(pt. 5), New York Times, June 24, 2010.

22. Peter Brown interview of Catherine Johnson, December 13, 2011, Minneapolis, MN.

23. Much of this chapter is about how to regulate one’s learning while avoiding various illusions and biases based on fl uency, hindsight bias, and the like. An excellent recent article on self-regulated learning that would prove useful to anyone seeking more knowledge on these topics is R. A. Bjork, J. Dunlosky, & N. Kornell, Self- regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques, and illusions, Annual Review of Psychology 64 (2013), 417– 444.

6. Get Beyond Learning Styles

1. Francis Bacon (1561– 1626) was an En glish phi los o pher and statesman. The full quote is “All rising a to great place is by a winding stair; and if there be factions, it is good to side a man’s self, whilst he is in the rising, and to balance himself when he is placed.” From Bacon’s essay Of Great Place.

Notes to Pages 133–148 ê 275

2. Peter Brown interview of Bruce Hendry, August 27, 2012, St.

Paul, MN. All quotes of Hendry are from this interview.

3. Betsy Morris, Lisa Munoz, and Patricia Neering, “Overcoming dyslexia,” Fortune, May, 2002, 54– 70.

4. Annie Murphy Paul, “The upside of dyslexia,” New York Times, February 4, 2012. The work by Geiger and Lettvin is described in G. Geiger & J. Y. Lettvin, Developmental dyslexia: A different perceptual strategy and how to learn a new strategy for reading, Saggi: Child Development and Disabilities 26

(2000), 73– 89.

5. Survey is listed in F. Coffi eld, D. Moseley, E. Hall, Learning styles and pedagogy in post- 16 learning, a systematic and critical review, 2004, Learning and Skills Research Centre, London; the quote by the student (“there’s no point in me reading a book”) is from same source, p. 137. The quote “a bedlam of contradictory claims” is from Michael Reynolds, Learning styles: a critique, Management Learning, June 1997, vol. 28 no. 2, p. 116.

6. The material about learning styles is drawn largely from H. Pashler, M. A. McDaniel, D. Rohrer, & R. A. Bjork, Learning styles: A critical review of concepts and evidence, Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9 (2009), 105– 119. This article reviewed the published evidence bearing on whether learning is improved when the instructional method is matched to students’ learning styles relative to when the instructional method is not matched. Two important fi ndings were that (1) there are very few studies that adopted the gold standard of performing controlled experiments, and (2) the few published experiments consistently found that matching instruction to learning style did not improve learning. One key conclusion is that more experimental research on this issue is needed, but at the moment there is little evidence for the existence of commonly postulated learning styles.

7. An excellent text on classic views of intelligence is Earl Hunt, Human intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

8. Howard Gardner’s theory is described in his book Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons (New York: Basic Books, 2006), among other venues.

Notes to Pages 148–150 ê 276

9. The material on work by Robert Sternberg, Elena Grigorenko, and their colleagues comes from several sources. For a nice pre sen ta tion of the theory, see R. J. Sternberg, Grigorenko, E. L.,

& Zhang, L., Styles of learning and thinking in instruction and assessment, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2008) 486– 506. Another interesting study by Sternberg, Grigorenko and colleagues identifi ed college students who showed much higher skill in either analytical, creative, or practical ability (relative to the other two abilities), and assigned them to different classes that focused on analytic instruction, creative instruction, or practical instruction. Students receiving instruction that matched their strongest ability tended to perform better on certain class- performance assessments than students who received mismatched instruction; see R. J. Sternberg, E. L.

Grigorenko, M. Ferrari, & P. Clinkenbeard, A triarchic analysis of an aptitude– treatment interaction, Eu ro pe an Journal of Psychological Assessment 15 (1999), 1– 11.

10. The study of Brazilian children was T. N. Carraher, D. W. Carraher, & A. D. Schliemann, Mathematics in the streets and in the schools, British Journal of Developmental Psychology 3

(1985), 21– 29. This fascinating study focused on fi ve children from very poor backgrounds who were working on street corners or markets in Brazil. Per for mance was compared for similar multiplication problems presented in different contexts: the natural context in which the child was expert (e.g., selling coconuts, but role- played in the experiment), word problems phrased within a different context (e.g., selling bananas), or formal math problems without context. The children solved nearly 100 percent of the problems when presented in the natural context, fewer in the different context, and only about a third when presented as a formal problem. A key point is that the children used concrete grouping strategies to solve the natural context problems, but then switched to school- taught strategies (not yet well learned) when presented with the formal problems. The mathematical strategies the children had developed were not evident on an academically oriented test.

11. The study of race handicappers is S. J. Ceci & J. K. Liker, A day at the races: A study of IQ, expertise, and cognitive complex-

Notes to Pages 152–155 ê 277

ity, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 115 (1986), 255– 266. This study sampled harness racing fans, with some classifi ed as expert and some as less expert. The expert group and less expert group were evenly matched on IQ, yet the expert group showed much better success at predicting outcomes of actual races and experimenter- contrived races. The experts’

success was related to their using an extremely complex system of weighting and combining the range of information related to the horses and the race conditions.

