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The social benefits of psychological generosity
Linda R. Tropp May 21, 2025 How much do you engage with others when you’re out in public? Lots of people don’t actually engage with others much at all. Think of commuters on public transportation staring down at their phones with earbuds firmly in place. As a professor of social psychology, I see similar trends on my university campus, where students often put on their headphones and start checking their phones before leaving the lecture hall on the way to their next class. Curating daily experiences in these ways may appeal to your personal interests, but it also limits opportunities for social connection. Humans are social beings: We desire to feel connected to others,…
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Marion Joseph’s literacy crusade for teaching
phonics in California is paying off Dan Walters March 19, 2023 Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – one person can have a life-changing impact on the wellbeing of millions of people. Marion Joseph, who died nearly a year ago at age 95, was one of those people. She impacted millions of California schoolchildren present and future who struggle with reading comprehension, the vital skill that underlies all of education. The pandemic underscored that too many of California’s elementary school students lack effective reading ability. EdSource noted that, prior to the pandemic, fewer than 50% of the state’s third-graders were reading at the expected level for their age. Three years later, after students…
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Can learning cursive help kids read better?
Some policymakers think it’s worth a try Shawn Datchuk May 6, 2025 Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.” Then he handed it to me to read. If you have a child in the Philadelphia School District, chances are they have not been taught how to read or write cursive either. But cursive handwriting is making a comeback of sorts for K-8 students in the United States. Several states in recent years passed legislation mandating instruction in cursive handwriting, including California, Iowa and Oklahoma. Pennsylvania and New Jersey are considering similar legislation, as are other states. I’m an associate professor of…
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‘Number sense’ is one of the building blocks of math
By Holly Korbey February 19, 2025 The building blocks of math that students need to excel — but aren’t always getting ATLANTA — Students gathered around a bright blue number board in Melissa Williams’ kindergarten class at the Westminster School, gazing at the bank of 100 blank squares, organized in rows and columns of 10. Their assignment was to pick a numbered tile and figure out where it should go on the board. The task seems simple, but Williams’ goal was to bolster students’ “number sense” — a difficult-to-define skill, but one that is nevertheless essential for more advanced mathematics. One student with a “42” tile carefully counted the…
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Clubhouse Rules:
New York’s New Young Republican Leader Eyes the Future November 8, 2022 By Asta Kongsted Gavin Wax sat on one of the many brown leather couches lining the studio apartment that serves as the “Clubhouse” of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) on a recent Thursday afternoon. It is thanks to Wax that this group has that Midtown apartment at all – a fact which the 28 year-old Queens native does nothing to hide and which no one does anything to dispute. When Wax took over the presidency of the Club in 2019, it had 50 members and nowhere to host them. These days, membership stands at 1,100, while…
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Battling the Loneliness Ogre:
One Man’s Journey in the Remote Work Era By Ragnhildur Thrastardottir May 18, 2023 When Benjamin Schwartz, 25, moved from New Jersey to New York City in 2021, he felt lonely. He was working from home as an advisor for Deloitte, and his days would often start with him crawling out of bed to get his computer and then returning to do the work from his bed. Schwartz didn’t meet many people or take regular lunch breaks, and this lifestyle started to take a toll on him. “This sucks,” he thought. “Maybe this isn’t the way life is supposed to work.” He tried going to coffee shops and libraries and…
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Not All Heroes Wear Capes2
These innovators, scientists, creative thinkers and just regular people all played a pivotal role in helping me live my best life. Ralph Braun Wheelchair van pioneer Ralph William Braun (December 18, 1940 – February 8, 2013) was the founder and CEO of the Braun Corporation. He is also known as the “Father of the Mobility Movement” at BraunAbility. Braun was born and raised in Winamac, Indiana. When he was six years old, doctors diagnosed him with muscular dystrophy. He started using a wheelchair at the age of 14. At the age of 15, he created a motorized wagon with his father to help him get around. Five years later,…
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Why it matters that Americans are comparatively bad at math
by JON MARCUS September 26, 2023 Employers, experts raise new alarms about competitiveness and national security Like a lot of high school students, Kevin Tran loves superheroes, though perhaps for different reasons than his classmates. “They’re all insanely smart. In their regular jobs they’re engineers, they’re scientists,” said Tran, who is 17. “And you can’t do any of those things without math.” Tran also loves math. He was speaking during a break in a Boston city program for promising local high school students to study calculus for five hours a day throughout the summer at Northeastern University. And his observation was surprisingly apt. At a time when Americans joke about how bad…
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Evolution of moral outrage:
I’ll punish your bad behavior to make me look good Jillian Jordann Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology, Yale University Standing up for what’s right can come with a cost to the individual – but also a benefit. Michael Fleshman, CC BY-NC What makes human morality unique? One important answer is that we care when other people are harmed. While many animals retaliate when directly mistreated, humans also get outraged at transgressions against others. And this outrage drives us to protest injustice, boycott companies, blow whistles and cut ties with unethical friends and colleagues. Scientists refer to these behaviors as third-party punishment, and they have long been a mystery from the perspective of evolution and rational…
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Why grammar mistakes in a short email could make some people judge you
Julie Boland, Robin Queen I’m a cognitive psychologist who studies language comprehension. If I see an ad for a vacation rental that says “Your going to Hollywood!” it really bugs me. But my collaborator, Robin Queen, a sociolinguist, who studies how language use varies across social groups, is not annoyed by those errors at all. We were curious: what makes our reactions so different? We didn’t think the difference was due to our professional specialties. So we did some research to find out what makes some people more sensitive to writing mistakes than others. What prior research tells us Writing errors often appear in text messages, emails, web posts and other types…
