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Policy makers, tech executives, teachers, and parents are forever trying to find new ways to improve kids' performance at school. Schools design and redesign curricula, teachers embrace and reject new learning technologies, and parents plot ways to get their kids to study more.

One novel solution researchers find helps kids to perform better is to get them to think about how they think-metacognition-and have them strategize how they study.

If this sounds easy, it is not. "All too often, students just jump mindlessly into studying before they have even strategized what to use, without understanding why they are using each resource, and without planning out how they would use the resource to learn effectively," says Patricia Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford with a PhD. "I find this very unfortunate because it undermines their own potential to learn well and perform well."

But students can be taught to think strategically about thinking and studying, says Chen, the lead author of a new study about the practice, and parents can prompt this type of learning by posing some strategic questions of their own.

In the study Chen led, researchers conducted two field experiments in which some university students were offered a variety of prompts to help them think carefully about how they studied, and how they might study more effectively for an introductory statistics class exam. The other students-the control group-simply received a reminder that their exam was coming up and that they should prepare.

Those who reflected on how they wanted to perform and what they needed to do to perform better outperformed those who did not, by an average of one-third of a letter grade. Those who received the intervention prompts twice did better than those who received it once.

"Our key insight in this research is the importance of being goal-directed and thoughtful about how one chooses and uses resources for learning-or to achieve any other goal for that matter," Chen said.

There is ample evidence that self-regulation and metacognition are key to learning. But the challenge is how to teach these things in such a way that it sticks. Part of the appeal of Chen's approach is its simplicity: any student, teacher or even parent could use it.

How the field experiments worked

A week to 10 days before a test, half the class received a 15-minute survey asking them to think about a test they were going to take. They were asked to think about the grade they wanted to get on the exam, and rate how important it was to them that they got that grade, and how likely they thought it was that they would get that grade.

The survey then asked the students to reflect on what kinds of questions the exam might include, and to identify which of 15 available class resources they would use to study, including lecture notes, practice exam questions, textbook readings, instructor office hours, peer discussions, and private tutoring. They were asked to write down why each resource would be useful and how they would use it, effectively mapping out a study plan.

The students in the control group received only a reminder that the exam was coming up in a week and that they should be ready for it.

The authors were careful to note that there were no statistical differences in the students' performance prior to the exam, nor any significant difference in their high school GPAs or their levels of motivation. There was also no statistical difference in the grades the two groups of students hoped to achieve, ruling out the role of motivation as a driver of performance versus reflection and thinking about thinking. The results held across race, class, and performance level (high- and low-performing students), and gender.

In addition to improving their grades, the students who completed the online survey reported less stress in relation to the exam, compared with their peers, and a greater sense of control over their performance.

Metacognition

According to the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF), which performs studies to try and close achievement gaps, metacognition is one of two of the most effective educational interventions it has tested. (Feedback is the other.) Students involved in programs designed to improve how they think about thinking accelerated their learning by an average of eight months' worth of academic progress. The effect was greatest for low-achieving and older pupils.

In one experiment, 12- and 13-year-olds significantly improved their writing skills by learning to better evaluate the quality of their own work. The students, from 23 primary schools in West Yorkshire, England, were divided into two groups, with half the kids offered guidance on how to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own narrative writing. Kids were taught what makes a good piece of writing and how to critique their own work. "Instead of relying on the teacher, they are taught strategies to improve their own writing-that's the self-regulation," said Emily Yeomans, senior program manager at the EEF. These kids made an additional nine months' worth of academic progress in the study.

Much of this research feels intuitive. Setting goals helps us to stick to them. Making a plan for how we reach a goal increases the likelihood of achieving it as well. But educators sometimes struggle to find constructive ways to put these findings into practice, especially when the demands on them change seemingly every year (personalized learning! An iPad for every kid! New assessments!) .

A key benefit to metacognition interventions is that they are not expensive. They are also applicable to everyone: teachers can use them, but so can parents. Chen said her lab had not studied this specifically, but said that parents, who often play the role of academic guides to their children, can encourage kids to think about how they deploy their study resources.

"They can model this strategic thought process by voicing out the way they are thinking through their resource use, or they can pose questions that nudge children to exercise this strategic thinking for themselves." The specific questions she suggested: "What you are doing doesn't seem to be working very well. Is there something else you can use that would help you do it better?" or "Look at the way they are doing things. Do you think they could have gone about it in a better way?"

As adults, we know we would benefit from more planning: strategizing for that tough conversation, outlining the memo that needs to be written, thinking about the holes in the power point presentation. Whether we do it is another matter. It's no different for students.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Chen as a Stanford professor. She is a post-doctoral research fellow with a PhD in social psychology.

