success midterm Flashcards
What is happiness?
a 2500-year-old question
we have been talking about
happiness for such a long time, it shows
the importance of this question to every society at every point in our history
Aristippus
Hedonism is a school of thought that argues that happiness is about seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering
Hedonism is believed to have originated with Aristippus of Cyrene. Aristippus believed that pleasure is the highest good and perhaps the only thing that matters
Confucius
One of the earliest eastern definitions of happiness comes from Confucius
believed the most important kind of happiness comes not from seeking pleasure but from exercising restraint and acting in a moral way
there is no happiness in wealth and status unless it was acquired ethically. To be happy, people should practice “altruism and self restraint
Plato
Plato asserts that those who are moral are the
only ones who are truly happy. People who give in to their desires will not be happy
Aristotle
argued that happiness comes from
living the “good life”
the good life is something that is achieved through the development of a good moral character and good habits over the course of an
entire lifetime
believed that happiness comes from both pleasurable things as well as things that are good for the soul, namely:
1) bodily goods – health, vitality, vigor, and pleasure
2) external goods – food, drink, shelter, clothing, and
sleep
3) goods of the soul – knowledge, skill, love, friendship,
aesthetic enjoyment, self-esteem, and honour
Contemporary Psychology
the goal is to measure what happiness is, figure out what predicts it, and determine whether your degree of happiness can be modified
Ed Diener
an American psychologist, professor, and author
In 1985, he and his colleagues published the “the satisfaction with life scale (SWLS),” which initiated the study of happiness and satisfaction.
scale consists of just five items and has become the measure used in the annual World Happiness Report
- In most ways my life is close to my ideal
- The conditions of my life are excellent
- I am satisfied with my life
- I’ve gotten the important things I want in life
- If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing
genetics and happiness
A study of over 2,000 twins from the Minnesota Twin Registry found that approximately 50% of life satisfaction is due to genetics
This leaves 40% attributable to intentional activities (e.g., your actions and attitudes) and 10% attributable to external events (e.g., your circumstances)
Martin Seligman
theory of happiness and well-being is
called PERMA
Seligman’s model builds on the idea introduced by Aristotle that attaining the Good Life comes from finding a balance among a number of things—pleasurable activities, good relations and meaningful pursuits.
PERMA
a 5 part theory of happiness and well-being developed by Martin Seligman
Social Emotional Skills
Getting a great sleep
Knowing and using your strengths
Challenging doubt, worry & negative thoughts
Relaxation breathing & mindfulness
Making and keeping friends
Knowing the signs of mental illness
Saying how you feel the right way
Balancing friends, fun and school
Managing the expectations of others
Four minutes of mindfulness
can reduce math anxiety and
improve math scores in college
students
extra 30 minutes of sleep
can produce to 0.5 increase in GPA. That’s
as many as 5 whole points and could be
the difference between a B+ and an A-.
Study Skills
Taking notes fast and efficiently
Scheduling: Making it all fit
Active recall: Beating the forgetting curve
Doing well on tests & writing great papers
Beating procrastination
Getting help with schoolwork
Getting a grip on your perfectionism
Increasing your perseverance and grit
Turning setback and failure into success
what is the focus of developing study habits?
make you efficient and effective
SWSL stand for?
Satisfaction with standard of living
HHIS stand for?
Household income satisfaction
P in PERMA
Positive emotions – feeling good
E in PERMA
Engagement – being completely absorbed in activities
R in PERMA
Relationships – being fulling connected to others
M in PERMA
Meaning – have a purpose and meaning in life
A in PERMA
Achievement – a sense of accomplishment and success
The science of memory and forgetting
From 1880 to 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted the first experiments on memory
Ebbinghaus hypothesized that the rate at which a person forgets depends on:
a) the difficulty of the learned material
(e.g., how meaningful it is to you)
b) how it is represented (e.g., drawing
or words)
c) physiological factors, such as stress
and sleep
forgetting curve
demonstrates how fast we forget
information over time, by Ebbinghaus
Why bother taking notes?
Most of the information your instructor thinks you should know will be mentioned verbally in the class, but not all of it will be on the slide
In one hour, you’ll forget 44% of what you were
taught
Helps keep you focused when you start to doze off
Pen and paper versus computer
Research found that students who wrote notes using pen and paper remembered more facts over a longer period and understood concepts better than students who took notes with laptops.1 Even though pen-and-paper notetakers wrote fewer notes than students who took notes with laptops, they did just as well as student with laptops when recalling facts, and outperformed students with
laptops when applying their knowledge.
