Lizette Alvarez reports on Florida’s reactions to standardized testing in a New York Times article. Florida has adopted standards more challenging than Common Core, including its Florida Standards Assessment which is still to be validated. She writes, “In Florida, which tests students... View Article
Categories for Uncategorized
Photo by Justin Case on Unsplash. College Board is withholding SAT scores for some Chinese and also South Korean SAT test-takers this year, according to the New York Times, due to concerns about “organizations that seek to illegally obtain test... View Article
Photo by Jessica Loaiza on Unsplash. New evidence suggests that ingestion of chocolate is associated with memory enhancement. In healthy adults aged 50-69, ingestion over three months of a mixture with a relatively high- vs. low-concentration of cocoa flavanol (specifically epicatechin)... View Article
Personalized learning: The importance of tailoring instruction to meet individual student needs
October 24, 2014 12:52 amEducators have a responsibility to ensure that students receive a high-quality education that meets their individual needs. A teacher named Natalie Munroe spent two days as a student in her own school to better understand the challenges that students face... View Article
Shute et al. (2015 Comput & Educ) compared undergraduate subjects who were randomly assigned to play either Valve’s Portal 2 video game or Lumosity for eight hours. Those who had played Portal 2 showed significantly higher pre- vs. post-test gains on measures... View Article
Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash. Grade 3 and 6 reading, writing and math test scores in the Waterloo region are uniformly less than the provincial average, according to more detailed EQAO (Education Quality and Accountability Office) results released yesterday.... View Article
An episode of CBC’s The Current, hosted by Chris Hadfield, dealt with the Canadian government’s increasing support for commercial research over basic research. In 2013, the federal government decreed that every new dollar of research funding would be earmarked for... View Article
An article in The Globe and Mail cites a number of studies (particularly by Charles Hillman of the neurocognitive kinesiology lab at the University of Illinois, as well as by Michelle Tine and coauthors at Dartmouth College) that have investigated... View Article
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash. Ontario provincial test scores released by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) today showed falling performance in elementary school (Grade 3 and 6) math (in terms of the fraction of students meeting provincial... View Article
Photo by Osmar do Canto on Unsplash. As related by Catherine Shu in an article in TechCrunch, the Korean start-up Ybrain has raised a $3.5M Series A round to manufacture and run clinical trials with its wearable health device. This headband device is targeted... View Article
Qin et al. (2014 Nat Neurosci) found that as children transition from counting to a memory retrieval strategy when solving arithmetic problems (between ages 7 and 9), there are corresponding changes in BOLD activation from prefrontal-parietal to hippocampal areas (along... View Article
According to Daniel J. Levitin in the New York Times, by “some estimates, preventable medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year”. Photo by Jair Lázaro on... View Article
Finn et al. (2014 PLoS One) find evidence that the more “effortful” language learning of adults vs. children interferes with their learning of an artificial language (consisting of two-syllable, three-category nonsense words). In particular, adult learners under given instructions to... View Article
A New York Times article by Elizabeth Green, “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?”, easily challenges the notion that Asian students are more passive and drilled than their US counterparts. Photo by Antony Hyson Seltran on Unsplash.
A Scientific American article by Carl Wieman examines how lecture-style classes, the typical structure employed in most university classrooms, may not be the most effective method for teaching, especially when it comes to science and engineering. Instead, research favoured a... View Article
Christopher Nyren writes about “The EdTech Failings of Silicon Valley” in an EdReach piece. The article highlights “10 EdTech Startups that Silicon Valley Loved” during the 1997-2001 Internet Bubble: UPromise, Lightspan, Advantage Schools, Saba Software, QuinStreet, ApexLearning, SchoolPop, TrainingNet, Academic Systems,... View Article
A New York Times article by Maria Konnikova cites a series of studies showing separate neural activations associated with printing, cursive (longhand) handwriting vs typing by children (Berninger et al., 2006 Dev Neuropsychol), and greater activation of a “reading circuit” during... View Article
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash. According to a New York Times blog post by Benedict Carey, research at Washington University found that memory champions have better than average retention of memorized material than college students a day after being... View Article
In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, author Steve Kolowich describes the satirical creation of the Babel (Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language) Generator, by Les Perelman and his students at MIT. The software generates essays prompted only with... View Article
According to Bauer and Larkina (2014 Memory), children do retain their earliest memories through age 7, at which point “childhood amnesia” (i.e. the forgetting of memories beyond the normal rate) sets in. In fact, this phenomenon was evident long before... View Article