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A Stanford researcher's 15-minute study hack lifts B+ students into the As

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Policy makers, tech executives, teachers, and parents are forever trying to find new ways to improve kids' performance at school. Schools design and redesign curricula, teachers embrace and reject new learning technologies, and parents plot ways to get their kids to study more.

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By Christian Jarrett

The structured nature of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy/CBT and its clearly defined principles (based on the links between thoughts, feelings and behaviours) make it relatively easy to train practitioners, to ensure standardised delivery and to measure outcomes. Consequently, CBT has revolutionised mental health care, allowing psychologists to alchemize therapy from an art into a science. For many mental health conditions, there is now considerable evidence that CBT is as, or more, effective than drug treatments. Yet, just like any form of psychotherapy, CBT is not without the risk of unwanted adverse effects.

A recent paper in Cognitive Therapy and Research outlines the nature and prevalence of these unwanted effects, based on structured interviews with 100 CBT-trained psychotherapists. "This is what therapists should know about when informing their patients about the upcoming merits and risks of treatment," write Marie-Luise Schermuly-Haupt and her colleagues.

The researchers asked each CBT-therapist (78 per cent were female, average age 32, with an average of 5 years experience) to recall their most recent client who had taken part in at least 10 sessions of CBT. The chosen clients (51 per cent were female, average age 38) mostly had diagnoses of depression, anxiety or personality disorder, in the mild to moderate range.

The interviewer - an experienced clinical psychologist trained in CBT - followed the Unwanted Events-Adverse Treatment Reactions checklist, asking each therapist whether their client had experienced any of 17 possible unwanted events during therapy, such as deterioration, new symptoms, distress, strains in family relations, or stigma.

The therapists, who work at outpatient clinics in Germany, reported an average of 3.7 unwanted events per client. Based on the therapists' descriptions, the interviewer then rated the likelihood of each unwanted event being directly attributable to the therapeutic process - making them a true side-effect (only those rated as "definitely related to treatment" were categorised as such).

Following this process, the researchers estimated that 43 per cent of clients had experienced at least one unwanted side-effect from CBT, equating to an average of .57 per client (one client had four, the maximum allowed by the research methodology): most often distress, deterioration and strains in family relations. Over 40 per cent of side-effects were rated as severe or very severe, and over 25 per cent lasted weeks or months, though the majority were mild or moderate and transient. "Psychotherapy is not harmless," the researchers said. There was no evidence that any of the side-effects were due to unethical practice.

Examples of severe side-effects included: "suicidality, breakups, negative feedback from family members, withdrawal from relatives, feelings of shame or guilt, or intensive crying and emotional disturbance during sessions."

Such effects are not so surprising when you consider that CBT can involve exposure therapy (i.e. gradual exposure to situations that provoke anxiety); discussing and focusing on one's problems; reflecting on the sources of one's stress, such as difficult relationships; frustration at lack of progress; and feelings of growing dependency on a therapist's support.

The longer that a client had been in therapy, the more likely they were to have experienced one or more side-effects. Also, and against expectations, clients with milder symptoms were more likely to experience side-effects, perhaps because more serious symptoms mask such effects.

Interestingly, before the structured interviews, the therapists were asked off the top of their heads whether they felt their client had had any unwanted effects - in this case 74 per cent said they had not. Often it was only when prompted to think through the different examples of potential side-effects that they became aware of their prevalence. This chimes with earlier research that's documented the biases that can lead therapists to believe therapy has been successful when it hasn't.

Schermuly-Haupt and her colleagues said a conundrum raised by their findings was whether unpleasant reactions that may be an unavoidable aspect of the therapeutic process should be considered side-effects. "We argue that they are side-effects although they may be unavoidable, justified, or even needed and intended," they said. "If there were an equally effective treatment that did not promote anxiety in the patient, the present form of exposure treatment would become unethical as it is a burden to the patient."

There are reasons to treat the new findings with caution: the results depended on the therapists' recall (an in-the-moment or diary-based methodology could overcome this problem), and about half the clients were also on psychoactive medication, so it's possible some adverse effects could be attributable to the drugs rather than the therapy (even though this was not the interviewer's judgment, and remember the researchers used a conservative estimate of side-effects, only considering those that were "definitely" related to therapy by their estimation, and ignoring those that they considered "rather" or "most probably" related).

The researchers concluded that "An awareness and recognition of unwanted events and side effects in all therapies will benefit patients, improve therapy or reduce attrition, analogous to the benefit of measurement-based monitoring of treatment progress."

