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
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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
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
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, 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 three schools in the United States”.... 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
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 materials for their own profit, to... View Article
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) was associated with about 25% better... 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
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. See here. Performance is worst in... 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
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 standards, relative to 2010), and even... View Article
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 at Alzheimer’s and MCI (mild cognitive impairment)... 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”.
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.
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