You may think you have a terrible memory, and it's true that your memory system is not as reliable as your visual or movement system – sometimes you forget, sometimes you think you remember when you don't – but your memory system is much more reliable than your thinking system, and it

But you've seen that a key factor in reading comprehension is providing knowledge from memory that the author omitted, as in the example of Mark and his barbecue. Fitting together “shouldn't use his new barbecue” and “boss coming to dinner” requires missing knowledge and that missing knowledge is unique to that sentence. It's how the two ideas fit

Both reading and math offer good examples of the properties of automatic processes: (i) They happen very quickly. (ii) They are prompted by a stimulus in the environment, and if that stimulus is present, the process may occur (or the relevant memory may be retrieved) even if you wish it wouldn't. Thus you know it would be easier not to read the wor

Factual Knowledge Improves Your Memory When it comes to knowledge, those who have more gain more. Many experiments have confirmed the benefit of background knowledge to memory using the same basic method. The researchers bring into the laboratory some people who have some expertise in a field (for example, football or dance or electronic circuitry)

initiative and gave his permission. Soon

Answer: This protest against school curricula has a surface plausibility: How can we expect to train the next generation of scientists if we are not training them to do what scientists actually do? But a flawed assumption underlies the logic, namely that students are cognitively capable of doing what scientists or historians do. The cognitive princ

Although K–12 students don't complete questionnaires about their teachers, we know that more or less the same thing is true for them. The emotional bond between students and teacher – for better or worse – accounts for whether students learn. The brilliantly well-organized teacher whom fourth graders see as mean will not be very effective. But the

the same. To a surprising degree, scoring well on a working-memory test predicts scoring well on a reasoning test, and a poor working-memory score predicts a poor reasoning score. (Working memory is not everything, however – recall that in Chapter 2 I emphasized the importance of background knowledge.)

Be Wary of Promises of Broad Transfer The history of education is littered with abandoned attempts to teach students a skill that will “train the mind” and help students think more critically about, well, everything. In the nineteenth