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    • Five Principles of Academic Buoyancy

      1. What is Academic Buoyancy? Academic buoyancy is the ability to successfully deal with academic setbacks and challenges that are typical of the ordinary course of school life (e.g. poor grades, competing deadlines, exam pressure, difficult schoolwork)

    • 5 Psychology Reads

      Five psychology books I have enjoyed. There are many others, of course, and this list is in no particular order.

    • What (if anything) can teachers learn from neuroscience?

      I’m sceptical of headlines that claim neuroscientists might have discovered the mechanisms that lead to bad behaviour, why teenagers are heavily influenced by their peers or why rewards don’t always work with adolescents. Such reports are usually accompanied by a stock photograph of a brain or diagram of a synapse and often dismissed outright by…

    • Nurturing habits in ourselves and others

      Habits have been defined as learned dispositions to repeat past responses (Wood and Neal, 2007). In other words, a habit is a behaviour we repeat because we associate it with a specific outcome. That said, habits can lead to both positive and negative outcomes and we often carry them out without awareness, especially if the…

    • Procrastination: Some causes and cures

      Procrastination can be viewed as an emotionally driven response related to our concept of self. Negative emotions arise because we might feel that the task we are putting off simply represents something that we aren’t prepared to handle. We might think of the task as being too difficult or the prospect of failure being too…

    • The problem with guessing

      (and the need for feedback) Guessing can be a useful strategy. Students might not think they know the answer to a question, but they quite often know what it is not, allowing them to reduce the pool of possible options. In the case of multiple choice questions, the sight of the correct answer can trigger…

    • Why Anxiety Makes It Difficult to Recall Information

      (But Not To Form New Memories). There remains clear evidence from multiple studies that high levels of anxiety can impair memory function. However, this impairment appears to only impact recall and has either neutral or beneficial impact on memory encoding (the process by which new information is stored). One reason why anxiety impairs the ability…

    • A Model of Student Anxiety

      (a work in progress) Why do some students seem to suffer more with anxiety than others? Limited amounts of stress are good for us (especially if we need to escape from a dangerous situation). This acute stress is often fleeting, involving a complex biological and behavioural mechanism that can increase motivation and cognitive function. But…

    • A Self-efficacy Primer

      The roots of Self-efficacy lie in the work of Canadian social psychologist Albert Bandura and his social-cognitive theory of behaviour. Bandura defines self-efficacy as ‘beliefs in one’s capabilities to organise and execute the causes of action required to produce given attainment’ (Bandura, 1977). Originally applied to clinical settings, interest in self-efficacy has spread to other…

    • Some Anxious Thoughts

      I’ve been thinking about anxiety lately. At a time when many students in England will be sitting or about to sit their mock exams (my own son included), it seemed like a good time to raise the issue again. None of us are strangers to anxiety and, indeed, some anxiety is actually beneficial to us.…