Friday, May 25, 2012

Community Engagement

In 2008, UVU received the Carnegie Foundation classification as an engaged university. Part of our mission is help students understand how their classes are relevant to their lives and how the can use what they have learned to help improve their communities. A high school from Bronx New York did just that. The school found a way to apply multidisciplinary subjects to the community to inspire learning and see the relevance of learning in their lives. I'll give you two examples. First, Students canoed down the Bronx river to gather data for scientific analysis to study ecology. Second, students had to learn to how to deal with rising water levels due to climate change. The students developed potential solutions to those problems.  UVU has resources for professors to develop and fund engaged learning projects in GEL grants or maybe service learning. Another project that might interest professors is the university project. This is a campus wide, multidisciplinary effort to tackle community problems. This year the university project is focusing on increasing literacy and numeracy in our local community.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Growth Mindsets in Action

The Scientific American has a blog post that nicely illustrates the benefits of a growth mindset. The author of the post, Andrea Kuszewski, describes the differing views intelligence and how a growth mindset gave have a significant impact on people. She reported of a case she had with an autistic child with an IQ of 80. After three years of training and hard work, the child's IQ was retest at 100, which is considered a normal IQ. That is a significant jump in a IQ scores.
The blog illustrates the best way to live up to one's cognitive potential, especially as one ages. She resolves some common misconception about intelligence as one ages, such as, that the game Sudoku is good way ward off cognitive decline. Sudoku is not the reason, per se, for the cognitive benefit; it's the challenging activities that is the reason for the buffer against the cognitive decline. So, if once you become proficient at Sudoku, switch to another challenging activity like the New York Times Crossword puzzle.