Note-taking strategies
Three most commonly used methods of taking notes are:
1) The Cornell Note
2) Diagrams
3) Comparison charts
The Cornell Note development
In the mid 1940s, a professor of education at Cornel University, Walter Pauk, developed a system for taking, organizing and reviewing notes that has been adopted at university and colleges throughout the United States and Canada
Pauk noticed that students miss almost half (40%) of the important points in a typical lecture. According to one study, first-year university students managed to record only 11% of important information while taking notes
The history of note-taking:
The ‘common place’ book
The common place book or “commonplacer” dates back to the early 1600s
was used to write interests, facts, quotes, and names. Commonplace books were a personal, physical way of synthesizing and memorizing what was read. The ability to recall important facts in conversation was considered an essential ability
Making a Cornell Note
broken down into three sections:
a) A wide right-hand column. In this
column, you write down information you are
learning, draw any diagrams, and sketch
relevant pictures
b) A narrow left-hand column. In this column,
you write keywords, concepts, important phrases and brief questions while reviewing notes
c) Bottom summary section. In this section,
you summarize your notes in your own words
using a few sentences answering the questions
Deep learning
deep learning produces the long-lasting results in terms of acquisition of knowledge
The key ingredients include:
(a) Summarizing in your own words (not word for word) at the bottom of the page
(b) Identifying key ideas in the left-hand column
(c) Making connections among concepts (in a drawing a chart, or by asking yourself why it is important or what it is related to) in the main part of the note.
what Cornell notes are designed for
Designed to help you take, review and organize information.
Forces you to focus on what matters.
Urges you to put things into your own words.
By translating concept is in your own words
your degree of understanding goes way up.
Research shows that writing down notes hand
works better than typing.
Diagrams and concept maps
may be easier to draw a picture of how something works
Diagrams and concept maps are often a part of written notes. In fact, research shows that adding drawings to notes to represent concepts and illuminate relationships improves the retention of the learned material
what is a diagram and the two main parts
A diagram is a simplified drawing that structures information in a meaningful way and presents it visually
There are two main types of diagrams:
a) illustrative diagrams serve to illustrate
something (e.g. name the parts) – see the picture on the right.
b) explanatory diagrams explain some aspect of the subject (e.g., how things are connected) – see the next slide
what is a Concept map
A concept map is a diagram that depicts connections and hierarchies between individual pieces of information at the same time.
It is a graphical tool that designers, engineers, technical writers use to organize and structure knowledge.
Comparison charts
helps you compare two or more items
While comparison charts are not practical for taking notes in the class, they can be very helpful when you are doing research or directly comparing two (or more) things, events, theories or characters.
Should I rewrite my notes?
Reviewing and rewriting your notes after class fosters learning and retention in two ways. First, it helps you clarify what you did not understand in the class. Second, by going over the information, you start rehearsing the
material you learned in the lecture
what should i write down in my notes?
- Key terms (e.g., Cornell note)
- Key concepts (e.g., happiness vs well-being)
- Key names (e.g., like Ed Diener)
- Key findings (e.g., like notetaking gets in the way of learning for more than 60% of students)
- Key implications (e.g., the top 7 predictors of
academic success are modifiable, which implies that those factors are skills that can be acquired by anyone, at any time).
how should i write my notes?
- Cornell note
- Diagram (or picture)
- Comparison chart
- Ask yourself, “Why is this important?” and “What is this related to?”
The five pillars of the good life
Positive emotions – feeling good (and minimizing stress)
Engagement – having activities that engage and absorb you
Relationships – having people that you feel close and connected to
Meaning – doing things that give you purpose and is meaningful
Achievement – having a sense of accomplishment & success
Positive emotions
Positive emotions is the first pillar of well-being.
According to Seligman, experiencing positive emotions, such as happiness, pleasure, warmth or contentment leads to a fulfilled life. Having positive emotions is however not about feeling excitement all the time. Any kind of positive feeling counts - from feeling “excited” to feeling “content.”
Can we increase positive
emotions?
Seligman thinks that even if you are not naturally cheerful and optimistic, you can still boost your positive emotions. You can do so by
identifying, engaging in and savoring activities that make you feel joyous, hopeful, proud or content. You could go for a run, spend time
with friends, maybe even read some poetry.
As Peter Lewinsohn (another psychologist) stated it like this, to experience pleasurable moods, you need to increase the frequency of
pleasurable activities. That means doing things – even when you may not feel like it, or thing that they may be boring or a waste of time.
Decreasing your stress
When people get stressed out, very often, they stop doing things they enjoy. Stress can quickly chip away at that First Pillar of the Good Life.
Seligman talks a lot about how to maximize positive emotions but doesn’t instruct us on how to decrease stress. The first step to dealing
with stress is to know what kind of stress you have.
Psychologists define stress as “any demand, psychological or physical on you or your body.”
