Problem: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes
B) No
C) Cannot be determined

"More than 80 percent of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Here is how to think it through logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status is unknown. You need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she would be the married person who is looking at an unmarried person (George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is looking at Anne, the unmarried person. This thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning - reasoning that considers all possibilities. The fact that the problem does not reveal whether Anne is or is not married suggests to people that they do not have enough information, and they make the easiest inference (C) without thinking through all the possibilities. Most people can carry out fully disjunctive reasoning when they are explicitly told that it is necessary (as when there is no option like 'cannot be determined' available). But most do not automatically do so, and the tendency to do so is only weakly correlated with intelligence.

"Here is another test of cognitive miserliness, as described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick.

"A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

"Many people give the first response that comes to mind - 10 cents. But if they thought a little harder, they would realize that this cannot be right: the bat would then have to cost $1.10, for a total of $1.20. IQ is no guarantee against this error. Kahneman and Frederick found that large numbers of highly select university students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Harvard were cognitive misers, just like the rest of us, when given this and similar problems."

Author: Keith E. Stanovich
Title: "Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss"
Publisher: Scientific American
Date: November/December 2009
Pages: 35-36

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Posted via email from LearnThat's Blog

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Unsere gemeinnützige hat das Rennen eingegeben gewinnen Sie einen Chase Finanzhilfe der Gemeinschaft, Und wir brauchen Ihre Hilfe! basieren auf Wertungen.

We heard about this just recently, and still need about 800 votes before 7/12 to make it, we've done great so far... but we need to get many more votes.
Können Sie uns helfen durch Stimmabgabe für unseren Wortschatz Junction Kampagne, Kostenfreiem Nachhilfe für Drittklässler bundesweit?
Als Dankeschön für Ihre Zeit, um abzustimmen, werden wir Kredit 10 Credits Lernen Sie.
In naher Zukunft, wenn www.LearnThatWord.org ersetzt www.eSpindle.org, Werden die Nutzer nur für gemessene Lernergebnisse zu bezahlen, und 10 Credits repräsentieren etwa einem Monat kostenlos Nachhilfe!

Here's how it works:

1 - Klicken Sie auf diesen Link: http://bit.ly/learnthatword.

2 - auf dem loslegen Link klicken:

3 - Auf dem nächsten Bildschirm, zu genehmigen, dass Chase kann mit Ihnen verbinden und erhalten Sie Zugang zu Ihrem öffentlichen Facebook info (sie wird deinen Namen und Profilbilder Liste nach Abstimmung).

4 - On the following screen, click "like" by clicking on the highlighted button (you can "unlike" Chase jederzeit möglich).

4 - Click "vote for this charity"... Thank you!! Send an email to [email protected] with your Facebook name and your eSpindle username, and we'll credit your account.

5 - Bitte geben Sie diese Informationen mit Ihren Freunden und allen, die über die Erziehung kümmert: Facebook, E-Mails, Foren, Netzwerke. http://bit.ly/learnthatword...

Let's start closing the Vocabulary Divide that causes so many elementary students to struggle. We still need about 800 votes before 7/12... just a little miracle that should be well possible with a little help of our friends!

Vielen Dank für Ihre Unterstützung!

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Ich hörte nur von einem unserer Mitglieder.

In den letzten Jahren hat unsere Website zu einem wichtigen Knotenpunkt für diesen erstaunlichen geistigen Athleten, da wir die einzige umfassende und vollständig verwaltete Rechtschreibung Programm zur Unterstützung bei der Verwaltung ihrer ehrgeizigen Ziel sind.

Wir bieten auch ein Forum für Buchstabierwettbewerb Kandidaten: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eSpindle_SB/

Diese besondere Kind gerade schrieb mir sagen: "Ich bin mit Ihrer Website als meinen persönlichen Coach. Es ist so ein tolles Programm!"

Ich war wünschte ihm viel Glück, aber dann dachte, wie der Begriff unpassend schien im Vergleich mit seinem Stand der Vorbereitungen.

l = p x o

Luck = x Preparedness Gelegenheit

Natürlich kann dieses Kind begegnen einer der wenigen Worte, die er noch nicht studiert hat oder dass sein Gehirn hat unter dem Ansturm des Wortschatzes Daten vergessen.

Und von dem, was ich mir vorstellen kann seinen Charakter so weit sehen, ich bin sicher, dass, selbst wenn er die Glocke und nicht die Fragen der Medien in diesem Jahr hört er wahrscheinlich im nächsten Jahr wieder ist.

Glück ist nicht blind.

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The newsletter from the Dana Foundation is always highly interesting. Today's news stream debunked the "fancy myth" of learning styles and that somehow somewhat somebody could actually made sense out of all that hype and turn it into results.

Here a quote from the article:

What are you calling a learning style?

“There’s not much to this notion of learning styles,” said Daniel Willingham, of the University of Virginia, and no evidence that categorizing children by such terms as “visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners,” for example, helps them learn.

The notion that we can categorize people by how they prefer to learn has seeped into popular culture; 90 percent of the undergraduates in Willingham’s classes raise their hands when he asks them if they know what their learning style is. But research has not proved the categories are useful.

For example, in one study researchers divided children into “auditory learners" and “visual learners,” and then gave them an “auditory task” and a “visual task,” expecting the auditory learners to ace the first and the visual learners to ace the second. They got the opposite results.

“In many of these studies, the original classifications don’t always work,” he said; one person might be classified a “serialist learner” one day, but would meet the standard for its opposite, a “holistic learner,” the next. “The theories at hand aren’t effective,” Willingham said; perhaps another learning theory will appear that is, but he doesn’t see one on the horizon.

His talk had the tables buzzing; many teachers and administrators said they at least consider learning styles when they design curricula or make lesson plans. Willingham said relying solely on such a perspective might lead to less-effective teaching, but he does promote the idea of “changing-up,” using a range of different modes in the lesson.

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With spring and a flavor of change in the air, we at eSpindle Learning are feverishly at work, making major changes to our website. By end of May, www.espindle.org will re-launch as http://www.LearnThatWord.org. Instead of the membership model we will launch an innovative concept that allows users to only pay for results! Only if you had trouble with a word and we successfully taught it to you will you pay a few pennies.

This will make LearnThatWord accessible to a much wider audience and more affordable.

We are also planning two major campaigns to celebrate our continued growth:

Come August, we will launch Wortschatz Junction, a campaign to make free tutoring available to third graders throughout the nation. If we find some extra sponsorship support, we may even be able to include 2nd graders and other countries. You can find our partner invitation here: http://www.espindle.org/proposal_o.swf.

Please contact us if you have ideas or would like to get involved!!

We are also actively looking for ways to make free tutoring available to other literacy organizations.

If you represent a nonprofit serving an audience that needs LearnThatWord support, feel free to contact us.

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