12. Dynamic testing: Robert Sternberg and Elena Grigorenko discuss this concept in Dynamic Testing: The Nature and Mea-sure ment of Learning Potential (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

13. The fundamental work on structure building was begun by M. A. Gernsbacher, K. R. Varner, & M. E. Faust, Investigating differences in general comprehension skills, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16

(1990), 430– 445. This article provides some of the elegant experimental work that contributed to the development of the structure- building theory— the idea that good comprehenders are able to construct a coherent, or ga nized repre sen ta tion of a narrative from many sources (either read, listened to, or seen in pictures), whereas less able comprehenders tend to construct many, somewhat fractionated repre sen ta tions of the narratives.

This research further suggested that poor structure-builders, but not good structure-builders, have trouble inhibiting irrelevant information, which likely contributes to their fractionated (in-effec tive) repre sen ta tions. Another relevant article is A. A. Callender & M. A. McDaniel, The benefi ts of embedded question adjuncts for low and high structure builders, Journal of Educational Psychology 99 (2007), 339– 348. They demonstrated that low structure-builders achieve less learning from standard school materials (textbook chapters) than do high structure-builders. However, embedding questions into chapters to focus the low structure-builders on the important concepts (and requiring them to answer the questions) boosted the low structure-builders to levels of learning enjoyed by high structure- builders.

Notes to Pages 157–158 ê 278

14. The discussion of learning concepts here relies on two studies: T. Pachur, & H. Olsson, Type of learning task impacts per formance and strategy selection in decision making, Cognitive Psychology 65 (2012), 207– 240. The typical approach to studying conceptual learning in the laboratory is to provide one example at a time, with learners attempting to learn the likely classifi cation of this example (e.g., given a case with a par ticu lar set of symptoms, what is the likely disease?). This experiment modifi ed that procedure by presenting two examples simultaneously (e.g., two cases) and requiring learners to select which of the two would be most likely to refl ect a partic u lar classifi cation. This comparative approach stimulated less focus on memorizing the examples and better extraction of the underlying rule by which the examples were classifi ed.

A similar theme to the one above, except that the focus was on transfer in problem solving, appears in M. L. Gick & K. J.

Holyoak, Schema induction and analogical transfer, Cognitive Psychology 15 (1983), 1– 38. Learners either studied one example of how to solve a par tic u lar problem or were required to contrast two different kinds of problems to fi gure out the common elements of their solutions. The learners who contrasted two problems were more likely to extract a general solution scheme and transfer that scheme to successfully solve new problems than were the learners who studied only one problem.

15. The reference on rule learners and example learners is M. A.

McDaniel, M. J. Cahill, M. Robbins, & C. Wiener, Individual differences in learning and transfer: Stable tendencies for learning exemplars versus abstracting rules, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143 (2014). Using laboratory learning tasks, this novel study revealed that some people tend to learn concepts by focusing on memorizing the par tic u lar examples and responses associated with the examples that are used to illustrate the concept (termed exemplar learners), whereas other learners focus on the underlying abstraction refl ected in the par tic u lar exemplars used to illustrate the concept (termed abstractors). Further, a par tic u lar individual’s concept- learning tendency persisted across quite different laboratory concept-

Notes to Pages 163–168 ê 279

learning tasks, suggesting that individuals may have a fairly stable predisposition toward exemplar learning versus abstraction across a range of conceptual- learning tasks. Of interest, an initial result was that the abstractors on average achieved higher grades in an introductory college chemistry course than did the exemplar learners.

7. Increase Your Abilities

1. A good introduction to Walter Mischel’s classic research on delay in gratifi cation in children is W. Mischel, Y. Shoda, & M. L. Rodriguez, Delay of gratifi cation in children, Science 244

(1989), 933– 938. For an accessible introduction for nonpsy-chologists, see Jonah Lehrer, “Don’t! The secret of self- control,”

New Yorker, May 18, 2009, 26– 32. For a 2011 update, see W.

Mischel & O. Ayduk, Willpower in a cognitive- affective pro-cessing system: The dynamics of delay of gratifi cation, in K. D.

Vohs & R. F. Baumeister (eds.), Handbook of Self- Regulation: Research, Theory, and Applications (2nd ed., pp. 83–

105)

(New York: Guilford, 2011).

2. Accounts of Carson are reprinted at the website maintained by historian Bob Graham, whose antecedents were among the original American settlers in California, www .longcamp .com

/kit _bio .html, accessed October 30, 2013, and are drawn from material published originally in the Washington Union in the summer of 1847 and reprinted in Supplement to the Connecti-cut Courant, July 3, 1847. Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 125– 126, relates Fremont’s directing Carson on this journey.

3. Research on brain plasticity: J. T. Bruer, Neural connections: Some you use, some you lose, Phi Delta Kappan 81, 4 (1999), 264– 277. The Goldman- Rakic quote comes from Bruer’s article, which quotes from remarks she made before the Education Commission of the States. Further research on brain plasticity, with an emphasis on treatment of brain damage, may be found in D. G. Stein & S. W. Hoffman, Concepts of CNS plasticity in the context of brain damage and repair, Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation 18 (2003), 317– 341.

Notes to Pages 168–176 ê 280

4. H. T. Chugani, M. E. Phelps, & J. C. Mazziotta, Positron emis-sion tomography study of human brain function development, Annals of Neurology 22 (1987), 487– 497.