Stress as load
This is about the number of things you have to get done at any give time
The more you have to do, the greater your load
You can lessen your stress as load by becoming more efficient with your time and asking for help you need
Stress as worry
This is about all of the negative thoughts, doubts, criticisms and worry that you play over in your head.
skills to help you deal with your stress as worry include, relaxation breathing, fact-checking your
doubts and rethinking setbacks
Engagement
Engagement is the second pillar of well-being
Engagement is about being completely absorbed in an activity or FLOW
When you are fully engaged in something:
a) you are completely absorbed in what you are doing
b) it feels like time has stopped
c) you become unaware of your “self” (i.e., no doubts, don’t feel selfconscious, don’t worry about what others think about you)
Relationships
Relationships is the third pillar of well-being
Having meaningful relationships is a basic need
According to Naomi Eisenberger, the pain that we feel when we are isolated and alone is very similar to physical pain
Research shows that having more deeper connections with others predicts longer life, better health and improved well-being.
Meaning
Meaning is the Fourth Pillar of Seligman’s theory of well-being
One way of maximizing purpose and meaning in your life is to choose activities that align with your natural strengths and core values.
For many people meaning and purpose is achieved when they feel they are a part of something bigger than themselves.
Achievement and
accomplishment
Achievement is fifth pillar of the Good Life.
about feeling a sense of accomplishment
after finishing your homework or helping a friend
To notice your achievements, it’s important to take a moment every day and reflect about what you did and what made you feel good about yourselves
What counts as
an achievement?
- Achievement is getting a high position or excelling in a particular field, for example in business, sports or politics.
- Achievement is making a lot of money and being able to acquire material goods, such as an expensive house, car, a boat.
- Achievement is being admired a great deal because you are successful in school, at sports or at work.
- Achievement is reaching your potential, finding out what you are
good at and then doing that.
Effort-based
accomplishments
To build a strong fifth pillar of well-being and feel accomplished, you’ll have to start paying attention to all your effort-based accomplishments. Effort-based
accomplishments are all of those things you put effort in on a daily basis, such as making a schedule and sticking to it, even cleaning your room, arranging a get-together with friends.
Anders Ericsson
is a psychologist who has spent 30 years studying exceptional athletes, musicians, and gifted individuals with the goal of understanding how these individuals acquired their great skills and whether regular people could achieve the same.
Perfect pitch
Perfect pitch is the ability to hear a note and know what note it is
Mozart had a perfect pitch at age six. Frank Sinatra had it too. Surprisingly, Miles Davis didn’t.
Ayako Sakakibara
in 2014, he recruited 24 children
between the ages of two and six and provided them with months-long music training to see if they could acquire perfect pitch. Each student had four to five training lessons everyday
that lasted just a few minutes. Some had training for less than a year, some more for a year.
At the end of the training every single student acquired perfect pitch
Implications
It is important to consider the implications of what you have read or discovered for (a) for theory (i.e., how we think about that topic), (b) for methods (i.e., how we study or measure a topic) and (c) for policy (i.e., how we teach, treat difficulties, run organizations, etc.).
scheduling
Make a schedule and sticking to it – is the single
most important skill that you need to acquire at
university
Purpose of scheduling
The goal of scheduling is about making everything that is important in your life, including school, work, friends, relaxing, sleep, eating and so on fit
How many hours
do university students
spend on studying
A large-scale survey of 420,000 full‐time first‐year students from 950 four‐year institutions in Canada and the United States conducted by The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)
showed that full-time students spend about 14 hours a week studying.
That is about one hour outside of the classroom for every hour in the
classroom.
How many hours should you study?
There is a well‐established rule of thumb that says that students should devote two hours of study time for every hour of class time.
scatter plot
It shows how two things are related, in this case
number of hours along the x-axis and
GPA along the y-axis. Every dot is the
data from one person.
purpose of storyboarding
The goal is to find those blocks of time – whether or not you needed them. Research studies show that learning is most effective
when you try to spread out your learning (over multiple days) and squeeze it in (throughout the day).
Taking breaks
Taking regular breaks while studying is crucial for maintaining focus, retaining information and managing stress
Researchers have noticed that student attention during lectures starts diminishing after approximately 10 –15 minutes. One study
found that students who listened to only 15min of lecture retained 41% of the material compared to those listening to 40 min of
material – they only retained 20% of the material.
Pomodoro breaks
Francesco Cirillo developed The Pomodoro technique to help him focus while studying as a student.
The principle behind the Pomodoro technique is to study uninterrupted for 25 minutes, then take a fiveminute break. You repeat that four times, and then take a longer break.
How many Pomodoros?
How many Pomodoro breaks you need will depend on your own attention span, how long you have been studying and how difficult
the material is.
Distractions
and interruptions
A very important principle of Pomodoro technique is to study uninterrupted for a prolonged period of time.
Research shows that interruptions and noise can negatively impact the effectiveness of learning.
