More motivation and Memory; 29 January The recent book I recommended was:
PETTY G (2006) Evidence-Based Teaching: a practical approach Cheltenham; Nelson Thornes (the link is to Amazon) You might also look at Geoff Petty's own site www.geoffpetty.com (in fact for some odd reason the final chapter of the book is only available from the website).

My page which draws, in far less detail, on the same research is at http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/what_works.htm

Many thanks to Dave and Chris for their "stimuli", and for getting the sequence off to a good start!

Their material tied in well with the standard input, in which we continued to look at motivation;

• http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/motivation.htm
  : do follow up on the side links, too. We were particularly concerned with "de-motivators" or "hygiene factors" in Herzberg's model, and saw how varied they were and how much determined by the experience of the individual student.
  
• We paid more attention this week to stress and motivation; see http://www.reversaltheory.org/RT_TheoryTOC.htm
  
• The best (i.e. popular, readable but also reliable) introduction to the physiology of the nervous system and the issue of arousal is Johnson S (2005) Mind wide open; why you are what you think London; Penguin.
  
• My point about stretching and relaxing the blu-tac is related to a truly awful paper of mine, which needs to be re-written, but can nevertheless be found at http://www.doceo.co.uk/original/skeleton_and_shell_1.htm
  
• In passing we discussed the odd phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/dissonance.htm: it's a confusing topic anyway, but I did not make it any clearer by the way I explained it! My apologies, and I hope you will find the page more illuminating.
  
• The story of Mrs Keech can be found here, (Wikipedia) and Festinger here (this is from the "Theory into Practice" website, which can be thoroughly recommended; it may not look pretty, but the material is always sound).
  
• The basic model of memory which I began to outline can be found at http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/memory.htm —but there will be more on that next week.

Please use the comment facility below this post to add your own ideas and recommendations for reading.  19:36