Writing to make test scores better

by lowjumpingfrog

Writing about exam worries for 10 minutes improves student results
[Via Not Exactly Rocket Science]

It’s a feeling you’ve almost certainly experienced before – the fear of waiting for an exam to start, heart thumping, palms sweating and brow furrowing. You worry about whether you’ve prepared adequately, and about the consequences of failure. So why not write these worries down? Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock have found that students do better in exams if they spend the prior ten minutes writing about their worries. Even better, the most anxious students showed the biggest improvements.

People often choke under pressure, performing far worse that they ought to. There are many reasons for this. For physical tasks, such as taking a penalty kick in football, people under pressure become overly conscious about their own actions. This disrupts the automatic side of familiar movements, turning experts into rookies. For mental tasks, anxieties about performance compete for the same mental resources that we need to succeed. In particular, these worries crowd out our working memory, which juggles small pieces of information and keeps is focused on the task at hand.

Beilock is something of an expert on these issues. As the author of Choke, she has literally written the book on the topic. Together with Ramirez, she reasoned that writing exercises might help to reduce pre-exam worries, freeing up enough resources for working memory to function at its best. It was a sound idea. After all, psychologists have used expressive writing to help depressed people from spending too much time ruminating over their thoughts.

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It is an impressive set of data. Writing about your anxieties regarding a test, results in better test scores. But only for those that are anxious.

Somehow, the people who are most likely to choke can lessen that by writing. But they also show that not just any kind of writing will work. It has to be expressive writing about their fear of failing on the test.

They even made the tests more stressful, by saying that they would be filmed and watched. This only enhanced the effect.

I can see this being used by athletes now.

And, in conjunction with the report from a few months ago that a similar writing exercise could reduce the gender gap in physics classes, it really does seem that exercises where people confront their fears, anxieties and worries actually allows them to surmount those problems, while sweeping them under the rug does not.

I wonder what other things this applies to?

60 apps! For every iOS device! I’m behind

Crazy iOS Stats – More than 60 Apps Downloaded for Every Device Sold
[Via Mactropolis.com]

Horace Dediu has some great data up at his asymco site surrounding the 10 billion apps download mark we know the App Store will soon hit. He’s got some striking numbers that really put some perspective on the huge numbers of apps downloaded. Some of the numbers and thoughts from Dediu that caught my include:

– Assuming the 10 billionth download happens this month, apps will have hit that milestone in half the time it took for songs to reach it (31 months vs 67 for songs)

– This little gem on the rate of downloads per day:

The amazing story of this chart is not that apps are running at above 30 million download per day, but that the figure is growing. Growth like this is hard to get one’s mind around. Not only are downloads increasing, but the rate of increase is increasing.

– And of course the stat I mentioned in the post title:

The number of apps downloaded for iPhone/iPad/iPod touch is running at more than 60

That seems an impressive number considering how many novice users there are out there that have likely downloaded very few or even no apps at all.

[More]

With an iPhone and an iPad, I should have 120 apps total. I only have 47.  Time to get to work.

Misleading title to a science news article

by AMagill

Smoking Causes Gene Damage in Minutes
[Via Discovery News - Top Stories]

New findings should serve as a “stark warning” to those considering taking up cigarette smoking, say scientists.

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No, the article states that smoking results in the uptake of a compound and its conversion into a mutagenic compound that reaches maximum in 30 minutes or so. Nothing in the article states anything about how they determined any sort of genetic damage. Nothing at all.

In fact, if they were worried about genetic damage in minutes, then it would have been unethical to ask volunteers to smoke cigarettes.

What they did was add a tagged version of a known compound to cigarettes. After smoking they found this label on a known mutagenic end product that results from metabolism of the tagged compound.

The mutagenic end product has been shown in the lab to rapidly damage DNA but there is nothing in this paper that demonstrates that the presence of this end product in the blood actually does anything at all.

The work is suggestive and I would expect that investigating any mutagenic links would be n area of useful investigation. But the report does not demonstrate direct gene damage in minutes from smoking. It simply suggests a possibly pathway but does not prove it.

The web post overstates the matter. But the work does demonstrate that mutagenic compounds are found very rapidly after smoking. And while a direct metabolic link to how rapidly gene damage occurs might not yet have been proven, the data do show that it takes almost 24 hours for the levels of this mutagenic compound to reach ‘normal’ levels.

That is from one cigarette. People go though packs of cigarettes a day. Keeping high levels of this compound circulating for years in your bloodstream does seem to indicate a healthy approach to life.

I agree with the last sentence from the abstract.

Because PAH diol epoxides are mutagenic and carcinogenic, the results clearly demonstrate immediate negative health consequences of smoking, which should serve as a major warning to anyone contemplating initiating tobacco use.

Living at altitude may increase suicides

by gdbg12

High-Altitude Suicide Risks
[Via Daily Ideafeed | Big Think]

An association has been found between living at higher altitudes and higher county rates of suicide. The average altitude in 50 counties with the highest suicide rates was 4,684 feet, and the average altitude in 50 counties with the lowest suicide rates was 582 feet. When researchers controlled for variables such as being male, being white, and lower household income, the link between altitude and suicide was still evident. The study authors took the Mountain Region of the U.S. (which includes Colorado) out of the equation, since that area is linked with higher suicide rates. But the association between altitude and suicide still remained.

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There are all sorts of ways to slice up data that make things look like confounding variables exist in the set of data.

Here it appears to be height. I’m not sure how height would really matter. The Pacific NW supposedly has high suicide rates but that could be due to long, long winter darkness coupled with overcast gloomy days. That would seem to depression greater and we know seasonal affective disorder exists. Thus the use of lighting to alter the course of the disorder.

This is an interesting observation but will require a lot of real work to find direct links. It could just be a consequence of selection process for the data.

Retractions in the MSM when the web never forgets

Salon mag pulls dangerous and fallacious antivax article
[Via Bad Astronomy]

Back in 2005, Salon magazine (along with Rolling Stone) published an antivax hit piece by Robert Kennedy Jr. called “Deadly Immunity”. This article had so many basic factual errors in it that doctors and skeptics were appalled; it was clearly an egregiously slanted antireality screed linking thimerosal (a preservative that used to be widely used in some vaccines) with autism. Even when it was published it was wrong, and new studies published showed conclusively that thimerosal was unrelated to autism; the number of diagnosed autism cases continued to rise even after thimerosal use was stopped in most vaccines.

Now, Salon has announced that they have taken the Kennedy article off of its archive due to its overwhelming lack of accuracy. A big cause of this was the publishing of Seth Mnookin’s book The Panic Virus, which I’ve read and which is excellent. The book details just how awful the initial research into autism and vaccines was, the rise of the antivax movement, and how people like Kennedy and other journalists published articles that were almost entirely fact-free when it came to actual medical issues. Of course, having international headlines about Andrew Wakefield’s research being called fraud didn’t hurt, either.

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I agree with Phil that it would have been better to keep the article up have huge disclaimers on it indicating how wrong the article was.

But simply disappearing an article seems to be a way to alter history by making it appear never to have happened. Now lots of articles will reference the original Salon but no one will be able to read it.

But the Internet never forgets, so you can still get the article and see just how wrong the article was.

At least they took the proactive route to removing it rather than just let link rot take its till.