Tag: back to school

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#TuesdayTip go back to school with these academic mysteries

Enter to win! One grand prize winner gets all five books. Five winners each get one ebook.

It’s back to school! I’m collaborating with four wonderful authors to bring you a giveaway opportunity.

And if you like academic mysteries, among the five of us, there are more than twenty books in our series:
Braxton Campus Mysteries by James. J. Cudney
Cassandra Sato Mysteries by Kelly Brakenhoff
Lila Maclean Academic Mysteries by Cynthia Kuhn
Professor Molly Mysteries by Frankie Bow
Professor Prather Mysteries by Mary Angela

When local big-shot Jimmy Tanaka, “The Most Hated Man in Hawaii,” pledges a huge donation to Molly’s college and then disappears, Molly’s bottom-line-obsessed dean tasks her with locating the missing mogul.
English professor Lila Maclean is thrilled about her new job at prestigious Stonedale University, until she finds one of her colleagues dead.Now she must act quickly to avoid failing her assignment…and becoming the next victim.
In sleepy Copper Bluff, South Dakota, English professor Emmeline Prather is enjoying a new semester. But when one of her students dies working on the fall musical, Prof. Prather has good reason to suspect foul play.
When Kellan Ayrwick returns home for his father’s retirement, he finds a body in Diamond Hall’s stairwell. Something is amiss on campus, but none of the facts add up. Can they find the killer before he strikes again?
Cassandra Sato traded her life in Hawai’i for a dream position in Nebraska. She expected the church casseroles, land-locked cornfields, and face-freezing winters. But  it’s her job that’s rapidly becoming a nightmare.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

You’ll have over thirty entry options between Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Newsletter Sign-Ups and More.

The giveaway opens today on September 15th and will close at 11:59 PM EST on September 20th. We will randomly choose the winners shortly afterward and announce the winners on our websites and social media. You can also see the winners from the giveaway link once we select them. Good Luck to Everyone!

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The Secret to Better Learning That Most People Don’t Know: Interleaving

brain
Mixing up your learning can lead to massive gains, a new study of academic performance reveals.

 For years now ‘interleaving’ has been a secret largely confined to researchers.

Interleaving means practising or learning different skills in quick succession.
When interleaving, tennis players might practice forehands, backhands and volleys altogether.
Interleaving for musicians could mean practising scales, arpeggios and chords all in the same session.
It’s quite a different method to how people normally learn.
Tennis players typically focus on forehands for a session and musicians on scales for a session.
The benefits have been shown in studies of motor skills:

“…college baseball players practiced hitting three types of pitches (e.g. curve ball) that were either blocked by type or systematically interleaved.
During a  subsequent test in which the three types of pitches were interleaved (as in an actual game), hitting performance was greater if practice had been interleaved rather than blocked.
A similar benefit was observed in a study of basketball shooting…” (Taylor & Rohrer, 2010)

A new study, though, shows the dramatic benefits of interleaving on children’s performance at math.

For the research some kids were taught math the usual way.
They learned one mathematical technique in a lesson and then practised it.
A second group, however, were given assignments which included questions requiring different techniques.
The results were impressive.
On a test one day later, the students who’d been using the interleaving method did 25% better.
But, when tested a month later, the interleaving method did 76% better.
That’s quite an increase given that both groups had been learning for the same amount of time.
The only difference was that some learned block by block and others had their learning mixed up.
One of the potential drawbacks of the technique is that it can feel harder at first.
Instead of concentrating on one skill at a time, you have to work on two or more.
But interleaving probably works because it forces the mind to work harder.
Instead of relying on learning a system and sticking with it, the mind has to keep searching and reaching for solutions.
The research was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology(Rohrer et al., 2015).
from PsyBlog http://bit.ly/2co2Lt6