- Unwanted Events and Side Effects in Cognitive Behavior Therapy

Support:

- Childline [support and guidance for children and young people aged under 19]

- Samaritans [support and guidance for anyone]

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Interviews with 100 CBT-therapists reveal 43 per cent of clients experience unwanted side-effects from therapy

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By Christian Jarrett The structured nature of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy/CBT and its clearly defined principles (based on the links between thoughts, feelings and behaviours) make it relatively easy to train practitioners, to ensure standardised delivery and to measure outcomes. Consequently, CBT has revolutionised mental health care, allowing psychologists to alchemize therapy from an art into a science.

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The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers

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The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers

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The surprising habits of original thinkers

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How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies “originals”: thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals -- including embracing failure. “The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most,” Grant says. “You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.”

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Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

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Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

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Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

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Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality."

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Great leaders don't seek to be loved or feared. They strive to be trusted and respected.

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After reading something extremely boring, people generated 28% more creative ideas. When we're bored, we daydream:

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Boredom has, paradoxically, become quite interesting to academics lately. The International Interdisciplinary Boredom Conference gathered humanities scholars in Warsaw for the fifth time in April. In early May, its less scholarly forerunner, London's Boring Conference, celebrated seven years of delighting in tedium. At this event, people flock to talks about toast, double yellow lines, sneezing, and vending-machine sounds, among other snooze-inducing topics.

What, exactly, is everybody studying? One widely accepted psychological definition of boredom is "the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity." [1] But how can you quantify a person's boredom level and compare it with someone else's? In 1986, psychologists introduced the Boredom Proneness Scale, [2] designed to measure an individual's overall propensity to feel bored (what's known as "trait boredom"). By contrast, the Multidimensional State Boredom Scale, [3] developed in 2008, measures a person's feelings of boredom in a given situation ("state boredom"). A German-led team has since identified five types of state boredom: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant, and apathetic (indifferent boredom-characterized by low arousal-was the mellowest, least unpleasant kind; reactant-high arousal-was the most aggressive and unpleasant.) [4] Boredom may be miserable, but let no one call it simple.

View More

Boredom has been linked to behavior issues including bad driving, [5] mindless snacking, [6] binge-drinking, [7] risky sex, [8] and problem gambling. [9] In fact, many of us would take pain over boredom. One team of psychologists discovered that two-thirds of men and a quarter of women would rather self-administer electric shocks than sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. [10] Probing this phenomenon, another team asked volunteers to watch boring, sad, or neutral films, during which they could self-administer electric shocks. The bored volunteers shocked themselves more and harder than the sad or neutral ones did. [11]

But boredom isn't all bad. By encouraging contemplation and daydreaming, it can spur creativity. An early, much-cited study gave participants abundant time to complete problem-solving and word-association exer-cises. Once all the obvious answers were exhausted, participants gave more and more inventive answers to fend off boredom. [12] A British study took these findings one step further, asking subjects to complete a creative challenge (coming up with a list of alternative uses for a household item). One group of subjects did a boring activity first, while the others went straight to the creative task. Those whose boredom pumps had been primed were more prolific. [13]

In our always-connected world, boredom may be an elusive state, but it is a fertile one. Watch paint dry or water boil, or at least put away your smartphone for a while. You might unlock your next big idea.

The Studies:
[6] Havermans et al., "Eating and Inflicting Pain Out of Boredom" (Appetite, Feb. 2015) [9] Mercer and Eastwood, "Is Boredom Associated With Problem Gambling Behaviour?" (International Gambling Studies, April 2010)

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Boredom has, paradoxically, become quite interesting to academics lately. The International Interdisciplinary Boredom Conference gathered humanities scholars in Warsaw for the fifth time in April. In early May, its less scholarly forerunner, London's Boring Conference, celebrated seven years of delighting in tedium.

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Giving students 15 minutes to reflect on how they study—and how they can do better—boosted grades by 9%.

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Giving students 15 minutes to reflect on how they study—and how they can do better—boosted grades by 9%.

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Policy makers, tech executives, teachers, and parents are forever trying to find new ways to improve kids' performance at school. Schools design and redesign curricula, teachers embrace and reject new learning technologies, and parents plot ways to get their kids to study more.

One novel solution researchers find helps kids to perform better is to get them to think about how they think-metacognition-and have them strategize how they study.

If this sounds easy, it is not. "All too often, students just jump mindlessly into studying before they have even strategized what to use, without understanding why they are using each resource, and without planning out how they would use the resource to learn effectively," says Patricia Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford with a PhD. "I find this very unfortunate because it undermines their own potential to learn well and perform well."

But students can be taught to think strategically about thinking and studying, says Chen, the lead author of a new study about the practice, and parents can prompt this type of learning by posing some strategic questions of their own.

