Tag Archives: gerardo ramirez

Students may forget relevant information in order to protect their own psyches

UCLA-led study suggests people often don’t recall memories that threaten the way they want to see themselves

What’s too painful to remember/ We simply choose to forget.”
– Barbra Streisand, “The Way We Were”

UCLA-led research has found that students in a college mathematics course experienced a phenomenon similar to repression, the psychological process in which people forget emotional or traumatic events to protect themselves. (more…)

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Learning About Spatial Relationships Boosts Understanding of Numbers

Children who are skilled in understanding how shapes fit together to make recognizable objects also have an advantage when it comes to learning the number line and solving math problems, research at the University of Chicago shows.

The work is further evidence of the value of providing young children with early opportunities in spatial learning, which contributes to their ability to mentally manipulate objects and understand spatial relationships, which are important in a wide range of tasks, including reading maps and graphs and understanding diagrams showing how to put things together. Those skills also have been shown to be important in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. (more…)

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Writing About Anxiety Helps Students Ace Exams

*Research says test performance improves when students write about their worries*

Sian Beilock, lead author of a new study that appears on January 13 in the journal Science, says writing about test-related worries for ten minutes immediately before taking an exam is an effective way to improve test scores in classroom settings.

“By writing down one’s negative thoughts, students may come to realize that the situation is not as bad as they thought or that they are prepared to take it on,” said Beilock, an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. “As a result, they worry less during the test.” (more…)

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