In a recent study that’s not yet published, Driska and his colleagues looked at an intense two-week wrestling camp, measuring feelings and attitudes of 89 teens before the camp experience and after. As expected, the players’ confidence increased — it was a tough camp to get through, Driska says. But what surprised him, he says, was how much feelings of hopefulness among the young people also increased.”
Hunches make people over-confident. But if the hunch runs in the opposite direction to everyone else’s certainties, then over-confidence can be a strength… It’s not as if data solve the over-confidence problem, anyway. Indeed, they can exacerbate it, especially when people get hooked on the wrong measures… The hunch and the data can educate one another. We need human judgment to correct for cardinal bias—the tendency to place more importance on what can be quantified than what cannot.”
What we do know is that regardless of minority status, socioeconomic class and first-generation college student status, how you take advantage of college is more important than where you go. For example, graduates who had mentoring relationships, internships and jobs where they applied their learning, as well as long-term projects lasting more than a semester, doubled their odds of being engaged in work and thriving in their well-being later in life. It may be the case that those who value college most take more advantage of the opportunity.”
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Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson