TIME Magazine

When effectively administered, feedback is a powerful way to build knowledge and skills, increase skills, increase motivation, and develop reflective habits of mind in students and employees. Too often, however, the feedback we give (and get) is ineffectual or even counterproductive. Here, four ways to offer feedback that really makes a difference, drawn from research in psychology and cognitive science.

Original Article

College admission letters go out this month, and most recipients (and their parents) will place great importance on which universities said yes and which said no. A growing body of evidence, however, suggests that the most significant thing about college is not where you go, but what you do once you get there. Historian and educator Ken Bain has written a book on this subject, What The Best College Students Do, that draws a roadmap for how students can get the most out of college, no matter where they go.

Top Dog, a new book by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman about “the science of winning and losing” is in large part a celebration of competition. The authors of the bestselling NurtureShock explore the benefits of what they call “competitive fire” — stories of Olympic swimmers, champion chess players, and upstart political candidates who reached the top by racing someone else. But just as interesting are the cases in which we do better without the element of competition. Sometimes, it turns out, competing against others can actually make our performance worse.

For more on the crisis of colleges failing to prepare students for the postgraduate world, check out Amy Laitnen's "Cracking the Credit Hour," which questions the continued use of the credit hour as a suitable measure for a student's learning through college.

In the roiling national set-to over whether guns would make schools safer, most of the debate has been a caricature of itself. One side wants to install guns in every school, and the other wants to banish them. “I wish to God [the principal] had had an M-4 in her office, locked up,” Republican Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas said on Fox News after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, “so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out … and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids.”

In a world as fast-changing and full of information as our own, every one of us — from schoolchildren to college students to working adults — needs to know how to learn well. Yet evidence suggests that most of us don’t use the learning techniques that science has proved most effective. Worse, research finds that learning strategies we do commonly employ, like rereading and highlighting, are among the least effective.

As children pine for toys they see in store circulars and on TV, parents want to please. But they also wonder: will this toy keep my child occupied or get tossed in the back of the closet after 10 minutes? One piece of information that might help has less to do with the toy itself and more to do with what’s happening around it.

Can a calculator make you smarter? The QAMA calculator can. You use it just like a regular calculator, plugging in the numbers of the problem you want to solve — but QAMA won’t give you the answer until you provide an accurate estimate of what that answer will be. If your estimate is way off, you’ll have to go back to the problem and see where you went wrong. If your estimate is close, QAMA (developed by Ilan Samson, an “inventor-in-residence” at the University of California, San Diego) will serve up the precise solution, and you can compare it to your own guess.

A repeat of the inconclusive 2008 invasion is unlikely to be what the preternaturally cautious Netanyahu has in mind. “The Israelis are not specifying an ambitious end game in terms of clearing out Hamas as [then-Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert did in 2008,” says Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator now at the European Council on Foreign Relations. ...

When Suzanne Kail, an English teacher at a public high school in Magnolia, Ohio, was told that she would be required to teach her students Latin and Greek word roots, she groaned and rolled her eyes. Kail believes in a progressive approach to education, in which active engagement in meaningful learning is paramount.