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Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Hetty Roessingh, Professor, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary

The Alberta government recently introduced Bill 6, a proposed amendment to the Education Act, that it says will “prioritize literacy and numeracy and ensure the province’s youngest learners receive the help they need as early as possible.”

Large classes with students who have a range of learning needs, including tailored learning plans, are among the factors that can make it difficult for teachers to ensure each child’s needs are being met. Implementing early literacy and numeracy tests with the intent of early intervention for at risk learners has intuitive appeal.

If passed, Alberta’s Bill 6 legislation would mandate reading and math tests from kindergarten to Grade 3, effective by fall 2026. According to ministry officials, its goal is to identify learning gaps early using short, simple and non-graded activities.

The announcement has received swift and forceful reaction from academics, the Alberta Teachers’ Association and senior-level school administrators.

Their concerns relate to the validity and reliability of the tests, how they were developed and their instructional value. Critics also raise concerns over the lack of teacher consultation and involvement, additional time teachers will need to administer and score the tests and whether the test results will change teaching and learning practices.

Questions also remain about whether schools will need additional resources to address learning gaps identified by way of the tests, since the bill doesn’t include any mention of this. The $11 million dollar pricetag of Bill 6 may not reap the insights needed to identify and meaningfully intervene for young children at risk.

Why early literacy matters

The testing proposed in Bill 6 misses important dimensions of literacy development. Early reading proficiency depends largely on two skills: phonemic awareness (the awareness to notice and work with different sounds) and phonics (mapping sounds to letters).

These foundational concepts and skills are learned by the majority of young children by the end of Grade 2, including English language learners (ELL) and children disadvantaged by socio-economic status. Exposure to two languages may heighten ELLs’ keen perception of sounds, helping them to apply their knowledge of how letters and their sounds relate and different letter patterns to correctly pronounce written words.

A learning-to-read school book I had as a child, Friends and Neighbours, is still on my bookshelf. As a newly arrived immigrant to Canada at age four from Indonesia, I was relatively proficient in conversational English by Grade 2. I learned the process of reading, including how to sound out letters and their English language patterns, by drawing on the vocabulary I developed and by interacting with native English-speaking children in the neighbourhood, on the playground and in the classroom.

However, a child’s strengths in recognizing and working with the sounds that make up individual words — phonemic awareness and phonics — may provide a false sense of security. These strengths can mask the needs of children at risk of reading failure as they transition to Grade 4, when the focus shifts from learning to read to reading to learn. At this stage, vocabulary knowledge becomes critical.

Beginning in Grade 4, the litmus of reading success is a child’s ability to comprehend increasingly complex and academically demanding texts. The testing proposed in Bill 6 misses the important role of vocabulary knowledge in this process.

The fourth-grade slump

The well-documented “fourth-grade slump” refers to the drop in reading performance many students experience around Grade 4. Children must shift from learning to read to reading to learn — a shift that is dependent on vocabulary depth and breadth.

A seminal 2003 study from researchers Jeanne S. Chall and Vicki A. Jacobs underscored the crucial role of vocabulary knowledge in reading success in Grade 4. They found that disadvantaged learners in Grades 2 and 3 scored as well as peer learners from higher socio-economic backgrounds.

At this early stage of reading development, phonemic awareness and phonics provides an important foundation for learners. The researchers found that it is not until Grade 4 that scores decelerate for children from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Without attention to vocabulary knowledge, young children may find themselves woefully under-prepared for the accelerating demands of Grade 4.

What Bill 6 overlooks

Given decades of research on reading development, Bill 6’s current focus is too narrow and offers only limited utility in early identification of young learners who will be at risk by Grade 4. Most children readily learn these skills already. The relative minority who struggle with these skills respond well to direct, explicit and intensive interventions.

To support students effectively, Alberta must measure vocabulary knowledge among young children. In addition, handwriting should also be assessed. Handwriting plays an enormous role in unlocking vocabulary in Grade 3, and as a skill, unfolds from kindergarten to Grade 3 years along a developmental continuum.

