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Passionate about helping people improve memory and learning skills, Winston Sieck and Louise Rasmussen, a husband and wife team from Yellow Springs, have developed a web-based learning program designed to change the way people think about learning.
“I have always wanted to pursue education research,” Sieck said. “And I’ve always been involved in one way or another with education.”
Sieck and Rasmussen are both cognitive psychologists and started their own company, Global Cognition, in 2011. Cognitive psychology explores internal mental processes and is defined as the study of the way people perceive, remember, think, speak and solve problems.
“A lot of our work has focused on adults,” Sieck said. “We are currently working on a project through the Department of Defense and looking at why some people have an especially easy time of adapting to new cultures, while many struggle with this.” Sieck said that during this study, which the couple started more than a year ago, he was struck by the competencies successful adapters have in common.
“They all have a similar mindset,” he said. “They are self-directed learners, and they take responsibility for learning new things on their own.”
Over the course of the project, which has involved interviewing 95 military personnel with different ranks and from different branches of service, Sieck and Rasmussen learned much about the common characteristics of successful learners and, as a result, started a new website, ThinkerAcademy.com, last June.
“Thinker Academy is a site where teenagers can go to build their learning and thinking skills,” Sieck said. “It’s designed with two things in mind: to help teens get better grades in high school and to teach them essential skills they will need once they get to college.”
The program is working not only to help students and their parents but also to shatter what they say are the “myths of learning in school.” According to the website, the first myth is that getting good grades is about trying hard and the second is a person needs to be born smart to do well in school.
“We want people to trade in those wrong ideas for some good ideas about study skills,” Sieck said. “The mindset is to use high school as a place to practice your learning strategies and better prepare for college.”
Sieck and Rasmussen had their own two teenage children set up on the site as beta testers and also found some friends and teachers to try the program.
“One of our favorite things we keep hearing about it (ThinkerAcademy.com) is the section on memory,” Sieck said. “We started out to teach kids how memory works and use the cognitive science behind memory. This is something you don’t learn in high school. Memory applies to many practical strategies.”
ThinkerAcademy.com helps users learn to take ownership of their learning and encourages them to think about teachers as a resource. “It’s all on them,” Sieck said. “Whether or not they are good learners is not something they are just born with, rather it’s a skill you can acquire just like learning to ride a bike. It just takes practice.”
Sieck and Rasmussen utilize techniques and science based on evidence from the field of cognitive psychology and the program teaches students a mindset rather than individual skills. “One reason I wanted to start this program in the first place is that I know the research and I wanted to help my own kids with skills as they reach high school age,” Sieck said. “I was able to put the important skills in a package and teach them in ways they could understand.”
The challenge has been reaching teenagers when they aren’t necessarily scouring the Internet looking for e-learning study skills programs. “Parents are looking, so we’ve written an email course for them that provides tips and techniques on how to coach their kids to be independent learners,” Sieck said.
The free email course helps parents figure out how to provide their children with support while giving them independence at the same time.
Rasmussen is pleased with the success rates they have seen thus far from ThinkerAcademy.com “It’s like a shot in the arm,” she said. “It gives teens a quick and easy injection of the study skills that have been shown to be effective.”
For more information, go online to globalcognition.org.
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