My other blog activities

I am delighted to have so many followers. However, it is not nearly as many as I apparently have at Psychology Today, where the reader views of my posts there now total over 65,000 (see http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic). Some of my posts there are cross posts from this blog, but others are unique.

You may want to know about my other blog on excuse-making, misplaced blame, and how to grow in competence and self-esteem by dealing with deception of self and others. See http://blamegameblog.blogspot.com.

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Older People Make Better Decisions

In an earlier post, I reviewed research showing that seniors compensate for any loss of memory ability by having developed learning and memory schemas over the years. Such schemas are ingrained strategies and ways of efficient learning that improve with experience and age. Now I have come across recent research that shows another age-developed skill: improved decision-making ability. Teenagers are notorious for poor decision-making. Of course that is inevitable, given that their brains are still developing and they have had relatively little life experience to show them what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, what doesn’t work often has more emotional appeal, and most of us at any age are more susceptible to our emotions than to cold, hard logic. Seniors also are prone to poor decision-making if senility has set it. Unscrupulous people take advantage of such seniors because a brain that is deteriorating has a hard time making wise decisions. In between teenage and senility is when ...
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Children Still Not Reading Well

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For the last 15 years, official data indicate there have been almost no increase in reading scores, despite the fact that the main purpose of No Child Left Behind. Look at these data: The graph data, which came from the U.S. Dept. of Education, also shows the gap between reading scores of whites and blacks. There is no change in the gap.We can argue all day on the causes of this lack of improvement, but it is hard to defend all the increased government spending for education or for NCLB programs. These data were presented by Mark Seidenberg at the University of Wisconsin at the Neuro-Education conference in Aspen, Co. that I attended. His talk aimed to explain the lack of change in the gap, which he attributed to incompatibilities between African-American English with traditional English. To me, the real issue that neither whites nor blacks are improving. Whatever the government is doing, it is not working! And the answer is MORE federal intervention?
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Judging Learning Effectiveness During Learning

When students study, they may monitor their progress during a study session by periodically forming judgments on how well they are remembering the material. Such judgments guide how much further study is deemed necessary. Researchers have studied this matter in the case of paired associate learning (where you learn lists of word pairs like dogs-cats, newspaper-book, etc.).  In particular, researchers looked for correlations between later memory recall either immediately after learning or after a short delay in which judgments about learning are based on a covert attempt to recall. Results indicate that making judgments about how well something will be remembered can be just as efficient as taking an actual test. In delayed judgments, the student typically makes an initial covert recall effort and then, based on that, judges how well the material was learned. Future recall tends to correlate with predictions on recall on a future test. That is not so surprising, other than the fact ...
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