Contrary to the popular belief that self-affirmations increase motivation by making us more likely to follow through with our goals, researchers at the University of Illinois and Southern Mississippi University found that people who ask themselves whether they will perform a task generally perform better on that task than people who tell themselves that they… Read More
How do you create the best exam questions possible without spending half the semester on trial and error? Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) suggest relying on others—in a word, crowdsourcing—to improve test content. “Crowdsourcing opens up a whole new possibility for people creating tests,” says Philip Sadler, who led the research in… Read More
Image by Samantha Kibler “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure,… Read More
Do you ever get the feeling that everything conspires against you the minute you have a deadline on the horizon? Facebook posts are unusually interesting; the kids need a ride to school, although they hate being dropped off; and just about anything from going for a run to cleaning the toilet suddenly seems more enticing than… Read More
We all battle distractions on a daily basis, and you probably know what it’s like to settle in to finish an assignment or study for an upcoming exam only to find that ambient noises that were hardly noticeable before suddenly seem hugely distracting. For those who study from home where kids, phone calls, and other… Read More
Some of us know we work better with a little Jack Johnson egging us on. But new research out of the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff says listening to music can damage your performance on certain study tasks. Examining the ability to recall information in the presence of different sounds, researchers instructed 25 participants… Read More