How to Succeed in School by Michael - HTML preview

By Michael Petty, PhD

About the Author

Dr. Michael Petty PhD is The Senior Scientist at www.NeuroLearnings.com

He has a BA from Durham University, UK An MA from the University of Calgary and A PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison

After National Service in the British Army where he was a marksman, and a stint as a pilot in the RAF, Michael was a professor and senior lecturer. He taught and carried out research at the Centre for Educational Research at the University of New South Wales, the University of Calgary and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Michael was a Canada Council Doctoral Fellow and held other fellowships including a Shaw Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also achieved a 4.0 grade point average. He is the author of over thirty papers and books and numerous articles in professional journals.

Michael is the CEO of TASK Research in Australia and chairman of Lanka Statistics and IT Research (Pvt.) Ltd, an international company based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He was principal of S.M.A.R.T Research in Australia.

Michael is a social psychologist and applied statistician.

* The cover photo shows Diluni, a statistician who developed a conjoint analysis package which is available on-line. That is a huge international achievement. Diluni comes from a rural area of Sri Lanka and she studied at rural schools and a rural university. Diluni is studying for an MsC. She uses brainwave entrainment.

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Contents

Chapter Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12

Content Page Myths about Teaching and Learning 1
What is Intelligence? 7
The IQ Fallacy and Psychological Fraud 15 The Human Brain is More Powerful than a Computer 20 There is no Limit to What You Can Achieve 24 Learning Styles 30 Effective Learning Strategies 35 The Myth of Subliminal Learning 40 The Way to Unlimited Success 44 This is the Way to Succeed in School 47 For Parents – How To Motivate Your Children 49 Effective Learning Strategies For Students 51

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This e-book helps students to achieve success in school and university.
It dispels the myth that some people are born no-hopers, as Australians say.
We show that everyone can achieve success in school and we show students and the parents of students how to foster high levels of achievement.

Myths about Teaching and Learning

 

Surprisingly, a lot of educators know little about learning. And when they do, what they know does not always find its way into schools.

An example: people have believed for at least half a century that a foreign language is best learned at a young age. Yet in schools in the USA and Australia a foreign language was not taught until high school. This seemed counterproductive if not outright stupid. Now evidence starts to emerge that perhaps we had no idea of when it is best to teach languages.

New research shows:

It is a common belief that younger children learn second languages more easily and more rapidly than both adolescents and adults. Implicit in decisions to lower the age of first instructional exposure to an additional language is also the belief that the greater the number of years of academic study devoted to foreign language learning, the better the outcomes.
However, there is surprisingly little research evidence to support these beliefs. … Research is therefore needed to inform policy makers of the respective advantages of an early start and different time distributions as well as of the different ways in which age may affect proficiency.¹

¹ Carmen Muñoz, Laura Collins, Joanna White, Mia Victori Blaya, Maria Rosa Torras Cherta, Teresa Navés, Luz Celaya Age, intensity of instruction, and metalinguistic awareness in EFL learning, http://www.tirfonline.org/Munozetalreport.pdf (extracted 16th September 2010)

Perhaps foreign language instruction in US and Australian schools was based on misinformation. Chances are that it still is.

Unfortunately a lot of educational practices are based on myths and fads. New theories about teaching and learning spring up like mushrooms after rain.

What we aim to do in this e-Book is to reveal some of the more pervasive myths and to provide real information based on good research.

 

Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, speaking about current research into learning says:

“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error … Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

It is particularly distressing that so many educators are misinformed about learning. This makes it very difficult for students to know how to succeed in school. We are all students, and some of us are parents of students, at some time in our lives. We need to know more about how to learn effectively.

Our goal in this e-Book is to provide parents and students with solid information on how to succeed in school and university.

 

Student Motivation

Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson asked why America has spent so much money on school reform and yet has so little to show for it. The answer he said lies not necessarily with schools and teachers, rather:

“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation, … The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well.”

It is easier for politicians and policy makers to blame teachers than to blame parents or students.

