Visual and Vocabulary Test

An interesting site which test you on your vocabularly using the MCQ format with visuals

http://www.merriam-webster.com/namethatthing/index.htm#quiz-top

The Secret Code Of Learning

Our body language can reveal more about what we know than our verbal languageBy Annie Murphy PaulRead more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/11/09/the-secret-code-of-learning/#ixzz1gmkmBed5

Frederic Mishkin, who’s been a professor at Columbia Business School for almost 30 years, is good at solving problems and expressing ideas. Whether he’s standing in front of a lecture hall or engaged in a casual conversation, he’s a blur of motion, his hands waving, pointing, jabbing the air. “I talk with my hands,” he says. “I always have.” When he was in graduate school, in fact, one of his professors was so exasperated by this constant gesticulating that he made the young economist sit on his hands whenever he visited the professor’s office.It turns out, however, that Mishkin’s mentor had it exactly wrong. Gesture doesn’t hinder clear thought and speech — it facilitates it. Research demonstrates that the movements we make with our hands when we talk constitute a kind of second language, adding information that’s absent from our words. It’s learning’s secret code: Gesture reveals what we know. It reveals what we don’t know. And it reveals (as Donald Rumsfeld might put it) what we know, but don’t yet know we know. What’s more, the congruence (or lack of congruence) between what our voices say and how our hands move offers a clue to our readiness to learn.(MORE: In Praise of Tinkering)Many of the studies establishing the importance of gesture to learning have been conducted by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. “We change our minds by moving our hands,” writes Goldin-Meadow in a review of this work published in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science. Particularly significant are what she calls “mismatches” between verbal expression and physical gestures. A student might say that a heavier ball falls faster than a light one, for example, but make a gesture indicating that they fall at the same rate, which is correct. Such discrepancies indicate that we’re in a transitional state, moving from one level of understanding to another. The thoughts expressed by hand motions are often our newest and most advanced ideas about the problem we’re working on; we can’t yet assimilate these notions into language, but we can capture them in movement. When a child employs gesture, Goldin-Meadow notes, “the information about the child’s cognitive state is conveyed sub rosa — below the surface of ordinary conversation.” Such gesture-speech mismatches have been found in toddlers going through a vocabulary spurt, in elementary-school children describing why the seasons change, and in adults attempting to explain how a machine works.Goldin-Meadow’s more recent work shows not only that gesture is an index to our readiness to learn, but that it actually helps to bring learning about. It does so in two ways. First, it elicits helpful behavior from others around us. Goldin-Meadow has found that adults spontaneously respond to children’s speech-gesture mismatches by adjusting their mode of instruction. Parents and teachers apparently receive the signal that children are ready to learn, and they act on it by offering a greater variety of problem-solving strategies.The act of gesturing itself also seems to accelerate learning, bringing nascent knowledge into consciousness and aiding the understanding of new concepts. A 2007 study by Susan Wagner Cook, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, reported that third-graders who were asked to gesture while learning algebra were nearly three times more likely to remember what they’d learned than classmates who did not gesture. Another experiment conducted by Cook determined that college students who gestured as they retold short stories they’d seen recalled the details of the stories better, suggesting that gesturing as we’re remembering helps retrieve the information from memory.(MORE: Is English Making Us Dyslexic?)So how can you crack learning’s secret code? First, pay attention to your own gestures. Research has found that watching a teacher gesture encourages young learners to produce gestures of their own. Learning improves even when children are given a specific gesture by someone else, rather than generating it themselves. In a 2009 experiment, Goldin-Meadow demonstrated that fourth-graders learning how to solve a math equation identified the correct answers more often when they imitated a helpful gesture shown to them by an adult than when they simply repeated the grown-up’s words.Second, train yourself to attend to others’ gestures. Notice in particular the gestures that diverge from speech — when people say one thing and motion another, they are primed to take advantage of instruction and direction from others. And encourage your kids to move their hands when they talk. Studies show that children instructed to gesture make more speech-gesture mismatches — that is, they increase their readiness to learn. To those like Frederic Mishkin’s erstwhile professor, who think we should remain still while speaking, the science of learning has given us a cheeky retort: Tell it to the hand.Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/11/09/the-secret-code-of-learning/#ixzz1gmkdOxjo

The Power of Smart Listening

Skilled listeners use specific strategies to get the most out of what they hearRead more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/07/the-power-of-smart-listening/#ixzz1gmjL3rD0

