A reaction of a parent to a sample subtraction assignment as guided by Common Core has gone viral. See here for some justification of the Common Core approach. It’s worth asking if students at this (age-seven) level are capable of the conceptual understanding... View Article
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A Globe and Mail editorial describes how Canadian provinces have generally fared worse in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) math rankings since 2006, after adopting “discovery learning” – even though a review by Kirschner et al. (2006, Educ Psychol) of a hundred empirical studies found no... View Article
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash. Sigman et al. (2014 Nat Neurosci) present cases in which neuroscience, and not only cognitive psychology, could inform education, “ranging from very general physiological aspects of human learning such as nutrition, exercise and... View Article
Finn et al. (2014 Psychol Sci) conclude from a study of 1,400 Boston-area students that individual schools can account for a large degree of the variation in performance gains on (MCAS) standardized test scores. However, the same school-identity variable accounted for... View Article
Hampson et al. (2013 JNE) point out “that after an intervening period of lack of exposure to the item, correct retention or retrieval of the item is dependent on the strength of encoding of the information at the time of... View Article
According to research by Harrar et al. (2014 Curr Biol), dyslexia involves an attentional deficit when shifting attention from aural to visual stimuli, and even more so when shifting from visual to aural stimuli. See also this MindShift blog post... View Article
Photo by Yustinus Tjiuwanda on Unsplash. In an EdSurge article, author Peter D. Lenn describes how the flipped classroom model was first tried out 40 years ago by the U.S. Army, with success. The author was involved in a lead contractor in that... View Article
As reported in a THE Journal article by Dian Schaffhauser, the New York State teachers union has voted to pull out of the Common Core testing. Their complaint seems to center around the rapidity of curriculum changes and insufficient time... View Article
Photo by Samantha Borges on Unsplash. In an EdSurge article, Dhawal Shah provides an analysis of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) worldwide, as of 2013. As he writes, “The number of courses offered has grown from about 100 MOOCs in 2012 to... View Article
According to an EdSurge article by Esther Wojcicki, the US spends more per student ($7,743) than other OECD nations, yet has fallen badly in the most recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test scores, released on December 3, 2013: “US students slipped... View Article
In a Huffington Post article, Adrienne Lu reports that the Obama administration has spent “$438 million of economic stimulus funding into developing standardized tests aligned to the Common Core and has strongly encouraged states to adopt “college- and career-ready standards”... View Article
In an e-Literate post, Phil Hill presents a “State of the Anglosphere’s Higher Education LMS Market” graph, tracking US, UK, Canada and Australia LMS (learning management system) adoption. For 2013, he concludes that the “same players keep growing (primarily Canvas, followed by... View Article
An MIT Technology Review article by David Talbot concerned facial expression recognition software, including Affectiva’s Affdex software (http://www.affectiva.com/). The article briefly concerns the application of such technology for education. Two of these studies were from UCSD researchers who founded another facial expression... View Article