In the study Chen led, researchers conducted two field experiments in which some university students were offered a variety of prompts to help them think carefully about how they studied, and how they might study more effectively for an introductory statistics class exam. The other students-the control group-simply received a reminder that their exam was coming up and that they should prepare.

Those who reflected on how they wanted to perform and what they needed to do to perform better outperformed those who did not, by an average of one-third of a letter grade. Those who received the intervention prompts twice did better than those who received it once.

"Our key insight in this research is the importance of being goal-directed and thoughtful about how one chooses and uses resources for learning-or to achieve any other goal for that matter," Chen said.

There is ample evidence that self-regulation and metacognition are key to learning. But the challenge is how to teach these things in such a way that it sticks. Part of the appeal of Chen's approach is its simplicity: any student, teacher or even parent could use it.

How the field experiments worked

A week to 10 days before a test, half the class received a 15-minute survey asking them to think about a test they were going to take. They were asked to think about the grade they wanted to get on the exam, and rate how important it was to them that they got that grade, and how likely they thought it was that they would get that grade.

The survey then asked the students to reflect on what kinds of questions the exam might include, and to identify which of 15 available class resources they would use to study, including lecture notes, practice exam questions, textbook readings, instructor office hours, peer discussions, and private tutoring. They were asked to write down why each resource would be useful and how they would use it, effectively mapping out a study plan.

The students in the control group received only a reminder that the exam was coming up in a week and that they should be ready for it.

The authors were careful to note that there were no statistical differences in the students' performance prior to the exam, nor any significant difference in their high school GPAs or their levels of motivation. There was also no statistical difference in the grades the two groups of students hoped to achieve, ruling out the role of motivation as a driver of performance versus reflection and thinking about thinking. The results held across race, class, and performance level (high- and low-performing students), and gender.

In addition to improving their grades, the students who completed the online survey reported less stress in relation to the exam, compared with their peers, and a greater sense of control over their performance.

Metacognition

According to the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF), which performs studies to try and close achievement gaps, metacognition is one of two of the most effective educational interventions it has tested. (Feedback is the other.) Students involved in programs designed to improve how they think about thinking accelerated their learning by an average of eight months' worth of academic progress. The effect was greatest for low-achieving and older pupils.

In one experiment, 12- and 13-year-olds significantly improved their writing skills by learning to better evaluate the quality of their own work. The students, from 23 primary schools in West Yorkshire, England, were divided into two groups, with half the kids offered guidance on how to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own narrative writing. Kids were taught what makes a good piece of writing and how to critique their own work. "Instead of relying on the teacher, they are taught strategies to improve their own writing-that's the self-regulation," said Emily Yeomans, senior program manager at the EEF. These kids made an additional nine months' worth of academic progress in the study.

Much of this research feels intuitive. Setting goals helps us to stick to them. Making a plan for how we reach a goal increases the likelihood of achieving it as well. But educators sometimes struggle to find constructive ways to put these findings into practice, especially when the demands on them change seemingly every year (personalized learning! An iPad for every kid! New assessments!) .

A key benefit to metacognition interventions is that they are not expensive. They are also applicable to everyone: teachers can use them, but so can parents. Chen said her lab had not studied this specifically, but said that parents, who often play the role of academic guides to their children, can encourage kids to think about how they deploy their study resources.

"They can model this strategic thought process by voicing out the way they are thinking through their resource use, or they can pose questions that nudge children to exercise this strategic thinking for themselves." The specific questions she suggested: "What you are doing doesn't seem to be working very well. Is there something else you can use that would help you do it better?" or "Look at the way they are doing things. Do you think they could have gone about it in a better way?"

As adults, we know we would benefit from more planning: strategizing for that tough conversation, outlining the memo that needs to be written, thinking about the holes in the power point presentation. Whether we do it is another matter. It's no different for students.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Chen as a Stanford professor. She is a post-doctoral research fellow with a PhD in social psychology.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Stanford researcher's 15-minute study hack lifts B+ students into the As

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Policy makers, tech executives, teachers, and parents are forever trying to find new ways to improve kids' performance at school. Schools design and redesign curricula, teachers embrace and reject new learning technologies, and parents plot ways to get their kids to study more.

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Antisocial cave fish may hold clues to schizophrenia, autism

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Antisocial cave fish may hold clues to schizophrenia, autism

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Cave fish have long fascinated biologists because of their missing eyes and pale skin. Now, one researcher is studying them for another reason: Their behavior may provide clues to the genetic basis of some human psychiatric disorders. Last week at the 23rd International Conference on Subterranean Biology in Fayetteville, Arkansas,he demonstrated how drugs that help people with schizophrenia and autism similarly affect the fish.