When we’re learning a foreign language, making sense of what we hear is the first step toward fluency. It sounds obvious, but until recently, we didn’t know much about how listening works. New research demonstrates that effective listening involves more than simply hearing the words that float past our ears. Rather, it’s an active process of interpreting information and making meaning. This kind of engaged listening is a skill that’s as critical for learning a range of subjects at school and work as it is for learning to understand a foreign tongue.(PHOTOS: Summer Programs Keep Kids’ Minds Sharp)Studies of skilled language learners have identified specific listening strategies that lead to superior comprehension. What’s more, research has shown that learners who deliberately adopt these strategies become better listeners. Last year, for example, University of Ottawa researcher Larry Vandergrift published his study of 106 undergraduates who were learning French as a second language. Half of the students were taught in a conventional fashion, listening to and practicing texts spoken aloud. The other half, possessing the same initial skill level and taught by the same teacher, were given explicit instruction on how to listen. In the journal Language Learning, Vandergrift reported the results: The second group “significantly outperformed” the first one on a test of comprehension. The improvement was especially pronounced among the less-fluent French speakers in the group.So what are these listening strategies? Skilled learners go into a listening session with a sense of what they want to get out of it. They set a goal for their listening, and they generate predictions about what the speaker will say. Before the talking begins, they mentally review what they already know about the subject, and form an intention to “listen out for” what’s important or relevant. Once they begin listening, these learners maintain their focus; if their attention wanders, they bring it back to the words being spoken. They don’t allow themselves to be thrown off by confusing or unfamiliar details. Instead, they take note of what they don’t understand and make inferences about what those things might mean, based on other clues available to them: their previous knowledge of the subject, the context of the talk, the identity of the speaker, and so on. They’re “listening for gist,” and not getting caught up in fine-grained analysis. All the while, skilled learners are evaluating what they’re hearing and their own understanding of it. They’re checking their inferences to see if they’re correct, and identifying the questions they still have so they can pursue the answers later.(MORE: Paul: The Secret Code of Learning)Such strategies are all about metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and they yield a variety of benefits. Research indicates that learners who engage in metacogition are better at processing and storing new information, better at finding the best ways to practice and better at reinforcing what they have learned. In a 2006 study by researchers from Singapore, Chinese speakers who were learning English as a second language reported increased motivation and confidence after they were taught metacognitive strategies.Though listening is often treated as a social nicety, a way to make others feel appreciated, it’s also one of the most powerful tools we have to gain information and insight. That’s true whether the language we’re listening to is the jargon of science and technology, the parlance of the executive suite — or the fast-flowing patois of French. Comprenez-vous?Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/07/the-power-of-smart-listening/#ixzz1gmjBYmwk

Why Asking Questions Might Not Be the Best Way to Teach

A recent study throws the efficacy of the Socratic method into doubtBy Annie Murphy Paul Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/14/why-asking-questions-might-not-be-the-best-way-to-teach/#ixzz1gmiMwTEO

More than 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrates wandered around Athens asking questions, an approach to finding truth that thinkers have venerated ever since. In modern times, the Socratic method was adapted for use in universities and became the dominant form of instruction for students learning philosophy and the law. The most recent national survey on the subject found that 97% of law-school professors use the Socratic method in first-year classes. Socratic dialogues seemed to work for the ancient Greeks (at least according to the records produced by Socrates’ disciple Plato.) Are they effective for people today? Recently, a group of researchers decided to find out.(MORE: Top 10 Greatest Speeches, Including Socrates’ Apology)In a study published in the December 2011 issue of the journal Mind, Brain, and Education, four cognitive scientists from Argentina describe what happened when they asked contemporary high school and college students a series of questions identical to those posed by Socrates. In one of his most famous lessons, Socrates showed a young slave boy a square, then led him through a series of 50 questions intended to teach the boy how to draw a second square with an area twice as large as the first. Students in the 2011 experiment, led by researcher Andrea Goldin, gave answers astonishingly similar to those offered by Socrates’ pupil, even making the same mistakes he made. “Our results show that the Socratic dialogue is built on a strong intuition of human knowledge and reasoning which persists more than twenty-four centuries after its conception,” the researchers write. Their findings, Goldin and his co-authors add, demonstrate the existence of “human cognitive universals traversing time and cultures.”But these “universals” come with a significant caveat. By the end of Socrates’ lesson, the Greek boy had figured out how to do the task. More than half of the contemporary subjects, on the other hand, failed to grasp the import of the philosopher’s 50 questions. This is only one experiment, of course. But it raises intriguing questions about the value of the Socratic method as a teaching technique in today’s classrooms. Law professors praise the tactic for training students to respond quickly and fluently to challenging questions — even if most instructors today employ a “soft” Socratic method, far less combative than the gladiatorial exchanges made famous in the 1973 movie The Paper Chase. Philosopher Mitchell Green, a professor at the University of Virginia, extols the approach for a different reason. “Answering questions about philosophical problems forces students to invest themselves in the outcome,” says Green. “The problem comes alive for them, not as ‘something René Descartes or John Stuart Mill once said,’ but as a dilemma for them to wrestle with and make choices about. The Socratic method makes them put some skin in the game.”(MORE: Annie Murphy Paul: The Power of Smart Listening)Green has his own ideas about the future of the ancient philosopher’s practice. He is working on digitizing the Socratic method: creating a computer program that will pose a series of questions about a philosophical problem, adjusting subsequent queries to challenge the user and reveal the flaws in her reasoning. Green has begun the venture by programming answers to familiar philosophical chestnuts like the mind-body problem and the question of free will. Ultimately, however, he plans to allow users to contribute their own content to the program (vetted by philosophy professors and graduate students who will maintain the site): a kind of Wiki-Socrates. Green’s project, which he hopes to make available to the public this summer, may seem a long way from the dialogues of Socrates’ Athens — but it’s simply the latest exchange in a conversation lasting 2,000 years.Paul, the author of Origins, is at work on a book about the science of learning. The views expressed are her own.Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/14/why-asking-questions-might-not-be-the-best-way-to-teach/#ixzz1gmiAHehN