Devising tools to assess vocabulary and handwriting is more than a matter of short, simple and non-graded activities. More comprehensive assessments, such as studying samples of children’s writing on a familiar and engaging topic, would provide much more useful data for transforming classroom pedagogy and practice.

Such assessments would take more time to administer and score, but they would be a far better use of $11 million than narrow assessments that capture only the tip of the iceberg of what matters for long-term literacy success.

Hetty Roessingh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Alberta’s proposed $11-million reading tests won’t actually help struggling learners – https://theconversation.com/albertas-proposed-11-million-reading-tests-wont-actually-help-struggling-learners-269791

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Mandi Baker, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management, University of Manitoba

The new year starts for many by making resolutions to live healthier lives. This can mean getting fitter by joining a gym, signing up to Pilates classes or starting a new diet.

For many, these resolutions are hard to maintain and the new habits slip away. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why our best intentions fail; the kids get sick so you can’t get out for a class, the costs of equipment or membership become too steep, and kale just isn’t cutting it for dinner anymore. In the end, motivation for our new habits runs out.

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Read more:
The science behind building healthy habits can help you keep your New Year’s resolution

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When we choose activities for our leisure that do not bring intrinsic enjoyment and/or satisfaction, we find it hard to preserve. External motivations, like gaining a reward (a particular body shape) or avoiding a consequence (minimizing the risks related to heart health), can only take us so far.

When we do things that we truly love, that are aligned with our values and/or sense of self, or we would do even if no one was watching, then the chances of maintaining those physical activities are much higher. That means the goal of resolution-setting is to find the things that tap into our intrinsic motivations.

How we frame health

Another challenge to sticking with new health-related habits, is the very individual way that health is framed. Health is positioned as being not only an individual’s responsibility, but that the individual is to blame if they are unwell. While the medical model serves a purpose in identifying problems and addressing them, applying a deficiency-model rationality obscures critical awareness about the complex and many ways that social factors impact health.

Social models of health, such as The Social Determinants of Health by Dahlgreen & Whitehead (1991), demonstrate that not only do our physiology, lifestyle choices, social and community networks matter, but socio-economic, cultural and environmental conditions do too. This shifts the responsibilities for health away from loading individuals up on guilt to shared collective responsibilities among all strata of community, government and institutions for a population’s health.

The notion that health is an individual problem, or deficiency, can be isolating, making the work of an individual’s wellness goals an effort that they feel they must do alone, and against broad systemic constraints.

Sociologists have long warned us of how these ideas, among others, lead us to think and treat ourselves poorly when it comes to moving our (fabulous and functional) bodies. Blaming ourselves or seeing physical activity, fitness and health as beyond our reach is both demoralizing and demotivating. Let alone added layers of social, economic, geographical and political inequities. This can be as heavy, if not heavier, than anything you might “lift” at the gym.

Getting physically active

Getting physically active for the first time, or after years, or only after the holidays means exercising your mental prowess. This list offers some insights into how to do the mental exercise to get your body moving and enjoying it:

• Be in your body: be embodied. Often made popular by mindfulness movements, the idea is to slow down your sophisticated mental processing to focus on your five senses and simply be in the moment. This teaches our nervous systems to take a break from processing stressful stimulus.

• Get active for no other reason than to enjoy yourself! Leisure theory tells us that seeking external rewards can make free time feel like work. Look for physical activity that brings you joy — make it the thing you look forward to rather than dread.

• Focus on what your body can DO rather than how it looks. Views of beautiful, attractive or healthy bodies constantly change. Focusing on what your body can and does do (a strengths-based approach to vitality) can be a subtle yet powerful mental shift to improve your quality of life.