"I think there is a lot of potential" for these fish to teach us about mental disorders, says David Culver, an evolutionary biologist at American University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study. Culver adds that- like other work on the cause of cave fish blindness -the new research may also have implications for human disease.

A decade ago, the lead author on the new study, Masato Yoshizawa, wanted to understand brain evolution by investigating the effects of natural selection on behavior. The Mexican tetra ( Astyanax mexicanus), a cave fish with very close surface relatives, seemed an excellent prospect for that work. Because the two populations can interbreed, it's easier to pin down genes that might be related to the neural defects underlying behavioral differences. Such breeding studies are not possible in humans.

The blind cave fish differ from their surface relatives in several notable ways. They don't have a social structure and they don't school. Instead, they lead solitary lives-a behavior that makes sense given their lack of natural predators. They also almost never sleep. They are hyperactive, and-unlike other fish-they are attracted to certain vibrations in the water. Finally, they tend to do the same behavior over and over again and seem to have higher anxiety than their surface relatives.

Yoshizawa, now an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, has been testing whether these fish might be useful in understanding the genetic basis of schizophrenia or autism. Studies in typical model animals-mice-are rarely illuminating, because the rodents often still behave normally when researchers manipulate genes that should cause these disorders. But even without genetic tinkering, the fish already show certain "symptoms" of the diseases, such as sleeplessness, hyperactivity, and asocial behavior.

What's more, 90% of the 101 classic risk factor genes for human psychiatric diseases are also found in the cave fish genome, according to Yoshizawa's comparison of genomes and transcriptomes-surveys of active genes-in cave fish and humans. Fully one-third of those genes are more or less active in the cave fish than they are in the surface fish.

As a first step toward assessing this new model, Yoshizawa and others have treated cave fish with several psychiatric drugs. Three years ago, a French team showed that the antidepressant Fluoxetine (commonly known as Prozac) caused the fish to become more aggressive toward each other. Yoshizawa has now shown that Fluoxetine-along with the antipsychotic Clozapine-made the fish sleep more and swim around less. "Overall, these drug responses in cave fish are very similar to what you see in human patients," he said last week at the meeting in Fayetteville. "These are strong evidence that cave fish could be a good model for human psychiatric disease."

Now, he and his colleagues are studying larger numbers of cave fish with variation in these behaviors, in the hopes that they can tease out which versions of which genes are associated with the extremes of these behaviors. From there, they plan to study how those genes interact with each other and the environment to alter fish behavior. Combined with insights into gene expression, nerve connections, and imaging the neural activity, the work could help prune the long list of genes implicated in autism and schizophrenia, Yoshizawa says.

Of course, Yoshizawa faces a long road ahead. "As with any model system, cave fish has limitations," says Houmam Araj, a program officer at the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved with the work. Fish and humans are separated by 400 million years of evolution, so the control of these behaviors may not be the same in humans and fish. Still, Culver says, "I think this is really exciting stuff."

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Antisocial cave fish may hold clues to schizophrenia, autism

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Cave fish have long fascinated biologists because of their missing eyes and pale skin. Now, one researcher is studying them for another reason: Their behavior may provide clues to the genetic basis of some human psychiatric disorders.

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Issue of Diversity in Genetic Research - Importance of Involving Indigenous populations

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Issue of Diversity in Genetic Research - Importance of Involving Indigenous populations

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Keolu Fox: Why genetic research must be more diverse

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Ninety-six percent of genome studies are based on people of European descent. The rest of the world is virtually unrepresented -- and this is dangerous, says geneticist and TED Fellow Keolu Fox, because we react to drugs differently based on our genetic makeup.

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Who we really are? The puzzle of personality

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Who we really are? The puzzle of personality

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Brian Little: Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality

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What makes you, you? Psychologists like to talk about our traits, or defined characteristics that make us who we are. But Brian Little is more interested in moments when we transcend those traits - sometimes because our culture demands it of us, and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves.

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No one wants to be in this position...

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YDA: For those who are born to create drama

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An incorrigible optimist or a case of positive illusion?

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An incorrigible optimist or a case of positive illusion?

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An absolutely mind-blowing talk by a cognitive scientist, Donald Hoffman. Hoffman studies how our visual perception constructs (or reconstructs) every aspect of our everyday reality.

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An absolutely mind-blowing talk by a cognitive scientist, Donald Hoffman. Hoffman studies how our visual perception constructs (or reconstructs) every aspect of our everyday reality.

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Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is ... or as we need it to be? In this ever so slightly mind-blowing talk, he ponders how our minds construct reality for us.

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