Alex Britez's List: Education

• Pupils actually learn better if conditions are arranged so that they have to make errors.

• adore social interaction
• Gregariousness:
• ove to be connected to others
• Autonomy
• chance to work independently
• Status
• strong, positive reputation
• Inquisitiveness
• need to know
• Aggression
• good competitors
• Power
• a drive for influence, responsibility, and authority
• Recognition
• respond to public encouragement
• adore feeling connected to institutions and groups bigger than themselves
• Affiliation

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• According to new data, the researchers say, that gender gap has become a myth
• little difference between boys' and girs' average math scores
• boys did still slightly outnumber girls in the 99th percentile.
• eflect the simple fact that more female students are now taking math courses
• somewhere along the way, girls stopped taking math and never learned the skills required to do well on standardized tests
• That skewed view — and not some lack of aptitude — may be what keeps girls from pursuing math and science as a career
• "Mathematics and science departments need to work on making graduate departments more women-friendly for not just the students but for the faculty as well,"
• role models for future generations

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• bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age

• men earn 70 percent of the Ph.D.s in the mathematical sciences,
• A study of mathematically precocious young people finds that boys outnumbered girls 2.8-to-1 in 2005, though that was down from 13-to-1 a quarter-century before,
• On average, girls have reached parity with boys in the United States and some other countries, and the gender gap at the high end is closing,
• ests typically show that, among students scoring in the 99th percentile for math achievement, boys outnumber girls 2-to-1. But that’s only among white students. Among Asians in the U.S., girls outnumber boys very slightly, as they do in Britain, Iceland and Thailand
• We concluded that the main  reason many fewer females than males excel in math in most countries is not lack of innate ability or ‘intrinsic aptitude’ but gender inequality,”
• “Nations with greater gender equality typically have a smaller math gender gap.”
• Society either sends a message that girls can excel at math, that they will be rewarded for doing so—or it doesn’t.
• In both cases, countries with as many or more girls at the upper extreme tend to be those with the greatest gender equality, such as Germany and the Netherlands
• East Germany regularly sent many more girls than West Germany to the International Mathematics Olympiad by margins of 5-to-0; Slovakia sent more girls by a margin of 3-to-1; Korea topped Japan by 6 to 0

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• The genetic explanation suggests that women's math skills are naturally inferior to men's, and there are evolutionary explanations to suggest why this might be so (e.g., our male ancestors had to travel large distances for hunting and had to use their brains to calculate the trajectory of their spears)
• So, the gap seems to be less about what little girls have or don't have, and more about what they do with what they have
• Barbie uttered the phrase "math is hard,"
• . We believed that one personality characteristic - the belief that traits are fixed or malleable - played a significant role in the gender gap issue
• People with fixed beliefs respond more negatively to failure because they view it as confirmation of their lack of ability.
• feel upset and depressed and as a result, are likely to give up
• malleable beliefs view failure as the result of lack of effort and tend to respond to it with optimism and increased motivation (like Nietzsche's famous quote "what does not kill him makes him stronger")
• old them all that they had performed poorly
• showed less identification with the math domain (they felt their math skills were not an important part of their identity)
• reported less enjoyment of math-related experiences,
• ndicated they were less likely to pursue a math career after graduation, compared to women who believed their math skills were malleable
• indicated they were less likely to pursue a math major
• hese results are important because they suggest the math gender gap may be primarily driven by a subset of women - those who believe their math ability is fixed and unchangeabl
• First, if women who view their math skills as fixed are most susceptible to the gender gap, our attention and efforts should be primarily focused on this vulnerable population
• ry to identify young girls with this belief structure early in their academic careers
• encourage girls to adopt a malleable view of their math skills
• he results of our study suggest that a similar program, designed to specifically address beliefs about the malleability of math skills, could be used successfully to address the math gender gap.
• some part of that belief system is influenced by society and by their experiences at school, but a large part of that belief system comes from their parents
• One way that such beliefs are regularly communicated is through praise
• In a recent survey by Columbia University, 85% of American parents think it is important to tell their kids they are smart. But such praise can backfire.
• But of the children who were praised for their effort, most picked the challenging test
• praising children for their intelligence communicates that this trait is fixed - that they were born inherently smart.
• , children who think their intelligence is malleable have a sense of control over their success, but children who think their intelligence is fixed have no contro
• Children labeled "smart" or "gifted" tend to coast and they come to see little value in studying or practicing their skills.

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• Singing songs, understanding the words sung in a song, and associating the words with meaning are the important components of singing any song
• song is a mnemonic for remembering the letters