 

How Motivation Overcomes Disadvantage

 

One cause of student failure, then, is poor motivation. Fortunately cognitive science can help develop motivation.

Years ago a friend and colleague at the University of New South Wales, Dr. Phil Mead, did some interesting research that showed that the children of non-English speaking immigrants to Australia performed better in school than their native-born Australian peers. The way Dr Mead explained this was to hypothesize that immigrants are more highly motivated to succeed than others, which is why they take the major leap into the unknown that immigration implies, severing ties with all they knew and left behind them.

Immigrants passed their motivation on to their children, Dr Mead postulated, and it was this high motivation that enabled them to overcome disadvantages such as low social status and their parents’ lack of an English language education. And this motivation was great enough to propel them well beyond what their teachers expected of them. It was ambition and motivation, not greater intelligence, which propelled these children from immigrant families to achieve in school and university at a level beyond their native-born Australian peers.

There is a great deal of evidence that parents’ attitudes and support and encouragement have more impact on students’ performance in school than any other factor, including IQ and teacher aptitude.

The Secrets of Success in School

Research shows that you can beat the odds. In the USA, Canada and Australia Asian students outperform others as if they had an IQ advantage of 10 points, though of course they do not. What is their secret? The answer can be expressed in four words: ambition, confidence, hard work. It is the ambition that drives the hard work. It is confidence that makes the hard work successful.
• You must want to succeed, and
• You must know that you can succeed.

How Parents can Help Their Children Succeed in School

Education is important; it is a major determinant of life chances. But education is not a given, parents can do much to foster educational achievement in their children.

• First parents need to know that every child has the potential for educational success. Your children almost certainly have the ability to succeed in school. There are common stereotypes about educational achievement that are false, such as that girls are not as good at mathematics or science or engineering as boys, or that the daughter of a single mother who works as a hospital cleaner cannot aspire to become a brain surgeon.

These stereotypes are dangerous myths and as a parent you have to examine whether you believe them. If you do believe them you need to re-examine your beliefs. Social class is a better predictor of performance in school than IQ; this is because working class parents and teachers believe that working class children are less likely to succeed in school than middle class children.

But Asian children in North America and Australia succeed in school not because they are intellectually or socially superior to Americans, Canadians or Australians of European origin, but because they are more highly motivated to succeed. It is the motivation and the belief that they can succeed that result in them topping university entrance exams and university courses year after year. And the motivation is provided by their parents.

As Professor Phil Mead showed in Australia, the children of non-English speaking immigrant parents perform better in school than their native Australian peers despite the fact that they are from disadvantaged working class families, because they inherit their parents’ will to achieve.

Teachers often, unfortunately, propagate the myth of working class disadvantage, giving working class or minority children in their care the idea that they should not aspire to higher occupations.
I knew this in theory but I came across it face to face when I went with my family to Australia to teach at university. At first, my son attended a working class school and his teacher, assuming he came from a working class background similar to that of the other students in the school, advised him that his career aspirations should not include anything higher than a trade or driving a truck. I went and had words with that teacher. Our son went on to win a university medal.

There are role models such as President Obama which show that such stereotyping is wrong. Introduce your child to appropriate role models – you do not have to like President Obama to present him as a role model, he is an African American from a single parent family who became a Harvard professor and president against the odds. Your child too can beat the odds, with your help.

• Parents need to foster a winning attitude in their children. They have to convince their children that they can succeed. It is the subconscious mind that needs to know this and the subconscious mind is negative and difficult to access. There are certain principles that derive from mental programming that should be followed in encouraging your child:

• Provide role models for educational achievement. You, your child and his teachers must not think that working class, African, Hispanic, or poor children cannot succeed in school. This is untrue. There are plenty of people from disadvantaged backgrounds that have achieved in school against the odds. Look for such role models.

• Make goals realistic. Encourage your child to aim for the top ten percent of his or her class in mathematics, not necessarily for the top position.