• Find your activity people. Get active with people who share your philosophies about health. Find supportive people who don’t judge, who understand motivation’s ups and downs, who acknowledge that bodies come in different shapes and sizes AND that bodies are capable and beautiful things of joy.

• Get outside. Science tells us that heart rates and worrying (anxiety, depression and rumination) come down when spending just a little time in nature. No need for remote corners of the Earth — just a walk down the street can make a big difference.

Engaging in physical activities that are joy-filled is not only a pleasure but can be a political act of hopefulness and self-respect. It acts to resist social norms about individuating discourses about health and associated assumptions of body shape, size and fitness.

Celebrating bodies in their diversity, getting out and enjoying movement, representing that healthy bodies are diverse and getting active with friends can all be political acts that celebrate countercultural ideas about health.

Movin’ and groovin’ with friends celebrates community and the value-altering, motivational shift of joy-filled embodiment and physical activity.
This subtle shift in thinking, and moving, could be the puzzle piece you’ve been missing for maintaining healthy habits.

Mandi Baker receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and has received funding from summer camps organisations and government bodies such as the Departments of Jobs, Precincts and Regions in Victoria, Australia, the Australian Camps Association and the YMCA Camps Victoria, Australia. She is affiliated with the Canadian Camps Association, the American Camp Association and Outward Bound Vietnam.

– ref. Your new health habit may be just a mental shift away – https://theconversation.com/your-new-health-habit-may-be-just-a-mental-shift-away-271923

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Leda Stawnychko, Associate Professor of Strategy and Organizational Theory, Mount Royal University

As the new year starts, it’s natural to feel torn between gratitude and restlessness. December often disrupts routines: fewer meetings, quieter inboxes and a rare chance to take stock and reflect.

During this time, people may feel pride in how far they have come, alongside a growing sense that the path they are on no longer fits.

This discomfort is especially common at stages of life when professionals expect to feel more settled, yet instead feel stagnant. It’s easy to dismiss such feelings as impatience or a lack of commitment.

But research on adult learning and development suggests that feeling stuck is often a signal of growth. It’s evidence that our internal development has outpaced our external circumstances.

In educational research, this tension is often described as a disorienting dilemma: an experience that unsettles our assumptions and highlights a mismatch between how we see ourselves and the contexts we are in.

While these moments are often uncomfortable, they act as necessary catalysts for meaningful learning and change, motivating people to reassess their goals, values and direction. Seen this way, yearning for new beginnings is a rational response to growth.

Diagnosing the source of restlessness

If you’re ready for change but unsure of where to begin, a useful first step is clarifying what is driving the sense of restlessness. Is it the work itself, the people you work with or the broader organizational culture?

When organizations are generally supportive, growth doesn’t necessarily require leaving. Change may be possible within the same environment. In these cases, conversations with supervisors can reveal opportunities that are not immediately obvious, such as stretch assignments, special projects or support for further learning.

Research shows that people who stay with organizations over the long term often do so because of strong relationships, a good fit with their broader lives and what scholars call “job embeddedness” — the financial, social and psychological benefits of the position that make leaving costly.

But when the cost of staying is stifling your growth, it’s worth exploring how you might either renegotiate growth where you are or thoughtfully prepare to move on.

Re-evaluating what matters now

Whether you’re considering a shift within your organization or beyond it, taking time to reassess your needs, goals and values is essential. What mattered to you earlier in your career may not matter in the same way now. Income, learning, flexibility, stability and meaning all rise and fall in importance across life stages.

Clarifying your values does not mean choosing one priority forever. It simply provides a clearer map for evaluating opportunities.

Some people prioritize mentorship or employer-supported education. Others need predictable schedules, strong health benefits or flexibility to care for family members.

Understanding what matters most now helps narrow your options and reduces the paralysis that often accompanies big decisions.

Focusing on activities rather than titles

Another way to gain clarity is to imagine your ideal role without fixating on job titles.

Titles can be misleading and often mask the day-to-day reality of the work. Instead, focus on activities. How will you spend most of your time? What skills will you be using day to day?

