What can students do to efficiently learn and remember? Cognitive science offers answers, say Adam Putnam, Victor Sungkhasettee, and Henry Roediger in their new essay, “Optimizing Learning in College.” Their learning tips include these: Find a quiet place to study. Get away from the TV. Tune out social media. Shut down e-mail. Focus! Generate questions about important points. Generate questions to be answered by your reading, such as “What is cognitive dissonance? How do people study it?” Read, recite, and review. Mentally summarize a chapter after reading it. Then review it and take note of what you missed. For concept learning, flashcards help. “Recalling information from memory is one of the best ways to remember information. . . . Many newer textbooks also including online resources with interactive quizzes.” (Yes!) Write your notes instead of typing them. Leave your laptop at home. Transcribing lectures engages less active processing than does hand-writing your own synopses of the presented material. Space your study. “By spacing your studying you will learn the material in less time.” Attending lectures that cover—in different words—the same concepts previously read in a text also provides spaced learning. Study by quizzing yourself. To prepare for an exam, “practice testing is one of the best study strategies.” Another best practice is explaining something to someone else, as in a study group. Sleep and exercise. Exercise enhances focus and creativity (as well as having health and emotional benefits). “Sleep deprivation can hurt your cognitive functioning without your being aware of it.” ... View more

Originally posted on April 22, 2014. Critics have used the SAT test redesign to denounce the SAT and aptitude testing.  The multiple choice SAT has “never been a good predictor of academic achievement,” Bard College president Leon Botstein argued in Time. Better, to “look at the complex portrait” of college applicants’ lives, including “what their schools are like.” said Colby College English professor Jennifer Finney Boylan in a New York Times essay. The SAT only measures “those skills … necessary for the SATs,” surmised New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert.  In a new Slate essay, David Hambrick and Christopher Chabris, distinguished experimental psychologists at Michigan State University and Union College, rebut such assertions.  Massive data, they argue, show that •    SAT scores do predict first-year GPA, whole-college GPA, and graduation likelihood, with the best prediction coming from a combination of both high school grades and aptitude scores. •    SAT scores of 13-year-old predict future advanced degrees and income, much as kindred and strongly-related IQ scores predict job training and vocational success. •    In one famous nationwide sample, the IQ scores of Scottish 11-year-olds predicted their later-life longevity, even after adjusting for socioeconomic status. •    Although SAT scores are slightly higher among students from high income families, the SAT also provides an opportunity for students from nonelite public school to display their potential—rather than to be judged by “what their schools are like.”  Thus SAT scores, when compared with assessments influenced by income-related school quality, have a social levelling effect.  •    Test preparation courses often taken by higher income prep school students “don’t change SAT scores much.” Ergo, say Hambrick and Chabris, while other traits such as grit, social skill, conscientiousness, and creativity matter, too, “the idea that standardized tests and ‘general intelligence’ are meaningless is wishful thinking.” ... View more