9.16.2009

Idioms, Doodling, ID, Employee Benefits, Mentoring, & Critical Thinking

The Crowd at Folklife

Figures Of Speech: Understanding Idioms Requires Both Sides Of The Brain - Science Daily

...though the interpretation of language involves widespread activation bilaterally, the right hemisphere has a special role in the comprehension of idiomatic meaning.

Doodling 'may help memory recall' - BBC

Doodling may look messy, but it could be a sign of an alert mind — Doodlers performed 29% better in remembering facts. The theory is daydreaming distracts from a boring task, which results in poor performance, but a simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task.

Citation: "What does doodling do?" By Jackie Andrade. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 3, Feb. 26, 2009. Also see Wired.

Related closely to the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

The role of theory in instructional design - Janet Clarey in A Brandon Hall Research Blog

One of the themes of the research — participant desire to use theory and report that they often do, but decisions are often made on the basis of intuitive judgment and practical wisdom developed over time.

I would add that the theories we learn help to build our Schemata — a mental model of a person, object or situation. This includes cognitive maps (mental representations of familiar parts of one's world), images, concept schema (categories of objects, events, or ideas with common properties), event scripts (schema about familiar sequences of events or activities), and mental models (clusters of relationships between objects or processes). For more information see: Learning and Declarative Knowledge and Capability Model.

Employee Benefits

A poll released by MetLife found that 89 percent of employees will look to either increase or maintain their level of employer benefits in 2010 despite economic hardship - Employee Benefits Top of Mind in 2010

However, another survey reports 66 percent of Americans are unsatisfied with pay.

Shifting the Shape of Mentoring - ASTD

In 2007, Rockwell Collins' mentees were asked to rate the ways mentoring allowed them to contribute to the success of the company. They identified three top areas:

  • receiving or providing encouragement, motivation, or support
  • helping me understand a different point of view
  • gaining or providing valuable knowledge, skills, or experience from another person.

When asked the same question in 2009, mentees rated the top three areas as

  • gaining or providing valuable knowledge, skills, or experience from another person
  • building or expanding my network
  • helping me understand a different point of view.

Critical thinking? You need knowledge - Boston Globe

We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about. Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.
Proponents of 21st-Century Skills might wish it was otherwise, but we do not restart the world anew with each generation. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. What matters most in the use of our brains is our capacity to make generalizations, to see beyond our own immediate experience. The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the capacity to understand the lessons of history, to grasp the inner logic of science and mathematics, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them.

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