One useful question is what activities you would gladly do without being paid. These often point to core strengths and motivations worth taking seriously. Organizational psychologists describe this as intrinsic motivation — the internal drive to engage in an activity because it is inherently satisfying.

For example, early in my career, I began to notice a pattern in my volunteer work. I was consistently drawn to supporting professionals through moments of career transition, conflict and change. Over time, that realization helped me recognize that mentoring and coaching were activities I already valued enough to do for free.

With that insight, I began targeting roles in my own career that rewarded those same activities, ensuring that my work consistently included elements that felt both meaningful and energizing.

Preparing for the next step

Once priorities and interests are clearer, look closely at the qualifications and experiences the roles you are drawn to actually require and begin developing them intentionally.

This can occur through low-risk avenues, including projects in your current job, entrepreneurial or side work, volunteer roles or targeted learning opportunities.

Consistently taking small, purposeful steps can help you systematically bridge the gap between your current capabilities and the demands of your next chapter. By actively cultivating these skills, you transform a period of restlessness into a constructive phase of professional readiness.

As you consider what comes next, use your network strategically to learn and ask questions. New beginnings unfold through conversations, experiments and choices made over time.

Also pay attention to the beliefs shaping your actions. Assumptions about what you can or cannot do can limit options more than skills ever do. Feeling stuck is an invitation to evolve and may mark the start of an exciting new chapter you can begin writing today.

Leda Stawnychko receives funding from SSHRC.

– ref. Feeling stuck at work as the New Year begins? It may be a sign of professional growth – https://theconversation.com/feeling-stuck-at-work-as-the-new-year-begins-it-may-be-a-sign-of-professional-growth-270878

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Igor Grossmann, Professor of Psychology, University of Waterloo

It’s that time of year when the internet turns into a giant group chat about self-improvement. New year, new you. Better habits. Better boundaries. A year older, and maybe wiser.

Right on cue, the wisdom hucksters appear. They are the “one weird trick” crowd — the gurus with a microphone, a smirk and a promise of instant ascendance if you just buy the book, sign up for the training program, use their AI tool or subscribe to their Substack.

But there is no “enlightenment pill” that works overnight and never wears off. The evidence points the other direction: wisdom isn’t a permanent halo you wear. It’s a set of mental processes you can practise — and lose — depending on whether it’s a calm Tuesday or a stressful Sunday.

To understand why we often fail to be wise when we need it most, we must stop treating wisdom like a fixed personality trait.

What is wisdom?

In modern psychology, wisdom isn’t an ethereal, mystical quality. It’s made of specific metacognitive skills — mental processes that help us navigate the crazy uncertain world we live in.
These include:

• Intellectual humility: Admitting you could be wrong or that your knowledge is limited.

• Recognition of uncertainty: Understanding that situations can unfold in many different ways.

• Consideration of diverse viewpoints: The ability to see how a situation looks from another side.

• Integration and compromise: Searching for solutions that balance competing interests rather than just scoring points.

These mental processes are ways of thinking that matter when life gets messy — whether dealing with interpersonal conflict, political disagreement or financial challenges. But here is where the “magic pill” story starts to collapse.

Wisdom isn’t a fixed personality trait

If you have ever successfully navigated a complex political disagreement at work on a Thursday, only to lose your temper over a broken dishwasher on a Sunday, you know that wisdom doesn’t work like a software update.

For a long time, psychologists treated wisdom as a stable personality trait, as something you have, like blue eyes or extraversion. The assumption is that if you measure a person once, you’ve basically captured who they are.

But major scientific advances, including a new yearlong study our team just conducted, suggest that this is exactly where the culture goes wrong.

We often use static snapshots to make big claims about how people change over time. This practice risks committing an “ecological fallacy,” which is the trap of assuming that what makes one person different from another (between-person differences) explains how a single person changes over time (within-person change).

