A brief round-up of a few of the latest findings reinforcing the fact that academic achievement is not all about academic ability or skills.Most of these relate to the importance of social factors.
Improving social belonging improves GPA, well-being & health, in African-American students
I was recently asked for advice in the case of increased “brain blocks” — failures to retrieve information that should be readily accessible. This question is, I suspect, of interest to many of my readers, so I thought I would answer it here.
There are many possible causes for an increase in this type of memory failure. These causes fall into three main categories: physical, environmental, and strategic. Let’s deal with the physical first.
Coding mnemonics are used for encoding numbers. Because words are much easier for most of us to remember, a system that transforms numbers into letters is one of the best ways for remembering numbers — as seen in the modern innovation of encoding phone numbers into letters (0800-ANSETT).
A coding system is very useful for remembering numbers, but it must be said that few people have sufficient need to memorize long numbers to make the initial cost of learning the code acceptable.
After Alzheimer's disease, the second most common neurodegenerative disorder is Parkinson’s disease. In the U.S., at least 500,000 are believed to have Parkinson’s, and about 50,000 new cases are diagnosed every year1 (I have seen other estimates of 1 million and 1.5 million — and researchers saying the numbers are consistently over-estimated while others that they are consistently under-estimated!). In the U.K., the numbers are 120,000 and 10,0002.
An analysis of English vocabulary* has found that the first 1000 words account for 84.3% of the words used in conversation, 82.3% of the words encountered in fiction, 75.6% of the words in newspapers, and 73.5% of the words in academic texts. The second 1000 accounts for about another 5% (specifically, 6% of conversation, 5.1% of fiction, 4.7% of newspapers, 4.6% of academic texts).
A study1 of nearly 2000 older adults has found that eating a Mediterranean diet was associated with less risk of developing mild cognitive impairment or of transitioning from MCI to Alzheimer's disease. The third with the highest scores for Mediterranean diet adherence had a 28% lower risk of developing MCI compared to the third with the lowest scores, and of those who already had MCI, those with the highest scores for Mediterranean diet adherence had a 48% less chance of developing Alzheimer’s.
Knowing a number of effective strategies for reading and note-taking, practicing and memorizing, is vital, but it's not the whole story. There is also a category of strategies we might term 'support' strategies. These include strategies aimed at setting goals, managing time and effort, and monitoring your performance and progress. In study, these come under the concept of self-regulation, which is related to the more general concept of metamemory.
Broadly speaking, a concept map is a graphic display that attempts to show how concepts are connected to each other. A concept map is a diagram in which labeled nodes represent concepts, and lines connecting them show the relationships between concepts.
There is one type of concept map you’re probably all aware of — mind maps. Mind maps are a specialized form of concept map popularized very successfully by Tony Buzan.
A mind map has four essential characteristics:
Do experts simply know "more" than others, or is there something qualitatively different about an expert's knowledge compared to the knowledge of a non-expert?
While most of us are not aiming for an expert's knowledge in many of the subjects we study or learn about, it is worthwhile considering the ways in which expert knowledge is different, because it shows us how to learn, and teach, more effectively.
Like many memory improvement courses, speed-reading programs tend to make inflated claims. Also like memory programs, most speed-reading programs proffer the same advice. In essence, speed-reading techniques involve the following components: