to continued practice beyond any visible changes in performance.” In other words: You’re getting better and better, even when you can’t tell you’re improving—a thought to keep you going through those long hours of practice.

Being a Lifelong Bookworm May Keep You Sharp in Old Age

To keep their bodies running at peak performance, people often hit the gym, pounding away at the treadmill to strengthen muscles and build endurance. This dedication has enormous benefits—being in shape now means warding off a host of diseases when you get older. But does the brain work in the same way? That is, can doing mental exercises help your mind stay just as sharp in old age?

Experts say it’s possible. As a corollary to working out, people have begun joining brain gyms to flex their mental muscles. For a monthly fee of around $15, websites like Lumosity.com and MyBrainTrainer.com promise to enhance memory, attention and other mental processes through a series of games and brain teasers. Such ready-made mind exercises are an alluring route for people who worry about their ticking clock. But there’s no need to slap down the money right away—new research suggests the secret to preserving mental agility may lie in simply cracking open a book.

The findings, published online today in Neurology, suggest that reading books, writing and engaging in other similar brain-stimulating activities slows down cognitive decline in old age, independent of common age-related neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, people who participated in mentally stimulating activities over their lifetimes, both in young, middle and old age, had a slower rate of decline in memory and other mental capacities than those who did not.

Researchers used an array of tests to measure 294 people’s memory and thinking every year for six years years. Participants also answered a questionnaire about their reading and writing habits, from childhood to adulthood to advanced age. Following the participants’ deaths at an average age of 89, researchers examined their brains for evidence of the physical signs of dementia, such as lesions, plaques and tangles. Such brain abnormalities are most common in older people, causing them to experience memory lapses. They proliferate in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, leading to memory and thinking impairments that can severely affect victims’ daily lives.

Using information from the questionnaire and autopsy results, the researchers found that any reading and writing is better than none at all. Remaining a bookworm into old age reduced the rate of memory decline by 32 percent compared to engaging in average mental activity. Those who didn’t read or write often later in life did even worse: their memory decline was 48 percent faster than people who spent an average amount of time on these activities.

The researchers found that mental activity accounted for nearly 15 percent of the difference in memory decline, beyond what could be explained by the presence of plaque buildup. “Based on this, we shouldn’t underestimate the effects of everyday activities, such as reading and writing, on our children, ourselves and our parents or grandparents,” says study author Robert S. Wilson, a neuropsychologist at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, in a statement.

Reading gives our brains a workout because comprehending text requires more mental energy than, for example, processing an image on a television screen. Reading exercises our working memory, which actively processes and stores new information as it comes. Eventually, that information gets transferred into long-term memory, where our understanding of any given material deepens. Writing can be likened to practice: the more we rehearse the perfect squat, the better our form becomes, tightening all the right muscles. Writing helps us consolidate new information for the times we may need to recall it, which boosts our memory skills.

So the key to keeping our brains sharp for the long haul does have something in common with physical exercise: we have to stick with it. And it’s best to start early. In 2009, a seven-year study of 2,000 healthy individuals aged 18 to 60 found that mental agility peaks at 22. By 27, mental processes like reasoning, spatial visualization and speed of thought began to decline.

Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/07/being-a-lifelong-bookworm-may-keep-you-sharp-in-old-age/#ixzz2ZX2O9qji 
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The Science of Smart: Eight Ways Of Looking At Intelligence

In “Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird,” poet Wallace Stevens takes something familiar—an ordinary black bird—and by looking at it from many different perspectives, makes us think about it in new ways.

With apologies to Stevens, I’d like to present eight ways of looking at intelligence—eight perspectives provided by the science of learning. A few words, first, about that term: The science of learning is a relatively new discipline born of an agglomeration of fields: cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience. Its project is to apply the methods of science to human endeavors—teaching and learning—that have for centuries been mostly treated as an art.
Different perspectives on intelligence may inspire us to rethink our learning process.As with anything to do with our idiosyncratic and unpredictable species, there is still a lot of art involved in teaching and learning. But the science of learning can offer some surprising and useful perspectives on how we educate young people and how we guide our own learning. And so: Eight Ways Of Looking At Intelligence.

The first way of looking at intelligence: Situations can make us smarter. The science of learning has demonstrated that we are powerfully shaped by the situations that we find ourselves in: situations that can either evoke or suppress our intelligence.

What are “situations”? Situations can be internal or external. They can be brief and transitory, or persistent and long-lasting. They can be as varied as the conditions under which we learn, the conditions that prevail in the classroom or the workplace, the conditions exerted by a peer group. They can be the physical conditions that learners experience by way of how much stress they’re under and how much sleep and exercise they get, and the mental conditions learners create for themselves by the levels of expertise and attention and motivation they’re able to achieve.