If I Were a Middle Class White Guy Writing About Being a Poor Black Kid

A response to Gene Marks's "If I Were A Poor Black Kid" in ForbesRead more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/15/if-i-was-a-middle-class-white-guy-writing-about-being-a-poor-black-kid/#ixzz1gmMUz0VQ

If I were a middle class white guy writing on Forbes.com about being a poor Black kid I’d be clueless. I’d be so clueless that I wouldn’t realize that I’m clueless, so I would not know that I should really, really step away from my expensive computer and not press send on my condescending, paternalistic and simplistic little essay that breezily fixes the problems of poor Black kids. I wouldn’t think, well, if these steps are so easy — use the Internet to get more learning and try real hard — then why don’t more kids do that? I mean, wouldn’t some of them have thought of that already? No, they wouldn’t because none of them are middle class white guys.I wouldn’t think about how my cheery advice doesn’t really interact with the challenges of being a poor Black kid — from the lack of role models to poor schools to depressed employment opportunities to the lure of the drug game to the day-to-day difficulties of being poor that makes it hard to get out of being poor because of a system that’s constructed to keep you poor. I wouldn’t think about those things because I wouldn’t really know anything about them because I don’t have to. I could potentially solve some of my ignorance by interviewing some poor Black kids before I write about them, but I wouldn’t go do that because, you know, what if I get robbed. I saw that happen in a movie.(MORE: Touré: Can Whites Say the N-Word?)In my pithy, encouraging, bootstrappy message to the poor, Black kids of America I wouldn’t include a discussion of overcoming the challenges of racism — from the mind-numbing messages society sends to broken families to the paucity of opportunity to the overpolicing of poor Black communities, which leads to the prevalence of criminal records which makes it nearly impossible to get jobs. I wouldn’t realize that Black people who are applying for jobs with a clean criminal record are treated the same as white people with a criminal record, so the struggle to find a job is complicated by Black skin. I wouldn’t know that the recession has hit Blacks harder than it hit whites, so no matter what a Black kid does he cannot find a job if few exist.I wouldn’t think about these things if I were a middle class white man because I never really think about racism because I don’t have to. Racism is something that happens to other people and I don’t really think about it that often because it’s complicated and it makes me uncomfortable to think about. I don’t even think about how race impacts my life, but I have a race card. You didn’t know I have a race card? Of course, I do. I don’t even have to pull out my race card for it to work. It works automatically. It’s accepted everywhere you want to be. Membership has its privileges.If I were a middle class man writing about a poor Black kid I would assume that anyone who knows the world in the way that I do would make the decisions that I would make so I need only share with them the knowledge that I have. I wouldn’t think about how their environment might impact their ability or willingness to use that information. I mean, everyone has access to the Internet, right? Just turn it on and become a Google Scholar, and then Skype away to a better education. I wouldn’t think that some of them may lack Wi-Fi. I mean, everyone has Wi-Fi, right?(MORE: Judith Warner: Why are the Rich So Interested in Public-School Reform?)Look, I’m a middle class white guy on deadline at a big-time magazine, with no idea of the hornet’s nest I’m about to step into — I’m just trying to be nice and give some advice to some poor poor Black kids. I’m doing the right thing. I’m not even aware that the very gesture and the breezyness of my discussion is insulting because I’m wrapped up in a cocoon of white privilege that blinds me to the realities of being a poor Black kid, so I’m not even aware of how difficult it is to be a poor Black kid because my life has never been anywhere near as difficult. Thank God for that.Touré is the author of four books, including Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? The views expressed are his ownRead more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/15/if-i-was-a-middle-class-white-guy-writing-about-being-a-poor-black-kid/#ixzz1gmLcnyOx