• Ignore the problem – focus on the solution. Do not for instance say ‘you must not watch TV while doing homework’. Avoid negatives, be positive; say ‘do your homework in a place free of distractions’, and name that place. Set aside an area where the child can do homework free of the distractions of TV.

• Repetition. Advertisers know the value of repetition. Repeat your mental programming even after the rules seem to have been learned, this will reinforce desirable behaviors and attitudes.
• Keep it simple. Do not try to achieve everything at once. And keep your instructions and advice simple, simple words will be processed more rapidly by the subconscious mind.

• Belief and confidence. Believe in the abilities of your child and yourself and have confidence in them. The human mind is infinitely powerful and it has few limitations. If you have confidence in the ability of your child to achieve then you will instill that confidence in your child also, and your child will achieve what he or she believes he or she can achieve.

• Hire a tutor if you feel you must. If you can afford a tutor then it may be a good thing to hire one, but it is probably not necessary as long as your child has the learning materials they need. And having a tutor may give your child the idea that they are less than competent, otherwise why do they need a tutor?

• Meditate. Learn meditation with your children, it will benefit both you and them. Meditation improves mental focus and thinking in general. Meditation is made easier with brainwave entrainment. It also improves general health.

• Use brainwave entrainment technology. Brainwave entrainment

technology is surprisingly inexpensive and there is plenty of university research to show that it works. It is also simple to use. Your child sits and studies while playing the appropriate mp3 track on headphones or speakers. Brainwave entrainment technology, including will enhance the learning experience. Brainwave entrainment can also

help with meditation. There is no risk to you, the products are guaranteed.

What is Intelligence?

Often when people think of intelligence they think of IQ, but IQ is not intelligence, it is supposedly a measure of intelligence. IQ is short for Intelligence Quotient and in the early days of IQ testing if you asked a psychologist what IQ tests measure they would respond with “IQ tests measure intelligence”. Nowadays psychologists are more likely to say: “IQ tests measure what IQ tests measure” or perhaps “IQ tests measure IQ”.

At best IQ is a measure of performance, but it is a very poor measure. Howard Gardner has devoted his career as a psychologist to the study of intelligence. Gardner defines intelligence as 'the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural settings'.²

Clearly intelligence is a capacity or potential to perform, that capacity may be measured, though imperfectly, in terms of IQ or academic tests, college admission tests, and so on.

Howard Gardner is best known for his work on multiple intelligences. The theory implicit in psychometric testing, is that intelligence is a single entity, that it results from a single factor, and that it can be measured simply via IQ tests. Gardner, however, has devoted a career in psychology to exploring the idea that there are multiple intelligences, not a single underlying factor.

According to Gardner’s latest formulation there are seven kinds of intelligence, they are:

Linguistic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, spatial intelligence, interpersonal intelligence - understanding other people, and intrapersonal intelligence, which is understanding oneself.

² Howard Gardner, & Hatch, T. (1989). Multiple intelligences go to school: Educational implications of the theory of multiple intelligences. Educational Researcher, 18(8), 4-9.

Whether Gardner is right and there are seven forms of intelligence is debatable, and this is not a new debate. At the beginning of the twentieth century London University Professor Charles Spearman studied the nature of intelligence. At the time there was debate among scholars as to whether there is one general underlying factor in intelligence or whether intelligence consists of a number of factors, similar to some of those postulated by Howard Gardner. The single underlying factor theory won out in the IQ debate and is embodied in IQ. This led to the IQ fallacy.

There is a new IQ debate. Howard Gardner is one of the participants, Daniel Goleman is another. Gardner is concerned with what might be called intellectual IQ; Goleman is concerned with what he calls emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence

 

In his groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman explores recent findings in neuroscience³.

Goleman asserts that the thinking brain grew from the primitive emotional brain: this, he says, reveals much about the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one. (Goleman p.11) This is something like what Freud also said.

The Id and the Ego

 

Id, ego , and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche. Freud may be somewhat passé now, but the model is a useful one. According to this model of the mind, the uncoordinated instinctual trends are the id; the organized part of the psyche is the ego. These constructs are functions of the mind and do not necessarily correspond to structures of the brain, which are the concern of neuroscience.

³ Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam Books, 1995 Freud said of the id:

It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations...

In Freud’s formulation the id is a more basic part of the mind than the ego; thus the psyche is, at birth, an undifferentiated id, part of which then develops into a structured ego. The id:
“

contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth—above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate from the somatic organization, and which find a first psychical expression here (in the id) in forms unknown to us” Freud, (1933) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

The id holds the basic drives, and from the perspective of neuroscience is the powerful unconscious mind that regulates our unconscious functions such as breathing, heartbeat and digestion. We shall henceforth refer to Freud’s Id as the unconscious mind. Breathing is the only unconscious function that we can easily access consciously, which is one reason why it is so effective in meditation to focus on the breath.

Focus on the breath in meditation gives some access to the normally inaccessible unconscious and it may well be that the pains of the first stage of a meditation retreat are occasioned when focus on the normally unconscious breath brings the id/unconscious mind to the surface. ”
The unconscious mind is responsible for our basic drives such as those for food, water and sex; it is home to our basic impulses. The unconscious mind is amoral, totally selfish, concerned only with pleasure and pain. The unconscious mind has no sense of time, it is completely illogical, sexual, infantile in its emotional development, and is not able to take “no” for an answer. The unconscious mind is regarded as the home of the libido.

The mind of a psycho/sociopath never develops beyond the unconscious mind, which is why sociopaths remain completely self-centered asocial people, entirely lacking in conscience even into adulthood. They are singularly focused on getting what they want for themselves and do not care at all about the cost to anyone else. In this they are pure unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is enormously powerful, as Freud said:

...The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world ... The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions ... in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse.

The sociopath does not develop a functioning ego and though many of them learn to behave superficially as social beings they cannot sustain long-term relationships even with family.

As Freud’s parable of horse and rider suggests the unconscious mind is passionate and more powerful than the ego. The reason why smokers have so much difficulty quitting and fat people stopping snacking is that the unconscious mind demands the pleasures of smoking and food.

Though the more rational ego knows that smoking is self destructive and that obesity kills it has little chance of imposing its will to quit upon the unconscious mind because the unconscious mind is powerful and emotion over-rides reason every time. If the unconscious wants to smoke then it will be very difficult to quit, even though the rational conscious mind desperately wants to.

Mister Spock of Star Trek may have been completely rational but he was part Vulcan, humans are not completely rational; the primitive part of our brain ensures that.

The pain of meditation

There were more than sixty people on a Vipassana meditation retreat in Australia’s Blue Mountains. It was midsummer in Australia and coming from the tropical north I made the mistake of thinking I would not need warm clothing. My first night was unpleasantly cold but after I got an extra blanket which I also used as a serape things were more comfortable.

In fact comfort was not an objective of the retreat. Our accommodation was simple and we were not allowed to speak, or even look at our fellow students; for ten days we maintained noble silence. This included a total ban on reading materials, telephone, radio and TV.

We also adhered to a Code of Discipline, which was the basic Buddhist code of conduct. We were required to commit ourselves, for the period of the course, to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual activity, speaking falsely, and intoxicants. There were signs warning us males not to look towards the women’s quarters. Naturally on seeing those signs one was prompted to look towards the women’s quarters.

Our instructor, on video, was Mr. S.N. Goenka, an Indian from Burma who according to his legend was destined to return the true Buddhsit tradition of meditation, Vipassana, to India.

We all sat in a large meditation hall for ten hours a day and meditated. For the first two days we practiced breath meditation; in the remaining days of the retreat we practiced self-observation, repeatedly focusing on our bodies and our thoughts; it was not easy. A few people dropped out on the first day.

Mr Goenka likened the retreat, which he referred to as the ‘kindergarten level’ of Vipassana to brain surgery and in a sense it was; we learned to observe the workings of our mind. And as is the case in surgery there was pain, without anesthetic, which Goenka-Ji also warned us to expect during the first two days of the retreat.