Situational intelligence, in other words, is the only kind of intelligence there is—because we are always doing our thinking in a particular situation, with a particular brain in a particular body.

On one level this is obvious, but on another it is quite radical. Radical, because, since its earliest beginnings, the study of intelligence has emphasized its inherent and fixed qualities. Intelligence has been conceptualized as an innate characteristic of the individual, invariant across time and place, determined mostly by genes (or before that, what was called “heredity”).

This was the view of Francis Galton, the Victorian gentleman who is the father of psychometric testing. He used the notion of inherent, fixed intelligence to show that it ran in the blood of England’s most eminent families. This was the view of Lewis Terman, the creator of the modern intelligence test. The father of psychometric testing.He used the notion of inherent, fixed intelligence to identify and cultivate children who were ‘gifted.’ And this was the view of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, authors of the notorious 1994 book The Bell Curve. They used the notion of inherent, fixed intelligence to argue that America’s class structure was the inevitable product of theIQ levels of various racial and social groups. 

So to assert that intelligence is in large part a product of the situations we find ourselves in is a departure, not only from the way science has traditionally thought about ability, but from the way many of us think about ability today.

On to the second way of looking at intelligence: Beliefs can make us smarter. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck distinguishes two types of mindsets: the fixed mindset, or the belief that ability is fixed and unchanging, and the growth mindset, or the belief that abilities can be developed through learning and practice.

These beliefs matter because they influence how think about our own abilities, how we perceive the world around us, and how we act when faced with a challenge or with adversity. The psychologist David Yeager, also of Stanford, notes that our mindset effectively creates the “psychological world” in which we live. Our beliefs, whether they’re oriented around limits or around growth, constitute one of these internal situations that either suppresses or evokes intelligence.

The third way of looking at intelligence: Expertise can make us smarter.One very robust line of research within the science of learning is concerned with the psychology of expertise: what goes on in the mind of an expert. What researchers have found is that experts don’t just know more, they know differently, in ways that allow them to think and act especially intelligently within their domain of expertise.

An expert’s knowledge is deep, not shallow or superficial; it is well-organized, around a core of central principles; it is automatic, meaning that it has been streamlined into mental programs that run with very little conscious effort; it is flexible and transferable to new situations; it is self-aware, meaning that an expert can think well about his or her own thinking. Expertise takes a long time to develop, of course, but it’s never too early—or too late—go deep in a subject area that interests us.

The fourth way of looking at intelligence: Attention can make us smarter. You’ve probably heard about the “marshmallow test,” a famous experiment conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. Mischel found that children who could resist eating a marshmallow in return for the promise of two marshmallows later on did better in school and in their careers.

Well, there’s a new marshmallow test that is faced every day, almost every minute by young people, and by the rest of us, too: it’s the ability to resist the urge to check one’s email, to respond to a text, to see what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter. We’ve all heard that ‘digital natives’ grew up multitasking and therefore excel at it, but the fact is that there are information-processing bottlenecks in the brain—everybody’s brain—that prevent us from paying attention to two things at the same time. The state of focused attention is a very important internal situation that we must cultivate in order to fully express our intelligence.

The fifth way of looking at intelligence: Emotions can make us smarter.We sometimes give short shrift to emotions when we’re talking about academic success, but the science of learning is demonstrating that our emotional state represents a crucial internal situation that influences how intelligently we think and act.

When we’re in a positive mood, for example, we tend to think more expansively and creatively. When we feel anxious—for instance, when we’re about to take a dreaded math test—that anxiety uses up some of the working memory capacity we need to solve problems, leaving us, literally, with less intelligence to apply to the exam.

One line of investigation within the science of learning has to do with the feeling of hope. Research in this area has found that a feeling of hopefulness actually leads us to try harder and persist longer—but only if it is paired with practical plans for achieving our goals, and—this is the interesting part—specific, concrete actions we’ll take when and if (usually when) our original plans don’t work out as expected.

The sixth way of looking at intelligence: Technology can make us smarter.There’s a fascinating line of research in philosophy and cognitive science investigating what’s called the extended mind. This is the idea that the mind doesn’t stop at the skull—that it reaches out and loops in our bodies, our tools, even other people, to use in our thinking processes.

Brain-scanning studies have found that when we use a tool, say a rake we’re using to reach an object that’s out of our grasp, our brains actually designate neurons to represent the end of the rake—as if it were the tips of our own fingers. The human mind has evolved to make our tools—including our technological devices—into extensions of itself.

The problem is that our devices so often make us dumber instead of smarter. I’ve already alluded to the way in which technology can divide our attention, producing learning that is spottier, shallower, and less flexible than learning that occurs under conditions of full concentration. Technology can also make us dumber when we allow key skills to atrophy from disuse, or fail to develop those skills in the first place.

