what gender do your ads think you are?

I 100% ought to be asleep right now, but THIS IS INTERESTING!

Click here: www.google.com/ads/preferences/view (via Ta-Nehisi Coates - the follow-up to his nail-on-the-head commentary on Condaleeza Rice, Hillary Clinton and babies)

If your cookies are on, at that handy link you will find the general categories of sites that Google has been creepily watching you visit.

That's mostly pretty boring, because you presumably knew this already - if you are shocked to find what sort of things you do on the internet, that's your own problem - but look a little lower!  Check out that bottom item and its explanation -

"Based on the websites you've visited, we think you're interested in topics that mostly interest men."

What is it, do you think?  The coupons?  The humanities reference sites?  The wildlife?  (That's adorable baby videos, by the way).  The Business and Industrial - Chemicals might be throwing them off (I think that came from a digression after searching for "melamine") but then I've also got cooking and bed and bath.... Really, I can only assume that my minor obsession with webcomics is marking me as masculine.

Is this an assumption - an obviously wrong assumption - based on data?  I should hope so, since they're Google... man, I'd love to see that data.  And I would really love to know just how many people they've got wrong.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.

— The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1837.

New blog title: Camila Talks About Going To College Because That's All She Does

no but seriously.  The only exception is that I also read about what other people write about going to college, which brings me to...

NEW RESEARCH!  Academically Adrift: Limited Learning in College is the catchy title of this new book.

From the NYT gloss:  "The study, by two sociologists, Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia... found that half of the students surveyed did not take any classes requiring 20 pages of writing in their prior semester, and one-third did not take any courses requiring 40 pages of reading a week."

Side note:  This fairly-representative week, from 4 classes, I have 368 pages of reading.  But of those same four classes, the approximate number of pages of formal writing due for the entire semester are 28, 14-17, 10-14, and 8-10. So I only scrape above their standard there.  Um, yay?

Obviously quantity of work and depth of learning are not necessarily correlated.  I mean, it's obvious to me.  The really shocking part of this research - or so I hear - concerns scores on the CLA, a test supposed to measure overall writing, reasoning and analytical skills.  Tested freshman year and then senior year, 36% of students showed no improvement.  But the book just focuses on the first two years, when 45% of students showed no real difference in scores.

This neither startles nor alarms me, really... The tests don't measure how much people learn in their own major, and I expect that somebody very interested in learning enough biology and chemistry to go to med school could get certainly the education they want without necessarily improving their scores on the CLA.  And then there's the question of what the CLA (or any test) really measures anyway.  And then the fact that what you get out is correlated to what you put in, and there's certainly a percentage of a college's population that ain't putting in much.  

And, of course, that it's mostly the liberal arts students who do improve, and the business and communication majors who don't...

Add all those up and consider that, for whatever it's worth, a clear majority of college students are showing improvement on the test anyway, and frankly I think we're all doing fine.  I understand why people might be upset by these results (especially if they're paying for somebody's massive tuition) but we should all take some deep breaths before we start freaking out.

That said... studying less than five hours a week (37% of students)  is just appalling.  Step it up, kiddos.

testing testing one two three

okay i have about fifteen billion blog posts I should have written, and should also rename this blog probably, but rather than waiting until I do these things before I write anything ever again, I'm forging ahead.

News! Research! Insights into study methods! Whoohoo! Is... is nobody else this excited?

Okay, so I actually kind of enjoy tests - why did I become an English major - what a fool I am - but anyway, tests are fun! They are challenges that, unlike so many of life's challenges (oooh did you see me just get deep), are measurable. Quantifiable, manageable, sometimes repeatable... if only all of life's obstacles could be so concrete!

Here's the news: Taking tests actually helps you learn better than studying does. Go read the article - it's okay, I'll wait!

(If you're not reading it, here's the gist: Purdue researches divided students into four groups. They all read the same passage. One group was the control (did nothing else), another studied by reading it repeatedly, another by concept mapping, and another through "retrieval practice," where they took little mini-"tests." A week later they all took a test and the retrieval practice group remembered much more than the others. There was another experiment, which also found the test-taking group remembered more later)

So, interesting: the test the "retrieval practice" group did and the test all groups took a week later were not the same. If you're thinking maybe they had an advantage because their study method and testing method were the same, well, think again - the "study" test was a free-write essay, and the "test" test was a short-answer test.  It wasn't the test format that helped.  IN FACT, in the second experiment the retreival practice group did better than the concept-mapping group on a concept-mapping test.  Let that one marinate for a while.

And, useful!  Because the "retrieval practice" method that they used is dead easy.  Dead easy.  Here's how it works: Take ten minutes and a blank piece of paper and write down everything you remember.

Okay, now go back to whatever you're studying and read it again.  Then get another piece of paper and try again.

And now you're done!

If you think about it, this method makes perfect sense.  When you test yourself, you learn what you don't know - and you practice remembering what you do know.  Whereas reading something over and over again doesn't make any sense at all - you just get really good at reading that info.  Fat lot of good that will do you come finals.

I realized that this is how I memorize poetry, too!  You can read a piece a dozen times and not learn a line.  The only way to learn it is to set it down, try to recite it from memory and see where you stumble.

So here's what I leave you with, on this Saturday night, before I have dinner and then... well, I won't be studying.  But when next you are, just remember: testing yourself, by simply writing down what you can remember, is not only one of the least painful ways to study (no eye-straining reading, no rote repetition, no flashcards!) but also, apparently, one of the most effective.

Go forth and prosper.