"We tend to be cognitive misers. When approaching a problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive mechanisms. Some mechanisms have great computational power, letting us solve many problems with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much concentration and can interfere with other cognitive tasks. Others are comparatively low in computational power, but they are fast, require little concentration and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even if they are less accurate. Are you a cognitive miser? Consider the following problem, taken from the work of Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Try to answer it yourself before reading the solution. 

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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Just stumbled across this program... inspiring!

 

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Many people may not know yet that Google has an extremely effective and generous grants program that helps nonprofits connect with their audience. Our Vocabulary Junction campaign, for example, has been made possible by their grant and it had a dramatic effect on our website.

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We recently got a grant expansion that allows us to dare and undertake a campaign I've been dreaming of for a long time.

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We switched the flip... flipped the switch... we're LIVE!

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Our nonprofit has entered the race to win a Chase Community grant, and we need your help! The grants are given to the top 200 nonprofits based on votes.

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.
Can you help us out by voting for our Vocabulary Junction campaign, making free tutoring available to third graders nationwide? Please also repost this on facebook, via email, in forums/networks, etc.
As a thank you for taking time to vote, we will credit 10 learning credits to you.
In the near future, when www.LearnThatWord.org replaces www.eSpindle.org, users will only pay for measured learning results, and 10 credits represent about a month of free tutoring!

Here's how it works:

1 - Click on this link: http://bit.ly/learnthatword. (You have to be logged into your Facebook account)

2 - Click on the get started link:

3 - On the next screen, approve that Chase can connect with you and get access to your public Facebook info (they will list your name and profile images after you vote).

4 - On the following screen, click "like" by clicking on the highlighted button (you can "unlike" Chase at any time). Click on the verification required link and fill in the captcha.

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 - Please share this info with your friends and everyone who cares about education: Facebook, emails, forums, networks. http://bit.ly/learnthatword... this is urgent!!

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!

Thank you for your support!!

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I just heard from one of our members. He's heading for the National Spelling Bee finals in Washington D.C. in early June and very excited.

Over the last few years, our site has become a major hub for these amazing mental athletes, since we are the only comprehensive and fully managed spelling program to help them manage their ambitious goal.

We also offer a forum for spelling bee contestants: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eSpindle_SB/

This particular child just emailed me saying "I am using your website as my personal coach. It is such an amazing program!" He has studied over 17,000 words with LearnThatWord so far... what an amazing achievement! There are only two members who have studied more -- you can see the highest scoring users by moving your mouse over the blue round "1" icon on the home page or next to the quiz.

I was wishing him good luck, but then thought how inappropriate the term seemed compared with his level of preparedness. Luck is so often looked at as something random. However, contrary to popular folk myth, luck very rarely just drops on people. Instead, it follows a formula.

l = p x o

Luck = Preparedness x Opportunity

Of course, this child may encounter one of the few words he has not yet studied or that his brain has forgotten under the onslaught of vocabulary data. He may be making a mistake. But he has taken every step to minimize the likeliness of that by making sure he is prepared to the highest degree.

And from what I can see of his character so far, I'm sure that even if he hears the bell and not the questions of the media this year, he's likely to be back next year.

Luck is not blind. She only has serious trouble seeing clearly. Get up and try to stand right in front of her by striving to increase your preparedness and opportunities wherever you can. Don't give up. Every action you take to either increase your preparedness or your opportunity will seriously increase your chances of being tagged by "luck."

 

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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 Vocabulary 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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