Context is absolutely critical to successful communication. Think of the common experience of being a stranger at a family gathering or a meeting of close friends. Even familiar words and phrases may take on a different or additional meaning, among people who have a shared history. Many jokes...
Study Skills
Articles
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In a 1987 experiment (1), readers were presented with a text that included one or other of these sentences: After doing a few warm-up exercises, John put on his sweatshirt and began jogging. or After doing a few warm-up exercises, John took off his sweatshirt and began... |
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Retrieval practice, as its name suggests, is a simple strategy that involves retrieving the target information one or more times prior to testing. It is not the same as repetition or rehearsal! The idea is not to simply repeat the correct information, but to try and retrieve it. Feedback as to... |
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Consider our facts about blood:
We could, as is often advised, simply turn these into... |
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When we are presented with new information, we try and connect it to information we already hold. This is automatic. Sometimes the information fits in easily; other times the fit is more difficult — perhaps because some of our old information is wrong, or perhaps because we lack some of the... |
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The more hyped and less plausible passive Mozart Effect
The so-called "Mozart effect" refers to two quite different phenomena. The one that has received the most media play concerns the almost magical (and mythical) effect of Mozart's music on intelligence. It is the result of a... |
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This is the last part in my series on understanding scientific text. In this part, as promised, I am going to talk about the difficulties novices have with scientific texts; what they or their teachers can do about it; and the problems with introductory textbooks. The big problem for... |
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The limitations of working memory have implications for all of us. The challenges that come from having a low working memory capacity are not only relevant for particular individuals, but also for almost all of us at some points of our lives. Because working memory capacity has a natural cycle... |
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In the last part I talked about retrieval structures and their role in understanding what you’re reading. As promised, this month I’m going to focus on understanding scientific text in particular, and how it differs from narrative text. First of all, a reminder about situation models. A... |
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Our society gives a lot of weight to intelligence. Academics may have been arguing for a hundred years over what, exactly, intelligence is, but ‘everyone knows’ what it means to be smart, and who is smart and who is not — right? Of course, it’s not that simple, and the ins and outs of... |