To give you a common example: The ready availability of technology has persuaded many people that they don’t need to learn facts anymore, because they can always “just Google it.” In fact, research from cognitive science shows that the so-called “21st century skills” that we’re always hearing about—critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, creativity—can’t emerge in a content-free vacuum. They must develop in the context of a rich base of fact knowledge: knowledge that’s stored on the original hard drive, one’s own brain.

The original hard drive: our brains.

In order for tech to make ourselves smarter and not dumber, we need understand when to take full advantage of our devices, and when to put them away.

The seventh way of looking at intelligence: Our bodies can make us smarter. A line of inquiry related to the “extended mind” research mentioned earlier is the work now being done on what’s called “embodied cognition.”

Ever since the cognitive science revolution of the 1970s, the dominant metaphor for the brain has been the computer: a machine that processes abstract symbols. The science of learning is demonstrating that the computer metaphor is seriously flawed when it comes to describing the human brain. It might be more accurate, in fact, to compare the brain to the heart. All the things that make the heart work better—good nutrition, adequate sleep, regular exercise, moderate stress—make the brain work better too.

Take sleep, for example, since sleep is something so many of us are lacking. We often don’t recognize that sleep is actually a key part of the learning process. It’s during sleep that the brain consolidates the memories it formed during waking hours—meaning that it sorts through those memories, weakening the ones that are trivial, strengthening the ones that are important, and connecting up these new memories to the memory structures that already exist in the brain.

If we don’t get enough sleep after learning, or if that sleep is of low quality, the learning process is truncated, and we remember that information less well and less flexibly. That’s just one example of how the physical state of our bodies is a key condition under which our brain operates and under which our intelligence is evoked or suppressed.

Lastly, the eighth way of looking at intelligence: Relationships can make us smarter. I mentioned earlier that the human mind is very adept at looping in our bodies, our tools, and even other people to use as instruments of our own thinking.

You’ve experienced this if you have a spouse or significant other: it’s likely that one of you is “in charge” of remembering when the car needs to go in for inspection, while the other is “in charge” of remembering relatives’ birthdays. This is called transactive memory, and it’s just one of the ways that relationships with others can make us smarter than we would be on our own.

There’s another kind of relationship that matters to intelligence: the relationship that we have to the institutions and organizations within which we live and work. The science of learning has demonstrated that a feeling of belonging is critical to the full expression of our ability.

The science of learning suggests that we ought to imagine our roles—as parents, as professionals, as learners. We should aim to be situation-makers—creators of circumstances that evoke intelligence in ourselves and others.

Jobs got it right – how fast, intuitive thinking results in harmful behavior

Why good deeds don’t go unpunished
[Via Ars Technica]

From an early age, we are taught that cooperation, generosity, and altruism are generally things we should strive for. But altruistic acts aren’t always lauded, and researchers have found that generous individuals are sometimes punished for their behavior. Studies suggest that people often react negatively to large contributions, are suspicious of those who offer help, and want toexpel particularly charitable individuals from cooperative endeavors. These seemingly counterintuitive behaviors are called “antisocial punishment” and are more common than you might think. But why would people want to punish anyone who is particularly charitable?

The answer to that question would explain a puzzling human behavior, and it could have important ramifications for public policy. Tackling many of the major problems we currently face—from climate change to political stalemates—requires cooperation and collaboration. Understanding why people are sometimes willing to undermine joint efforts out of what appears to be nothing more than spite could go a long way to improve cooperation and discourse in many areas.

Sociologists Kyle Irwin and Christine Horne suggest that our inclination to punish do-gooders may stem from our adherence to social norms. Using a clever experimental design that allowed them to manipulate the level of conformity among group members, the researchers investigated the relationship between antisocial punishment and social norms.

[More]

Wait where did I hear that before?

(this is not the original ad. It is a draft one read by Jobs himself.)

Jobs described these people explicitly, the generous, the rule breakers, the deviants:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

And what this study shows is that in communities where there is little diversity of behavior, anyone who acts differently, even when those acts benefit everyone, is punished buy the community by removing those individuals.

Instad of everyone rising to the nail that stands higher, they remove that nail.

But Jobs, in his amazing fashion, flipped this behavior on its head, not only making those people seem normal but actually working to move social norms to embrace those people.He made us want to be those people.

He wanted us to all rise to that higher nail by using the tools of the new age.

That is a hallmark of this new society we are putting together. Not only Jobs recognized it. Most of those running 21st Century organizations kow this at some level.  But few put it into focus  so brutally or effectively.

Those groups that fail to embrace the rebels who change the world will lose. Those groups who do embrace the rebels can not help but win.

This is a fascinating study because it demonstrates this principle directly and the results speak for themselves. Groups that fail to embrace those with differnt approaches will actually harm themselves and others in the community in order to expel those who are outside the norm.

