There has been an increase in talk to reduce standardized testing in grade school across North America. Ohio reduces standardized testing hours In Ohio, it was recommended by the Ohio Department of Education to reduce testing by roughly 20%. According... View Article
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In a New York Times article, Susan Dynarski discusses why American students from low-income families are significantly less likely to receive a college degree compared to their high-income counterparts. Numerous attempts to close this gap in the US education system... View Article
Photo by Aedrian Salazar on Unsplash. The teenage brain continues to be a topic of contention among neuroscientists as they attempt to account for behavioural differences between teenagers and adults. Dr. Francis Jensen, chair of the Department of Neurology at... View Article
Brook Larmer’s article in the Hamilton Spectator highlights the extensive measures taken by students and families in preparation for the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam. The gaokao is written by over nine million students each year and remains the... View Article
There appear to be few consistent empirical demonstrations of the idea that studying materials printed on yellow paper are easier to recall than those printed on white paper, however there is evidence that warm colours (like yellow, orange and red)... View Article
According to a new research paper by Lester and Warda (2014 University of Calgary School of Public Policy), Canada ranks third of 36 countries (behind Chile and France, and just ahead of Spain and India) in terms of the size... View Article
Chang et al. (2014 Curr Biol) compare visual perceptual learning in young (19-30 year old) and older (65-79 year old) adults. The task (reporting two digits that were flashed in the center of a screen within a sequence of letters)... View Article
It is no secret that China consistently dominates standardized tests on the international platform. Their education system, although stressful, adapts students to roles needed in the economy. China’s Educational history While far from perfect, their education system has successfully served the... View Article
In a New York Times article on race and college admissions, Yascha Mounk exposes both the “racial balancing” at top schools like Harvard that discriminates against Asian-American applicants (as Harvard once discriminated against Jewish applicants), and the myth that “Asian-American applicants... View Article
Photo by William Hook on Unsplash. In a New York Times article, Natasha Singer relates criticisms of behavior-tracking apps, in particular the most popular, ClassDojo, which its developer reports is now “used by at least one teacher in roughly one out of... View Article
An article by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic touches on the neuroscience of wisdom. He cites work by UCSD clinical psychologist Lisa Eyler and psychiatrist and Dilip V. Jeste (e.g. Meeks & Heste, 2009 Arch Gen Psychiatry, and Bangen et al., 2013 Am J... View Article
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
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