Translation: Just because “wiser people” on average are doing better doesn’t mean each individual becomes wiser in the same way, on the same timeline or for the same reasons.

New research: Wisdom acts like a system

To test this idea, our team conducted a year-long, multi-wave study of nearly 500 North American adults. The results recently appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

We asked participants to reflect on real adversities — social conflicts, health scares, job losses — as they occurred over the course of a year.

Participants rated their use of four core wisdom features: intellectual humility, recognizing uncertainty and change, consideration of diverse viewpoints and searching for compromise.

The headline results are disruptive for anyone selling instant transformation.

First, wisdom fluctuates. While personality traits like extraversion or neuroticism remained stable, wisdom features fluctuated significantly from moment to moment. You can be wise on Thursday and a fool on Sunday.

Second, it’s a network, not a monolith. We found that wisdom is best modelled as a network of loosely interconnected skills rather than a single underlying “wisdom trait.”

Third, context matters. People were generally wiser when reflecting on social conflicts than when dealing with personal health issues or trauma.

Most importantly, we found that patterns between people didn’t match patterns within individuals over time. What predicts who is generally wiser doesn’t necessarily predict how individuals become wiser.

Therefore, if you’ve ever thought to yourself “I know what the wise thing is… why can’t I do it when I’m emotional?” — congratulations! Your lived experience is more scientifically accurate than half the pop-science advice market.

The good news about wisdom

If wisdom isn’t an update you install, is there anything you can actually do?

Yes. In our yearlong study, we found a specific predictor of growth. When people reported higher-than-usual self-distancing at one point in time, they reported higher levels of wisdom-related features three months later.

In other words, when people step back and view a difficult situation from a third-person perspective, they are more likely to reason wisely in the future, including by practising intellectual humility, searching for compromise and recognizing uncertainty and change.

That finding is correlational. But in a separate experiment published in Psychological Science, we tested whether training in distanced reflection changes wise reasoning.

For one month, participants kept a daily diary about the most important issues of the day. One group wrote typically (first-person), while the other group was trained to write about their daily challenges using the third-person (for example, asking “What did Chris feel?” rather than “What did I feel?”).

The result? The group trained in distanced reflection showed significant increases in wise reasoning about interpersonal challenges compared with the control group. This shift in language helped broaden their self-focus, breaking the egocentric cycle that often blocks wisdom.

How to practise wisdom (no app required)

So, what do you do practically when life gets heated? Based on this research, here’s a toolkit of repeatable practices for spiralling arguments, regrets or looming decisions in the year ahead:

1. Practise self-distancing. Instead of asking “Why am I like this?” try asking “What is [Your Name] missing right now?” It might feel awkward, but it helps with your mental geometry: you are widening the frame.

2. Ask the humility question. Ask yourself: “What would change my mind here?” If the answer is “nothing,” you aren’t reasoning but defending a position.

3. Allow two truths to coexist. Wisdom is rarely a knockout punch; it is usually an integration. Ask: “What is true on my side, and what might be true on theirs?”

Will this make you instantly wise forever? No. That’s the point. Wisdom is closer to physical fitness than a magic pill: it is trainable, context-dependent and annoyingly easy to lose when you’re tired, stressed or flooded with emotion.

The more evidence we gather, the clearer the message: if someone is promising enlightenment now, they aren’t teaching wisdom. They are selling false certainty. And certainty is often the opposite of what wisdom requires.

Igor Grossmann receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight Grant 435-2014-0685), John Templeton Foundation (grant 62260), and Templeton World Charity Foundation (grant TWCF-2023-32568).

Jackson A. Smith receives funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) through the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

– ref. Why you’re wise on Tuesday and foolish on Sunday: Practising wisdom in uncertain times – https://theconversation.com/why-youre-wise-on-tuesday-and-foolish-on-sunday-practising-wisdom-in-uncertain-times-272230