A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities. As schools ratchet up academic standards for all students, new buzzwords are “persistence,” “risk-taking” and “resilience” — each implying more sweat and strain than fuzzy, warm feelings.

“We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter,” Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said. “That has backfired.”

Dweck’s studies, embraced in Montgomery schools and elsewhere, have found that praising children for intelligence — “You’re so clever!” — also backfires. In study after study, children rewarded for being smart become more likely to shy away from hard assignments that might tarnish their star reputations.

But children praised for trying hard or taking risks tend to enjoy challenges and find greater success. Children also perform better in the long term when they believe that their intellect is not a birthright but something that grows and develops as they learn new things.

Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Link Via Geekosystem

The winners of the very first Google Science Fair were announced on Monday. Congratulations to the top winners in each age group!

Lauren Hodge in the 13-14 age group. Lauren studied the effect of different marinades on the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled chicken.
Naomi Shah in the 15-16 age group. Naomi endeavored to prove that making changes to indoor environments that improve indoor air quality can reduce people’s reliance on asthma medications.
Shree Bose in the 17-18 age group. Shree discovered a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients when they have built up a resistance to certain chemotherapy drugs.

Shree Bose (center of picture) also won the overall Grand Prize, which comes with a $50,000 scholarship, a trip to the Galapagos Islands, and an internship at CERN. Shah and Hodge also won scholarships and internships at Google and LEGO. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

The students created a 1,900-square-foot inflatable tent which is radiation-proof by layering radiation-shield materials like Demron. Demron is currently used in protective safety suits. In fact, the workers cleaning up Japan’s nuclear  Fukishima  plant are currently using them. The tent, which can house four to six astronauts, also uses a gold-metalicized film to reflect the UV rays. According to the university, it’s airtight material is made from a “polyurethane substrate” which keeps the air in, allowing for an atmosphere that the astronauts can breathe.

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Americans generally believe the ideal person is self-reliant. Most Americans see themselves as separate individuals, not as representatives of a family, community or other group. They dislike being dependent on other people, or having others depend on them. Some people define this trait as selfishness. Others see it as a healthy freedom from the constraints of family or social class.

How is this value manifested into behavior? In individualist cultures, such as the U.S., it is assumed that people need to be alone some of the time and prefer to take care of problems by themselves. Another expectation is that people are ready to “do business” very soon after meeting, without much time spent on preliminary conversation. Also people act competitively, are proud of their accomplishments and expect others to be proud of their own accomplishments.

Reading this makes the USA seem like a strange, exotic culture. Which I suppose it is if you weren’t born and raised here. Link -via Breakfast Links

“My children have to appear in court,” Erica Russell, the mother of two eighth-grade girls who spent eight hours in jail, said Tuesday. “They were handcuffed, slammed in a wagon, had their mug shots taken and treated like real criminals.”

“They’re all scared,” Ms. Russell said of the two dozen arrested students. “You never know how children will be impacted by that. I was all for some other kind of punishment, but not jail. Who hasn’t had a food fight?”

What do you guys think?  Link (Image from aggrotech‘s Photobucket album)

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

On the one hand, you may look at YouTube comments and chat rooms and think literacy is going into the dumpster. On the other hand, those are millions of people who would otherwise never communicate a thought in public if the internet were not available to them. Writer Clive Thompson says the new technology has changed the meaning of writing for younger people.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.

Of course, not every young internet commenter will go on to be a Stanford student. Do you see the internet as an aid or a hindrance to literacy? Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Mads Berg)

Harry Potter and the Scheming Students

Screwy Scoreboards

Caltech is M.I.T.’s biggest rival in pranks, despite being located at opposite ends of the country. They often take potshots at one another and are especially prone to pranks at football games. Although the Great Rose Bowl prank is pretty well known, another football stunt occurred when Caltech wasn’t even playing. During the 1964 Washington vs. Illinois Rose Bowl game, the audience of 100,000 was rather bored by a somewhat lackluster game. That is, until they looked up and realized that someone had changed the electronic scoreboard to make it appear as if Caltech was putting the hurt on M.I.T. It happened again in 1984 – although the teams were UCLA and Illinois (again), it appeared as if Caltech was stomping M.I.T., 31-9.

“We Suck”

In Cod We Trust

Rooftop Ride

Rice Gets More Comfortable

Fictional Facebook Fox

Remember when video games were bad for you? Mom and Dad would complain about how they tied up the television, kept you from playing outdoors, ruined your eyesight and wasted your time. That’s a thing of the past. Re-tooled videogames are now helping children and teens boost basic skills in reading, writing and math.

At West Nottinghamshire College in the U.K., computer science teachers were struggling to get teenage students into literacy and numeracy classes. The college needed to take drastic measures to assist “disaffected students”.

The resolution came in the form of Neverwinter Nights, Atari’s popular computer game. Teachers rebuilt the game to deliver educational challenges players must tackle in order to progress.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

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Other tips include structuring time for peer tutoring every day, apologizing to students when necessary and asking students to conduct a "personal skills audit" where they focus on their individual strengths rather than their weaknesses.

The kit, designed to help Queensland teachers address mental health in the classroom, suggests social and emotional wellbeing has been linked to young people’s schooling, among other things.

The education aid has sparked a row in parliament, with deputy opposition leader Mark McArdle calling it "kooky, loony, loopy lefty policies."

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A teacher who could no longer afford to print out the tests for his classes has taken to selling ads on his students’ tests. The current pricing is $10 per quiz, $20 per test and $30 per final. Most of the ads are from parents and local businesses. What kind of a message would you put on your kid’s test?

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*a total of 30 percent overall — admitted stealing from a store within the past year.

*More than two of five (42 percent) said that they sometimes lie to save money.

*A substantial majority (64 percent) cheated on a test during the past year

*More than one in four (26 percent) confessed they lied on at least one or two questions on the survey.

*A whopping 93 percent said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character

The report released yesterday covered honesty and integrity. A later report will have survey results on drug use and violence. Link -Thanks, Geekazoid!