So you’ve received a convoluted form with rows and columns and colors and numbers and it’s supposed to tell you important stuff about your kid. You have no idea what the colors and rows mean, but you start freaking out immediately because these are the results of a test. And tests are scary. They judge us. They compare us to our peers. They tell us if we are good little humans.They make serious predictions about the outcome of our lives. Right? More and more we hear the wor

Umm, if you have to ask, better to do a little research, I did! Keep in mind as we go that I’m writing from a teacher’s perspective, but kids are kids at home and in the classroom, so most of this should translate. Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing here before we get going. When we talk about positive reinforcement, most of us think about saying or doing something positive when we approve of a certain behavior, and that’s partly true. To be a little more cl

As parents, you have certainly run into those moments with your kids where they all of the sudden don’t seem to remember something they should know very well by now. It’s so annoying, am I right? For that matter, you may have the same frustration with yourself. Why do we lose recall of certain facts or events? The most likely explanation for lost pieces of information is that it never really had the chance to make it to long-term memory in the first place. In order to be ab