From the abstract:

A fourth study suggested that the target is seen by some as establishing an undesirable behavior standard and by others as a rule breaker. Individuals who formed either perception expressed a desire for the unselfish person to be removed from the group.

A rule breaker. An undesirable. A deviant.

At least that is what their intuition tells them. In groups with different norms, with a wider variation of behavior, the punishment is not so severe. 

That is, a more diverse group is  more accepting of those who help everyone. A less diverse group is less accepting and actually wants to rid the group of those who try to help everyone else.

And their punitive intuitive behavior actually works against the ability of any of them to win.

In this game, the overly generous person helps everyone else and hurts themselves, as just a few seconds of slow, deliberative thought reveals.

It is a competitive game, one where those with the most points wins. People put any amount of credits (each starts with 100) in a pot, the amount is doubled and then split amongst everyone. So if 5 people give 50  each (keeping 50 for themselves) and one gives 90 (keeping 10 for themselves), then after 1 round everyone has 163.3 except for the generous one. They only have 123.3

If everyone had put 50 in, then everyone would have 150 credits.

So the generous one actually made it easier for everyone else to win while hurting their own chances. They help everyone else win by losing.

Yet the conservative group wants to kick them out, wants to actually punish them even more.

If the participants had been engaged in more deliberative thinking, they would have realized they needed to keep the generous person around. They were more likely to win with such generosity.

But most people did not react that way. They simply stayed with their intuitive rules of thumb, punishing those who were actually helping them.

Sometimes rapid rules of thumb simply hurt, not help.

Because it is often these deviants, these rule breakers and troublemakers who do drive us forward. Jobs got it right, even as many groups punish them.

7 WAYS TO SHARPEN YOUR MEMORY

1. Be conscious of the limits of your working memory—the mental holding area that contains the facts and concepts you're thinking about at any one time. We can hang onto only about four facts or ideas at a time in working memory, but we can pack more information into those four slots by engaging in chunking: linking multiple pieces of information into a few meaningful groups.
2. We all remember from school that cramming the night before a test doesn't work too well, but many of us use the same approach in our working lives, hurriedly reviewing what we need to know on the way to a meeting or presentation. It's much more effective to expose yourself to the information in brief sessions spaced out over time. One easy way to do this is to use your email program to send yourself a weekly or biweekly message containing the material you need to review.
3. Despite its many proponents, there's little scientific evidence to support the idea that we have distinctive learning styles (visual, auditory, etc.). However, we do all learn and remember best when information is presented in multiple modalities—when we hear it, see it, act it out, and so on. If there's something you need to remember, try to absorb it through several senses: read the material out loud, watch a video lecture on YouTube.
4. Sleep is key to memory: it's during slumber that we consolidate and make permanent the knowledge we've gathered during the day. After you've been exposed to a lot of information (for example, when you've spent the day at a conference), make sure you get a good night's sleep. You can also try reviewing important information just before you go to bed at night—or following a study session with a daytime nap!
5. We often conceive of memory as something like a storage tank, and a test as a kind of dipstick that measures how much information we’ve put in there. But that’s not actually how the brain works. Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting—so quizzing yourself doesn’t just measure what you know, itchanges what you know. Put away your notes and try to recall the material from memory.
6. We remember new knowledge better when it connects to what we already know. Before heading into a situation in which you'll be absorbing a lot of new information, "activate" your prior knowledge by reflecting on what you currently understand of the topic, maybe jotting down a few notes. You'll be priming your mind to grab and hold onto the new material.
7. The "generation effect" is the term psychologists use to describe the following phenomenon: we remember material better when we've generated it ourselves. Rather than reading or repeating someone else's formulation, put the information to be learned into your own words: explain it to yourself, or talk about it to someone else. Research also shows that teaching someone else helps the teacher to remember the material better.

Developing Character, Courage & College Readiness

The high school day starts with Humane Letters, a two hour Socratic seminar where students read great books and the founding documents. They ask, what does it mean to be human? What is justice? Students apply two rules: textual evidence and reason in the common pursuit of truth. Seniors write a thesis and defend their work in front of a panel and their peers.

There is no reference to pop culture at Great Hearts--just the study of spirit, law, and philosophy. "Character is not an outcome--it is a state of being first," said Scoggin. "Character arises from forming habits of heart." Elementary students at Great Hearts focus on "comportment."

Raphael's painting School of Athens (1510) adorns the lobby of all Great Hearts schools--placing the Aristotle-Socrates dialectic center stage. There's no BYOD here, Scoggins thinks "Kids need a place away from technology to relax and think big thoughts."

Scoggins uses unusual language to describe aims: the lifelong pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. He's happy to list what they love: 1) moral intellectual and physical virtue, 2) western tradition, 3) human dignity and freedom, 4) philosophical realism, 5) conversation and community, and 6) humility. The school culture is "about service and love."