AVReading

We have this remarkable tendency to remember the things we like, and forget the things we don’t.  It’s a form of confirmation bias that, if it goes unchecked, ensures that we will likely make the same mistakes over-and-over again.               Though this cognitive bias did not have a name in his day, Charles Darwin was quite aware of this tendency.  In fact, to avoid the pitfalls of this mistake, he developed his own “golden rule” of reflection:  if there is contradictory or inconsistent data, immediately write it down.  In his own words, “I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones” (Darwin,1887).             I think this problem is magnified in the classroom, where we make so many decisions each day.  Sometimes to just survive, we have to forg...