I’ve written a fair amount about how I sometimes have my students visualize success (see My Best Posts On Helping Students “Visualize Success”).

A study just came out reinforcing its effectiveness. The research focused on developing healthy eating habits, but it seems to me that it’s easily applicable to the classroom.

Here’s an excerpt:

Those who made a concrete plan, wrote it down and also visualized how they were going to carry out the action (i.e. when, where and how they would buy, prepare and eat fruit) increased their fruit consumption twice as much as those who simply set out to eat more fruit without visualizing and planning how they were going to do it.

These kinds of visualization techniques are borrowed from sports psychology. “Athletes do lots of work mentally rehearsing their performances before competing and it’s often very successful. So we thought having people mentally rehearse how they were going to buy and eat their fruit should make it more likely that they would actually do it. And this is exactly what happened,” says Bärbel Knäuper. This research points to a simple yet effective means of changing eating habits.