There was the physical pain of sitting with legs crossed which became trivial after a while. There was also emotional pain.

In the train returning to Sydney a group of us talked about our experiences on the retreat. One of them was a young British dot-com millionaire. He said that on the second day he had gone into the communal dining hall at lunch time and had burst into tears. Because he did not want to be seen crying he went out onto the balcony.

Another of us had spent two years in Japan learning kendo. He was formidably fit and his pain manifested itself physically. He said that the pain he felt was worse that the pain when he had broken an arm.
It seemed that the emotional pain we felt in the first two days was a result of gaining access to our unconscious mind through rigorous meditation ten hours a day.

As we talked it seemed that this pain in the first two days was a universal experience. We also agreed that the Indian chants with which Goenka-Ji introduced some of his meditations were pretty horrible, that the vegetarian food had been excellent and that the whole ten-day experience had been most valuable.

Brainwave Entrainment Gives Access to the Id

When we meditate we enter an Alpha brainwave state. Experienced meditators may even get down to the slower theta brainwaves. Theta is called the hyper-suggestible state. As our experience of the initial pain of meditation shows the subconscious is accessible in alpha. The subconscious it is more accessible in Theta but Theta is hard to achieve through meditation alone and is usually achieved only by adepts, those of us who are not monks are unlikely ever to achieve the higher meditative states.

Suggestions made when the brain is in Theta bypass the critical filters of the mind; since the brain in Theta is in a childlike state it accepts suggestions that it would reject in a higher brainwave state such as the wide-awake Beta.

Brainwave entrainment allows us to enter Alpha and Theta relatively easily. Brainwave entrainment makes the benefits of meditation in controlling the unruly id readily accessible to nearly everyone. Brainwave entrainment is the fast track to meditation for those of us who are not monks or nuns.

IQ and achievement

Goleman says in his book Emotional Intelligence, that IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success … As one observer notes, “The vast majority of one’s ultimate niche in society is determined by non-IQ factors, ranging from social class to luck” (Goleman p. 36)

The IQ test, developed by Lewis Terman at Stanford … led to what psychologist Richard Gardner calls the “IQ way of thinking”: “that people are either smart or not, that there’s nothing much you can do about it, and that tests can tell you if you are one of the smart ones or not. The SAT test for college admissions is based on the same notion of a single kind of aptitude that determines your future. This way of thinking permeates society”. (Goleman p. 40)

Every now and then I check myself out on Google to see if anybody is reading my articles and I found Petty MF, Field CJ (1980), “Fluctuations in mental test scores”, Educational. Research, 22(3), pp. 198-202 quoted in the Italian medical/psychology reference: Psicologia clinica (F. Del Corno, and Lang, Margherita (2003) FrancoAngeli, 576 pages)

What Cecil Field and I found was that mental test scores, in this case group Stanford-Binet IQ scores measured over the years for hundreds of grade school students seemed to be remarkably unstable.

We had believed, as Gardner puts it: “that people are either smart or not, that there’s nothing much you can do about it, and that tests can tell you if you are one of the smart ones or not”. We also thought as other psychologists did, that IQ scores were supposed to be stable over time.

What we found, much to our surprise, was that IQ scores for these students, from one year to the next were remarkably unstable, with scores in one year correlated on average only 0.5 with scores in the following year.
IQ is a very one
dimensional measure of ability or potential to achieve

In our review of the literature for the article which reported our findings, (and which also generated interest from the Bulgarian Institute for Brain Research), we found that the reigning guru of psychological measurement at that time, Benjamin Bloom, felt that a correlation coefficient between IQ scores of 0.5 indicated stability.

But a correlation of 0.5 indicates that only 25% of a person’s IQ score in one year is predicted by his score in the previous year. This finding accords pretty well with Goleman’s observation that: “At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success”. We found that IQ in one year contributes only 25% to IQ in the year following. So IQ does not contribute